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Branding Innovation



The most successful brands have realized the necessity to continually usher innovation into the overall brand strategy to stay afloat in a highly competitive marketplace. However, before you know the real role that innovation must play in branding, it helps to first be clear about how innovation must fit into a brand's overall strategy. Without such clarity, an entrepreneur risks creating a complex web of miscommunication and ambiguity that is certain to undermine their ability to achieve the goals their brand desires.



Innovation in branding can mean many different things, depending on the context in which it is used. For example, the term innovation can refer to the incorporation of new technological innovations into an already established brand. It can also refer to an artistic interpretation of a product or service that takes existing products to new levels of excellence. Branding that features innovation as a key component has been used for decades, starting with the evolution of brand identity to branding itself. Today, it's easy to see the influence of branding strategy and innovation in branding's core elements.



One way in which innovation in branding can occur is through "freezing" or immersing a brand in an innovative niche. There are many examples of brands frozen in time, such as apple computers in the early 1990s and Macintosh computers in the late 1990s, or the Google search results in the early days and Google dot com in the later years. These iconic brands seemed to embody the entire philosophy of innovation in branding: focus on quality rather than volume, drive towards real customer needs, and disregard traditional marketing practices. Though these brands enjoyed brief periods of dominance, they all quickly found their way back to the mainstream. Their frozen image seemed to have failed at driving innovation in branding because of one fundamental factor: innovation requires risk.



As the world's most powerful brand names evolved and began to move from being "innovative" to be "standard", innovation in branding had a limited counter-culture appeal. Innovation in branding simply didn't seem possible. This led to short bursts of branding creativity (think iPod, Nike, or Levi) before the trend lost steam. Today, however, innovation in branding is more prevalent and seems to have finally found its footing.


Innovation in branding is often linked to the idea of creating new customer demands, which is called brand positioning. Brand positioning occurs when a brand "prefers" to a new customer base by positioning itself as the solution for a problem.



Here's an example: A new car company wants to enter the mass market by positioning itself as a car for younger people, who don't own a car yet. It then launches advertising campaigns that are aimed at this younger crowd. The main aim is to create a taste for its services among this younger generation, while also capturing some of the lucrative older male demographic who already have cars.


Another example: A health food giant wanted to position itself as the frozen food group. So it launched a couple of advertising campaigns, one focused on offering a healthy diet choice and one that was more focused on the concept of "locking in" the vitamins and nutrients better than any other. It positioned itself as the leader in offering a better diet option and started to carve out a separate position for itself within the crowded frozen food industry. In the process, it created its own brand identity. Today, the frozen food industry is composed of very lean cuisine franchises such as Pure Food and Wine, Blue Mesa Grill, and Healthy Elements.

Lean Cuisine is a great example of innovation in branding because this type of business tends to not focus on a particular niche or client. Instead, they tend to target the middle class with their healthy offerings. They also work on changing the consumer's relationship with food (which is why they were able to position themselves as the natural solution). And they capitalize on this by positioning themselves as the "go-to" source for these new products and services.


Innovation in branding can be a critical component to creating a winning branding strategy. Don't be afraid to look outside your core competency when branding. The more you are creative, the better chance you have of branding solutions that are different enough to differentiate from your competition but still grounded in your core competency. When you do this, you can't but help but create a positive impact on the minds of your consumers.

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