The Three J's of Branding Roundtable

In a nutshell, branding is basically creating a promise to your customers and then delivering on it. In this ever growing marketplace of competitors, successful companies and organizations have branded their product and figured out how to remain consistent, true to their mission and grow based on creating value for their clients.

In a unique twist, the Santa Clarita Valley Business Journal not only invited executives from two local companies to share their views, but also from the city of Santa Clarita, which has successfully conducted two branding campaigns to attract business and encourage residents to support amenities in their local community by shopping locally.

The “Three J’s of Branding” came to light in a round table discussion with Julie, James and Jason.

Julie Benson, vice president, public relations with Princess Cruises, revealed the leisure travel company’s philosophy behind the “Escape Completely” branding campaign. James D. Hicken, President and CEO with the Bank of Santa Clarita, described how the bank intentionally set itself apart as an old-fashioned, traditional community bank account holders could trust and respect. And Jason Crawford, marketing and economic development manager with the city of Santa Clarita, shared how the city built itself as a business-friendly community where it sees its residents as customers, all in an effort to build a community people like to work and live in.

Q: How do you differentiate your companies through your brand? Julie, let’s start with Princess Cruises.

Julie Benson: A lot of people think branding is just marketing. But we look at it as a holistic way to run a business, to identify your business, and to attract loyal customers. It not only encompasses marketing, but it’s also looking at every single touch point your customer could encounter with Princess. And are we consistent with how we present the image?

One of the big brands we all talk about as marketers is Disney. They are so focused and protective. You can’t have Mickey Mouse in certain situations. It’s the same with Princess. We have our sea witch — which is our logo. It has to be a certain color and our typography has to be a certain way. Our tagline is “Escape Completely.” A part of what we do at Princess in establishing our brand and helping it grow is to understand what customers are saying. We do an annual branding health study of consumers and travel agents to figure out where we are year by year. And we benchmark ourselves against other cruise lines to get people’s ideas and thoughts about where we are, what we’re doing, and if we are following our paths.

It’s this all-encompassing project that has a lot of working pieces. It’s also about how we train our employees and it’s about our employees feeling a part of our company, so that when they talk about our company they’re representing our brand and they’re passionate about the brand.

Q: Because you’re in the travel industry, is it more of an emotional connection you’re trying to make with your customers?

Benson: Absolutely. Establishing a relationship with your customers and building that brand is about making your customers want something that you have and that only you can fulfill. That’s when the brand is truly successful — when you have to have your Starbucks or you have to have the latest Apple product because that’s who you are.

James D. Hicken: An ad agency individual told me years ago that all the marketing dollars in the world and all the branding in the world will not create demand. I may have no desire to take a trip someplace. [The company] can have the best advertising in the world and I’m not going to look at the advertisement and think, “I want to go on Princess to go some place.”

But what branding and marketing do is they take an existing demand and bring more business your way. If I wake up one day and say, “I would like to go to the Mediterranean,” it is the brand that will drive me to the provider and give me the experience I’m looking for.

Benson: Branding is all about building customer loyalty and what that does is it builds word of mouth. So when you wake up one morning and say, “I think I’m going to take a vacation; maybe I’ll go to the Mediterranean,” and you tell Jason that, Jason will say, “I just got back from a Princess Cruise; it was phenomenal.” By the fact that he had a great experience and shares it with you, you may start to think, “Maybe I should try that brand.” That customer loyalty is so key to the sustainability of our business.

Q: James, you had an interesting campaign with the bank.

Hicken: When we started the bank we realized we’re in the feel good business. We sell an experience. People have choices; and those who forget people have choices make a huge mistake. You see that going on with Bank of America now. When we started the bank we sat down and discussed what it was we wanted to project. We wanted to project an institution that was traditional but innovative. We wanted to be innovative by realizing that we wanted to be traditional.

We also wanted to set ourselves apart from the competition through our branding. When people make choices what to do with their money, it’s a very emotional decision. When we had the collapse of the banking sector in, that was the second component that created — and I’m going to use the word loosely — opportunity to contend to separate ourselves from our competition and let people know who we are strategically and who we are culturally.

We did not believe it was in the best interest to take a government loan, so we launched a full-scale campaign to go out to the public to say, “We’re very traditional, we’re trustworthy, we have core values in which we operate, and we are proud of the fact that we don’t need a government bailout to move forward.” And that played extremely well and you can see that in consumers today. It is part of who we are, it’s part of our culture, it’s our branding, it’s our marketing, it’s our logo, but most importantly, we can lay out the best branding campaign. We can tell people who we are and how we differentiate ourselves, but if we don’t have the passion from the employees who work for us who convey that message, it is all for not.

Q: When did you decide you wanted to do a branding campaign? And how long before you actually started it?

Hicken: We decided before we opened, and it was a good ten months [before we started the campaign]. As part of the branding, we kept in mind that this valley has a long history of community banks. We wanted to make sure in the launching Bank of Santa Clarita that we weren’t perceived as an extension of Valencia Bank & Trust or Santa Clarita National Bank. They both were great institutions, but we wanted to make sure the Bank of Santa Clarita had its own unique identity within the valley.

Q: Jason, can you talk about the city’s campaigns and what the goals behind those were in terms of branding?

Jason Crawford: Interestingly, a couple things I’ve heard from you both is consistency and experience. Those are two of the things we have focused the most on with the city’s branding strategies. We have a graphics standard. We make sure the seals of the logos are the exact colors and the right size. We make sure all the street signs throughout the city have a consistent look and that the buses have the graphics package on them that matches or compliments the other looks.

And we focus on the experiential. We don’t want to just say we are the most business friendly city when we’re doing a business attraction campaign; we need to back that up. That means making sure all of our employees and staff are trained in customer service and with this philosophy. We do focus more holistically on branding not just being one marketing campaign, but as an all-encompassing strategy.

We do a Think Santa Clarita business attraction campaign where we are promoting to businesses outside of Santa Clarita why they should relocate here to do business. We also have done campaigns for visitors to attract them to come here to stay for events or go to Six Flags. And we work to associate ourselves positively with some of those events.

It’s not enough when you talk about branding and having a slogan or a logo to just recognize that the apple is the Apple logo; you have to have an association with it. Hopefully, it’s a positive association and seeing the logo makes you want to buy Apple products. If you just see an apple and it reminds you of Apple but it doesn’t have any association, then that doesn’t get you a whole lot. Which is why we don’t focus so much on the slogan or the logo as much as we do on the experience.

Benson: When you look at a company like Princess, we’ve got a head office and we have 16 ships floating around the world. Our challenge and our goal is to make sure there is consistency. That no matter which Princess ship you are on, you have the exact same experience.

Hicken: There is a great story I’ve told my staff. It’s about NASA down at Cape Canaveral. There was a reporter down there interviewing people about the success of NASA. He bumped into a gentleman who was a janitor. Not knowing what the gentleman did, he asked. The janitor’s response was, “I help put men into space.” NASA truly had created an environment where no one person was anymore or any less important than the next person.

This plays an extremely important role in making sure that customers have a positive experience and they walk away feeling good about the decisions they made. And each person — whether they’re on the frontlines or in the back room — plays an important part. That’s where Disney does a wonderful job. When you walk into the theme park, you get the same level of service from each of their cast members.

Q: It seems to me that branding comes first from the vision. If a company doesn’t know what its vision is, it can’t clearly articulate a branding campaign.

Hicken: From that vision, everything is created. It takes a constant reinforcement with staff to make sure they understand the vision. But more importantly, staff needs to have a vested interest in that vision.

Benson: A big thing about successful branding is defining your core values, sticking to them, and having those be your guiding principles. One of the big missteps in the past few weeks has been with Netflix. They weren’t true to their core values in terms of listening to the customer and delivering what the customer wanted. Their brand is really suffering right now. The idea of a strong brand is that it creates value over time; so you don’t want to make those types of mistakes.

Crawford: When you’re sticking with your vision and values, your brand becomes a promise to your customers that you have to consistently deliver on. If you don’t deliver, then you have a false brand, so you lose that loyalty and trust. People will stop believing in the brand and will go somewhere else.

Q: What is the significance of rebranding?

Benson: It needs to start with understanding your audience and doing some research about what your audience finds meaningful. It’s also about figuring out what you can offer that nobody else can. How do you differentiate your product?

Hicken: Every company needs to constantly reevaluate itself and be prepared to change depending on the environment and the changes that are occurring within the environment. As far as rebranding goes, it’s really reinventing. As far as it goes with banking, we have to be prepared to reinvent ourselves on a daily basis. While we may not necessarily be going through a “rebranding,” we are constantly reassessing. The needs of the consumer are changing all the time. How we deliver the products and services need to change with them, or else we will lose them.

Crawford: When I think about rebranding, I first evaluate what is thought about the brand now, and what should be changed or kept before you go about changing the brand. It may be that the things you want to rebrand are small, and you can just do very detailed changes. Or you may need to think broader and change things that are indirectly related. Take Santa Clarita, for example, which for ages and ages was thought of as a bedroom community — and we were. Now we are a thriving business community with over 70,000 jobs here that most people don’t know about. Does it make sense for us to rebrand ourselves entirely as a business community? No. We are still a great place to live and raise a family, so we need add to and enhance our brand.

Changing the graphics package for the way our signs and letterhead are don’t tie directly into this, but when you’re wanting to make a large impression and make noticeable change to you audience you can use some of these other tools to help reintroduce yourself to them.