This section deals with all aspects of brand strategy for high tech companies, from core brand positioning and messaging to brand design and corporate identity.

Working definitions: We'll use a two-part definition of "brand":

• brand. (n) The sum of all parts of a product or company's image, and the resulting idea that stays in a customer's mind.
  
• brand. (v) The strategic actions, policies, and tools that reinforce this idea over time.

So is a brand a logo? Yes.  A product name? Yes. A mission statement? Yes. Is it advertising, sales processes, market positioning? Yes.  You get the picture; a brand is all the above and more. 

This section is moderated by Dennis Van Staalduinen of Brandvelope Brand Strategy. If you have any thoughts on any of the materials in this section, if you can recommend good branding books or resources, or if you'd like to do an insider's case study of a strategic branding initiative please e-mail Dennis at dennisv@brandvelope.com.

• Brand Channel A thought-provoking site maintained by US mega-brand consultancy Interbrand.  Features critical brand reviews, discussion, a useful (and relatively authoritative) glossary, and thankfully, not too much interbrand propaganda.  One fun section: they track brand placements in popular films.  Did you catch the classic 70's cologne brand Hai Karate in the Incredibles?  No?  Well they did.
  
• World Advertising Research Center. This is an amazingly comprehensive UK-based site from the publishers of Admap magazine, which contains literally thousands of resource articles and studies.  Particularly impressive are the hundreds of case studies which can be sorted by objective. Note, this is a subscription site, but there is a relatively painless 7-day trial option.
  
• What brand are you? This (completely tongue-in-cheek) engine allows you to simply enter your current name, pick a brand value and a main company goal, and voila, they'll coin a new brand name for you like "Optilogo" or "munimentum". . It's aimed at skewering would-be brand gurus who come up with wild coinages and try to pass them off as genius, without first considering their plausibility. 

Canadian Marketing Association Convention – May 17-19, 2006, Montréal

Harvard Business Review on Brand Management - Harvard Business Review

Originally written in 1994, the examples show their age a bit, but the principles behind them don't.  This selection of articles from the HBR explores private label branding, product line extensions, and case studies of famous brands in action.  Too heavilty skewed to consumer brands, but a good overwiew. 

22 Immutable laws of branding – Al Ries and Jack Trout

Okay, if you're interested in brand strategy and you haven't read a book by this grand old man of marketing, go to Chapters now and pick one up.  You won't even need to buy it.  Just sit down and flip through it for a half hour or so, and you're done.  Jack Trout and his various collaborators over the years have produced the most compulsively page turning business books in history, and the 22 Immutable Laws series (with 'positioning' and 'marketing') are even more readable than most.  One caveat however: remember that these "laws" actually ARE mutable, or at least are much more complex than Trout makes them out to be.  Also remember that Trout is talking about consumer brands, not the B2B or component branding most Ottawa high tech marketers are dealing with, and he gives short shrift to corporate master brands.  If he had his way, every company would be a Procter and Gamble and every product would be Tide. 

Brand leadership – David Aaker, Eric Joachimsthaler

David Aaker is another big must-read name in brand strategy.  Note that where Jack Trout is breezy, entertaining, and readable, David Aaker writes textbooks, and this one is a heavy, long read, and you'll feel like you're cramming for an exam.  But where Trout is overly simplistic, Aaker has a wonderful appreciation for the nuances of different markets and the brand strategies that are appropriate for them.  Particularly useful: the discussion of Brand Architecture.  Also recommended are his books Managing Brand Equity and Brand Portfolio Strategy.

Article: multi-lingual branding: for anyone trying to sell a product across cultural or linguistic barriers, this recent brandchannel article isn't bad. Partucularly striking: the time-worn story of the Chevy Nova failing to sell in Latin markets because the name means "doesn't go" is an urban legend. (the moderator apologizes if he helped perpetuate this through his own presentations and writing).

Canadian Markting Association 2004 Brand Metrics Study - CMA president John Gustavson was in Ottawa in November to present a few of the results of this survey.  Some highlights: a whopping 73% of Canadian companies define brand as the "wholistic customer experience of product, service, and organization." That might sound like good news for brand managers in the trenches, until you realize that this is a survey of marketing staff.  Perhaps more telling is the fact that only 18% of companies rated the level of commitment to building the brand as being very high. There is still much work to be done!  For an overview, here's a CMA Press Release summarizing the report.