The main reason for the general fascination with brands is their ability to provide the consumers an extra value in addition to what the product/service company themselves can provide. A value which becomes the major motivation for consumers to desire the product. Everybody agrees about that, but from here on it becomes foggy. First of all, what is this value exactly? Also, how precisely is this value being added and incorporated into the brand? In this short article I attempt to provide a clear answer to both of these key questions and to suggest a workable approach to creating value added brands.

From time to time the marketing world is taken aback by huge, quick, unpredictable and seemingly inexplicable successes. These hits are products or services, entertainment locales or vacation spots, shopping malls or specialty stores that enjoy puzzling immediate popularity. There are incognitos that become hot celebrities, there are events, festivals or concerts that capture the masses, real estate development projects that evoke huge demand, or styles that become trendy.

A successful differentiation is not imitated by your competitors, even though it brings you unmistakable success with consumers. It seems impossible? Not quite so. I am about to reveal to you the unexpectedly simple and wonderful secret of successful differentiation: you must think beyond the core benefits of your product category. Think: Off-Core Differentiation.

If you are trying to segment your market in the traditional way, what you may be looking for would be groups of consumers sorted out in such a way that a certain likeness exists within each group, and a difference exists between them. The variable determining the meaningful likeness or difference between those groups would be the segmentation variable.

This is how we, marketers, usually think: "Find out what they want, give it to them nicely wrapped and with a big shiny smile, and let the surveys show that they are satisfied." Good old Satisfying Marketing, right? Well, not any more.

Consistent data from all over the globe indicates that even the most satisfied customers tend to keep an open mind towards other offers.

The 'Marketing Strategy' is the way we have come up with for achieving our marketing goals and it should include two mandatory elements:

- Which target consumers whom we can reach, hold a viable potential to buy whatever we intend to sell?

- What is the offer (the entire marketing mix) we will be presenting to these consumers in order to appeal to them and thus realize the said potential, given their alternatives?

You must not think of these as two separate questions but rather as two parts of the same idea.

About 95% of what executives in competing companies do is pretty much the same all around. This is good management. If you are CEO'ing a wireless communication services provider, you strive to put up an advanced technological infrastructure with a promising future, cool end-user phones, other devices and accessories, a great service system and competitive prices.

The old customary procedure of strategy development has a pure and sound logic. It has been designed in order to answer the question: What is it that we should do in order to achieve our goals?

The process essentially involves three stages:

1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to be?
3. How are we to get there?

This process is based on Gap Analysis.

Our starting point is to be clear as to what we mean by "love for a brand". The love of a brand is more similar to the love of ice-cream than the love for a spouse. Love for a brand is actually a strong feeling of anticipation for something good, pleasant or beneficial that we believe with great certainty that we will get from the brand. It is the anticipation for good experiences, pleasant sensations or positive emotions.

By definition, a luxury brand is an outstanding brand, justifiably priced highly and destined, at least primarily, to a select group of the social-economic elite. Luxury is not about unattainability though. After all, you cannot profit from consumers that cannot buy your brand. However, luxury is about the consumer outstretching herself a bit to buy something extraordinary but rather expensive for her financial ability.

A spate of recent articles about the Obama brand have, in my view as an expert on marketing, neglected the brand's strategy and focused its verbal or visual expressions. But far more important is the distinction between the short-term brand, "Candidate Obama," and the long-term brand, "President Obama."

So far candidate Obama's campaign exemplifies perfect wizardry in short term branding.