Friday 23 July 2010

Building a common Brand

Much of the last week has been spent on considering issues relating to brand and visual identity. The YMCA of the USAs re-brand has been a real catalyst for discussion. Today the World Council is considering whether there might be appetie for developing a global brand identity for the YMCA Movement. In Canada the YMCA has 95% brand recognition - probably similar in England (maily due to the Village People I think!) but without knowledge of what we do. YMCA England's strategy includes developing a common brand across England and a task group has been established - I wonder what more we need to do to make this a reality?

4 comments:

  1. Really good to hear in the Q&A session, the reinforcing of the key to successful communication being:

    * to identify your audiences
    * develop engaging & relevant messages
    * use the most appropriate communications channels to reach them.

    This has been after an African delegate had stated communications were expensive. Mexico responded with the arguement that social media and electronic commuications could be cheap, if not free.

    Another African delegate responded to this by stating that internet-based comms were unreliable in large parts of Africa, with out-of-date equipment and lots of viruses on PCs.

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  2. Rebecca Morton from the World Alliance and brand expert, Bob Tobin, led us through a brilliant session on "what is brand?" this morning.

    All around the hall you could almost see light bulbs going on above people's heads, as they finally realised that brand is more than a logo. The conversation afterwards testifies to this.

    The plenary session that followed saw us split into groups to discuss issues on global visibility, communications and working collaboratively.

    There were some superb suggestions. Hopefully will share more later on these.

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  3. In the light of what we have heard I wonder how we might adapt/re-focus our brand re-fresh model?

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  4. Thanks Ian, but in terms of our process, nothing's changed at present, but we do have some considerations.

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