This episode of The Business Conversation Podcast features Ulli Appelbaum, an award-winning marketing and brand strategy consultant with more than 20 years of experience. Ulli is also the author of “The Brand Positioning Workbook", which has been described as "Hands down the best book on brand positioning since Ries & Trout introduced this concept many years ago". Ulli talks about his own definition of what a brand is, along with his concept of “Association Bundles”, a set of associations that consumers remember your product or service by. Ulli’s insights bring back concepts that have been tried and tested strategies, but have since become “lost knowledge” as most marketers now learn on-the-job, instead of getting solid training.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Ulli: "The brand is the sum of all the associations consumers have about your offering."
Ulli: "As a marketer, if you don't manage these associations or decide which associations you want to build, consumers will create automatic associations, that's just how the brain is wired."
Garrio: "The prevailing narrative right now is the customers define what the brand is, and so on. But by taking this intentional approach and understanding the mechanics that a user will use to define your brand, the marketer now has a little bit more control over architecting the kind of experience they want to have."
Ulli: "People look at brands as coming back to bundles of association. Which are the ones you want to nurture and which are the ones you want to build, and which are the ones you want to move away from? It's not about a framework with 26 little buckets inside on strategic nuances and details. It's either you are an expert, or you have soft paper, or you are the bear, or you are really cheap. It's as basic as that."
Ulli: "Empathy is not, 'we're both educated, we both believe in these social issues, we empathize together.’ No, empathy is really empathizing with someone whose point of view you completely disagree with. And that is so extremely difficult and that's what we have lost over the last 10 years."
Follow the link below to learn more about Ulli Appelbaum:
This series is being put together in collaboration with AIGA Minnesota - one of the largest chapters of AIGA, that works to enhance the value and deepen the impact of design across all disciplines of business, society, and our collective future.
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