Brand equity is the "value" of a brand. Although this seems a funny concept to most people - how does one measure the "value" of a brand, anyway? - it's a dead serious topic when trying to build awareness of something. Marketing consultancies have no shortage of clients who want to know how their brand is doing (http://www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/Optimor/Content/KnowledgeCenter/BrandzRanking.aspx). Simply put, the value of a brand is the difference between two similar products or services: one unknown, one well-known.
It is expensive to build brand awareness. Corporations invest a lot to do so, usually in mass advertising and promotion, typically between 5% and 15% of revenue including salary or outsourcing equivalent (http://www.gtms-inc.com/tip_tacklemarketingbudget.htm). Some companies spend a lot and don't have much to show for it (Microsoft's J. Springer campaign springs to mind). Others spend little yet manage to build brand awareness, usually by having a product or service ("offer" or "value proposition") so compelling, the target market and the press fall over it with word-of-mouth and rave reviews (Google itself grew this way). Beyond the product/service offer, companies work on corporate image, important for recruiting (and keeping) talent. Advertising and press relations are key in corporate image. Nonprofits of course have it much tougher. Budgets are much smaller and as a result, there is less ad spend and more reliance on the press. Bad press is bad for companies, but can be dramatic for nonprofits. In the Internet age, probably the very shortest shortcut to increasing brand equity is to become well-referenced in Google. A distinctive product name which returns the correct link in the top three hits has every chance of becoming better known. In particular, influencers such as journalists and bloggers can easily find the source of the product for more information, and overnight direct hundreds or thousands of readers' attention. One of the methods to attain the goal of top referencing results is "buzz", or getting people to talk about the product and service, to search for it often and click on the appropriate weblink. It's a positive cycle; the more people talk positively, the more people hear positive things. Sugar Labs' approach of six-month dev cycles lends itself well to creating buzz. Brands are fragile. People are surrounded by literally thousands of brand messages, few of which filter through. So marketers carefully choose an effective logo (eye-catching, and readable even when small) and typeface (distinctive yet clear) and then hardly change it over time. Instead, marketers shape the message du jour by building on brand values - what the brand means. We haven't done a lot of this work for Sugar - e.g. a "Brand Book", a document with visuals which perfectly express the brand values - but we try to communicate that Sugar is fun, high-quality, easy to use, educational, collaborative, open, compatible with varied hardware, and so on. Brand-building requires patience and absolutely crystal clear messages, so clear that word-of-mouth explanations can be very brief. The Marketing Team has been working on this for two brands: Sugar Labs and Sugar on a Stick. Sugar is such a generic term, marketing on that name alone cannot bring results - Sugar the children's interface would fight for mindshare with Sugar the stuff you put in your coffee. So since March, we have always linked "Sugar" and "Labs" together. Although some chemical labs doing sugar analysis appear in search results, we have had good results by marketing the phrase and logo "sugar labs". "Sugar on a Stick", as a project of Sugar Labs designed to easily communicate that Sugar is software, present on OLPC laptops but independent too and available to be "plugged into" any PC or Mac or netbook, has since the June v1 Strawberry launch benefited from a logo put together by Gary and Christian and a "beauty shot" by my friend the talented Philippe Cantiniau, both of which were widely republished by tech sites and bloggers. Both of these, the logo and visual, reinforced Sugar Labs branding with identical typefaces and comparable color treatments; both the Sugar Labs and the Sugar on a Stick logos color the word "sugar", allowing us in a sense to have our cake and eat it too (pun intended). Of course, it's early days for anyone to try to put a money value on Sugar Labs' brand equity. However, our brand equity is already way ahead of many well-financed startups; that value is real. Protecting that value - insuring that what the brand means is something decided by the project, and not others - is an important goal of the marketing team and the project's leadership. Not for its own sake, but so the spreading of the Sugar word continues to grow, and is not fragmented. Such fragmentation - where people are not quite sure what a word means - results in the fading away of brand equity and starting over... with all the effort that implies. This is what distresses me about Caroline's sugaronastick.com. It's completely unclear to anyone discovering the Sugar on a Stick project why there are two pages with the same name and apparently the same product. This can only lead to confusion and fragmentation. Although I agree with the idea of commercial technical support, and perhaps even a minisite for the project (an initiative adored by marketers but often ineffective for parent-org branding), doing it that way poses a grave risk to the Sugar on a Stick project. Sean Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator _______________________________________________ SoaS mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
