-A-

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1  Addressability-

a measure of how easy it is to get in touch with people who might want what you're offering.

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6  Adoption of innovation-

a behavioral characteristic that examines the tendencies by which customers adopt a product as it moves through its life cycle. People can be characterized as innovators, early adapters, one of the early majority, one of the late majority, or laggards.

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2,3,6 AIDA-

the foundation for content generation which encourages contacts to engage with the brand while they are on their way from making a decision to acting on that choice. The acronym (with keyword intent in parenthesis) stands for Attention (information), Interest (navigation), Desire (commercial investigation), Action (transaction).

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1 Alternatives-

as you develop your offering, you can't avoid making choices between competing alternatives. Considering the customer's perspective results in better choices. Presenting an attractive offer means understanding the alternatives your customers face upon purchase. 

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1 Attention-

modern life is overloaded with demand on your attention. Everyone has too many things to do, and too little time to do them all. Maximize your effort's chances of capturing attention with a headline or hook to promote it.​

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-B-

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​6,7 Brand-

a company, product or service. According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), a brand is a "name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competition." Many practicing managers refer to a brand as more than that- as something that has actually created a certain amount of awareness, reputation, and prominence in the marketplace. 

 

• The brand resonance model lists a series of steps for building a strong brand: (1) establishing the proper brand identity, (2) creating the appropriate brand meaning, (3) eliciting the right brand responses, and (4) forging appropriate brand relationships with customers. 

  • Achieving these four steps, in turn, means establishing six brand building blocks: brand salience, brand performance, brand imagery, brand judgments, brand feelings, and brand resonance.​

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• Brand association: a relationship that one company instigates with another to strengthen its public image. Must be seen as desirable, deliverable, and differentiating.

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• Brand attitude: the overall posturing a company chooses to project to its public.

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• Brand building: managing a brand involves the careful development and implementation of creative brand strategies. Three models are helpful in aiding such planning:

  • Brand positioning model: describes how to establish competitive advantages in the minds of customers in the marketplace;

  • Brand resonance model: describes how to take these competitive advantages and create intense, active loyalty relationships with customers for brands; and 

  • Brand value chain model: describes how to trace the value creation process to better understand the financial impact of marketing expenditures and investments to create loyal customers and strong brands.

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• Brand elements: different components of a brand that identify and differentiate it such as a name, logo, symbol, package design, or other characteristic. 6 criteria: memorable, meaningful, likable, transferable, adaptable, and able to be protected.

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• Brand feelings: are customers' emotional responses and reactions to the brand. It is not enough for a brand to be just respected. It must transcend to become a name or symbol that emotionally binds a company with the desires and aspirations of its customers.

  • Transformational advertising: advertising designed to change consumers' perceptions of the actual usage experience with the product.​

  • 6 important types of brand-building feelings: 1. warmth, 2. fun, 3. excitement, 4. security, 5. social approval, and 6. self-respect. The first three types of feelings are experiential and immediate, increasing in level of intensity; the latter three types of feelings are private and enduring, increasing in level of gravity.

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• Brand identity: the name, logo, slogans, associations, and behavior a company uses to ensure that the right image forms in the mind of fans.

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• Brand imagery: refers to the more intangible aspects of the brand, such as: 1. user profiles, 2. purchase and usage situations, 3. personality and values, and 4. history, heritage, and experiences.

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• Brand judgments: customers' personal opinion about and evaluations of the brand, which consumers form by putting together all the different brand performance and imagery associations. 4 types are particularly important: judgments about quality, credibility, consideration, and superiority.

  • Brand credibility:​ describes the extent to which customers see the brand as credible in terms of three dimensions: perceived expertise, trustworthiness, and likability.

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• Brand knowledge: two components:

  • Brand awareness: related to the strength of the brand node or trace in memory, which we can measure as the consumer's ability to identify the brand under different conditions.

    • Brand recognition: consumers' ability to confirm prior exposure to the brand when given the brand as a cue.​

    • Brand recall: consumers' ability to retrieve brand from memory when given the product category, the needs fulfilled by the category, or a purchase or usage situation as a cue.

  • Brand image: the perception that is formed in the customer's mind about a product/service/company.

    • Brand attributes: are those descriptive features that characterize a product or service.​

    • Brand benefits: the personal value and meaning that consumers attach to the product or service attributes.

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• Brand logo: a design (composed of graphics, words, and/or letters) that conveys a company's brand name and character in the marketplace. 

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• Brand-mark: a company logo composed of only a graphic (i.e., no words or letters). 

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• Brand mantra: a short, three to five word phrase that captures the irrefutable essence or spirit of the brand positioning. Similar to brand essence or core brand promise. Strong brand mantras are structured with three terms, as follows: emotional modifier, descriptive modifier, brand function. The emotional modifier provides a qualifier- how exactly does the brand provide benefits and in what ways? The descriptive modifier further clarifies the nature of the brand. The brand functions term describes the nature of the product or service or the type of experiences or benefits the brand provides. 

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• Brand name: the label given to a company or product/service to help create a strong and memorable image in the minds of fans. Brand names that are simple and easy to pronounce or spell, familiar and meaningful, and different, distinctive, and unusual improve brand awareness.

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• Brand performance: describes how well the product or service meets customers' more functional needs. Five important types of attributes often underlie brand performance: 1. Primary ingredients and supplementary features, 2. product reliability, durability, and serviceability, 3. service effectiveness, efficiency, and empathy, 4. style and design, plus 5. price.

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• Brand personality (or character): the attitude, look, and vibe of a company.

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• Brand resonance: describes the nature of the ultimate relationship and level of identification that the customer has with the brand. Characterized in terms of intensity as well as activity.

  • Intensity: ​the depth of the psychological bond that customers have with the brand (strength of the attitudinal attachment and sense of community).

  • Activity: engendered by loyalty (repeat purchase rates and the extent to which customers seek out brand information, events, and other loyal customers).

  • We can break down these two dimensions of brand resonance into four categories: 1. behavioral loyalty, 2. attitudinal attachment, 3. sense of community, and 4. active engagement.​​

    • We can gauge behavioral loyalty in terms of repeat purchases and the amount or share of category volume attributed to the brand, that is, the "share of category requirements," or how often and how much.​

    • Resonance requires a strong personal attachment beyond having a positive attitude to viewing the brand as something special in a broader context.

    • Conveying a sense of community provides a broader meaning for the brand.

    • Perhaps the strongest affirmation of brand loyalty occurs when customers are engaged, or willing to invest time, energy, money, or other resources in the brand beyond those expended during purchase or consumption of the brand.

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• Brand structure (a.k.a. brand architecture): the manner in which a company brand and a company product brand relate to each other. There are three possibilities, company dominant, company endorsed, and company silent.

  • Company dominant (or combined) brand structure: a type of product brand architecture in which the identity of the company supports the overall image of all of its products and services.​

  • Company endorsed brand structure: a type of brand architecture in which the company uses its identity to support the image of products and services outside the realm of its usual line of products and services. 

  • Company silent (or separated) brand structure:  a type of brand architecture in which the identity of the company is separated from the various products and services it provides so that the image of one product/service can't affect the image of another product/service.​

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• Brand value chain: a structured approach to assessing the sources and outcomes of brand equity and the manner by which marketing activities create brand value.

  • Consistent with the brand resonance model, it assumes that the value of a brand ultimately resides with customers. Based on this insight, the model next assumes that the brand value creation process begins when the firm invests in a marketing program targeting actual or potential customers (stage 1).​

  • The associated marketing activity then affects the customer mind-set, what customers know and feel about the brand, as reflected by the brand resonance model (stage 2). 

  • This mind-set, across a broad group of customers, produces the brand's performance in the marketplace: how much and when customers purchase, the price that they pay, etc. (stage 3). 

  • The investment community considers this market performance, and other factors such as replacement cost and purchase price in acquisitions, to arrive at an assessment of shareholder value in general and a value of the brand in particular (stage 4).

  • Three sets of multipliers moderate the transfer between the marketing program and the three value stages: program quality, marketplace conditions multiplier, and investor sentiment.

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• Customer based brand equity: the differential effect that brand knowledge has on consumer response to the marketing of that brand. Approaches brand equity from the perspective of the consumer. The power of a brand lies in what customers have learned, felt, seen, and heard about the brand as a result of their experiences over time.

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• Letter-mark: a logo that features the initials of a brand name with or without the name spelled out beneath, alongside, or above the name.​

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• Word-mark: a logo that features the brand name in a simple and unique typeset.​​

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4 Buyer's journey-

The active research process people go through leading up to making a purchase. Three stages: Awareness (problem-based keywords), Consideration (solution keywords), and Decision (branded keywords).  When buyers have a problem, they search for a solution, and often buy a product or service.​

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-C-

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6 Cannibalization-

when a company's product or service takes away from another of its existing products or services.

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2,3,4 Call to action-

the most effective marketing messages give the recipient or prospect a single, very clear, very short action to take next. 

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1 Caveman Syndrome-

human biology is optimized for conditions that existed 100,000 years ago, not for the world in which we live today. Part of the challenge of working in the modern world is that our brains and bodies are tuned for physical, and social, survival, not 16 hour work days. Business hasn't been around long enough for our biology to adapt to the new demands we are placing upon ourselves. We are running demanding new software on ancient hardware.