Vitaly Demin Senior Strategy Consultant Read about Vitaly

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August 2011

Earlier this month I wrote an article about how brand mismanagement is killing a very strong smartphone brand - Droid. Stretched among three smartphone makers (Motorola, HTC and now Samsung) and having no holistic brand strategy, Droid is becoming irrelevant to the consumer.

Now that Google acquired Motorola Mobility last week, there's a chance for them to do something about it.

As weak and confusing the Droid brand has become over the last year or so, there's still a good amount of brand equity built into this name to turn it around. There are a few things Google and Motorola should start doing.

First thing they need to do is to make sure that all other non-Motorola manufactured Droid phones eventually disappear from the marketplace. If they explain to Licasfilm people who own the Droid trademark how marketing works and how much more money their trademark can make them in a long run, the latter will most likely listen and eventually stop licensing out the Droid trademark to HTC and Samsung. When people start seeing consistency in the Droid brand and the product design and stop getting confused over multiple models and makers, then the brand has a real chance of becoming successful.

Second part of the Droid brand strategy is the brand name architecture. Google and Motorola should keep in mind that they should only use numbers and letters in Droid models (i.e. Droid 5, Droid 5S, Droid 6, etc). That's exactly why brands like iPhone, Lexus, BMW, etc are so strong because they don't use other words for models. The secondary word always dilutes the power of the primary word and companies should avoid that whenever possible. When you buy an iPhone, you tell your friends that you bought an iPhone. When you buy a Lexus, you say - I bought a Lexus. If you buy a Motorola Droid Bionic, well, you say - I bought a Motorola Droid Bionic.

If I had a say in the branding of the next Droid model, I would call it Droid 5. There are two reasons for this thinking: 1) Droid 5 will help move the entire previous Droid naming mess behind (the most recent one is Droid 4 which is branded as Droid Bionic), and 2) it will position itself as the most relevant competitor of the iPhone 5 which is about to come out this fall.

Third thing Google and Motorola need to jump on after that is the actual branding of the Droid device. If you look at all Droid devices to date, none of them has Droid printed on them. Motorola Droid phones, for example, feature names and logos of Verizon, Motorola and Google. Absolutely nothing about Droid. How do you build a brand when the brand name is missing from the product? And we are talking about the team work of supposedly the best marketing minds of Motorola, Verizon and Google. Look at the iPhone and the name is right there on the back right under the Apple's logo. That's exactly how Google and Motorola have to do it with the Motorola logo and the Droid name (in this very case it needs to be "Droid 5" because their situation is different from the iPhone where Apple no longer needs to specify the version of the device). This way the smartphone will start gaining traction as a brand and become credible in consumer's eyes.

You can only build a strong brand for a product when you have only that brand on it. Ever wondered why you never saw the AT&T logo on the iPhone? Apple didn't care about the fact that traditionally every carrier in the US for decades stuck its name on every single device they sold. What Apple did care about is building and protecting their iPhone brand. That's one of the reasons iPhone became so special because it was isolated and never got diluted by the carrier brand names.

Once Google and Motorola figure out the parts described above, they need to forget about launching more phone models and focus on Droid only, exactly like Apple did. Constant upgrading of hardware and software and staying consistent is a way to build a powerful brand. Steve Jobs figured that out long time ago and we can all now see the results of this strategy.

No other Android phone can be more Android than Droid and if Google and Motorola miss this opportunity, it will be the last nail in the Droid's coffin.

Read also:

• Three strategies that can give Nokia and Microsoft a chance

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Free on iBooks

This eBook is a brief insight into the core of the executive management of Sony Corporation, the core that is unfortunately filled with one of the most perilous human qualities – arrogance.

For a very long time now Sony has been known as an organization permeated by arrogant attitude toward their suppliers, their distributors and now their customers. This culture is felt everywhere in the world. I remember having meetings with Sony people in Moscow Russia when I consulted the largest electronics retailer in the country. These meetings were very adversarial and not a most pleasant experience. Also, as I worked with electronics retailers in Kuwait, Emirates, India, England, US and other countries, the opinions I received about Sony were the same. Nobody liked them and nobody wanted to do business with them because it was just too painful. Obviously, they could not stop carrying Sony products in their stores but some of them did try to reduce the assortment. Sony rarely partners. They dictate.

This work is an attempt to show how corporate arrogance affected the decisions Sony made along the way, the decisions that led to mistakes, mistakes that got them dethroned from the position of being the best and the most admired consumer electronics company in the world.

I hope this eBook helps other companies see a bigger picture of how decisions that are made inside their organizations affect their brand, their customer loyalty and profitable business growth. Very often top managers do not realize that many of wrong decisions are made not due to the lack of knowledge about the problem but due to the mentioned above human flaw – arrogance.

The 2nd edition includes financial updates from 2010 as well as other recent events associated with the Sony organization.

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