Tag Archives: brand marketing

Consistent Branding Means Survival

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To ensure the future growth and profitability of your company, you must use a brand management strategy to continually build, strengthen and revitalize your brand. Building and maintaining a valuable brand isn’t easy.

Brand positioning is a process, not an event. Your brand blueprint (vision, areas of focus and touch points) and your brand voice (main messages, approach to language, type, color and imagery) come from ongoing emotional connections made with your customers every day.

You must focus on the emotional aspects of your brand – the proposition, making a quick and intuitive emotional connection with your customers that creates awareness, has influence, and elicits their buy-in and loyalty.

Exceptional brand performance is no accident. Implementing a strong, actionable brand plan is crucial to achieving standout market performance. You can’t simply rely on the functional differences of your products or services. Customers have too many choices. Differentiating and communicating your brand’s unique value to the marketplace is essential. You need to craft messages that stir up specific words or emotions when someone hears or sees your company’s name, products or services.

Your brand serves as a powerful motivation tool to all your stakeholders such as employees, investors and customers. Companies are constantly looking for ways to grow their brand image, using new ideas and initiatives in the market. Many are creating innovative ways for building their brand and pushing boundaries to influence customer buying behavior, getting their messages across clearly and effectively. Branding today must include social media across multiple platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more social communities.

Customer loyalty, commitment and collaboration are the key to business success in today’s competitive environment. Brand strategies need to be relevant, have a differentiated offer and reflect values that are credible and believable. This is only achievable by ensuring consistency in product and service quality with your brand promise.

Your branding identity strategy will be more successful if you closely target your market. Focus on getting your company name and your products or services in front of your current customers and best potential customers. An effective brand marketing strategy creates the kind of loyalty that leaves customers indifferent to the advertising and marketing factors of your competitors.

Branding is the intangible part of your business. A brand, unlike your product or service offerings, is a collection of ideas, feelings, word associations and visuals that represent your value proposition. Customers choose one particular brand over another because of its intrinsic value. Your brand serves as the link between your product’s promise and the customer’s desire.

Branding is a way to differentiate your company, product or service from competitors. It means having a personality that is unique and appeals to customers. This would include your brand name, graphic representation, tagline, key descriptive phases and brand story.

Well-focused and consistent attention to brand identity marketing will create a favorable, memorable position of your products or services in the minds of your prospects and customers. You must brand consistently to compete and become a factor in the industry sector in which your company participates.

A powerful brand identity and active brand strategy can prevent poor market awareness, insufficient product or service recognition, weak customer retention, lack of loyalty, inadequate lead generation flow, longer-than-expected selling cycles and low product valuation.

Whether you are a new or established business, one looking to refresh or solidify your brand, your company’s brand identity is crucial to your company’s success. A strong brand communicates to your customers a promise and expresses your unique value through words and images.

Developing your brand doesn’t happen overnight. Consistent communications that differentiate your company are imperative to the success and life of your brand.

In today’s fast-paced, multimedia world, it is more important than ever to promote recognition of your company, and its product or service by stressing the quality and the unique value of your brand.

Am I a Journalist or a Blogger?

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I had lunch recently with a group of friends, all journalists – editors or reporters. All, including myself, have a bachelor’s degree in journalism or closely related academic area. We spent many years, learning the ropes, ethically and how to report a story without bias, to have balance and fairness in our reporting. We’ve all been employed by mainstream media publications. And, all of us are also bloggers.

The subject of journalist versus a blogger is not new; it has come up many times in the last decade, primarily from the onslaught of new freelance bloggers (journalists?) at the 2004 elections, who began doing Web log posts.

Although I blog and am a trained journalist (now I work in branding marketing and public relations), I don’t consider my blog posts journalism. In the United States, journalists don’t get a license, closest thing to it is a press pass or ID, so the definitional line isn’t so clear.

If this subject isn’t new, why then did we talk about it and now I’m writing about it? Our conversation at lunch was centered on recent ruling by U.S. District Federal Judge Marco Hernandez about a blogger, who claims to be an investigative blogger. The ruling was based on First Amendment protection. For the full story, take a look at “You Be The Judge: Are Bloggers Journalists?”- Forbes http://onforb.es/vABJ3e

Most bloggers that I know, say they are journalists, entitled to equal rights with mainstream media outlets. Some of my journalist friends disagree. They say bloggers are not journalists – never were and never will be. They argue that the majority of bloggers, because they have no editors, no strict standards and no one to answer to clearly are not journalists. It also seems to me j-school college graduates are trained to verify our facts and quotations. I don’t believe that all bloggers do this.

Yet as for First Amendment rights, I come from a little different point of view. I believe that journalism reports and blog posts deserve First Amendment protection that our Constitution guarantees. However, I don’t believe the blogger should have free run. Like journalists, they are subject to consequences that can arise after they publish a post, such as being sued for libel or ordered to reveal a confidential source.

It is very clear that bloggers have First Amendment rights, which protect all of our opinions. What isn’t so clear is if bloggers are entitled to the protections of other federal and state laws, such those that allow journalists to protect confidential sources. That’s another topic for another day.

When we ask who is a journalist, the real questions are: is the journalist, whether reporting for a magazine, newspaper, television, radio or blog, giving analysis, commentary or simply political outbursts? (Hmmm…I won’t go here in this, but that brings to mind some mainstream reports?)

The true issue is not the job title, but the activity.

How’s Your Brand Image?

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Today successful businesses are very aware of their brand image. The value of a strong brand identity lies in the impression left with anyone who comes in contact with your company. It’s how your customers see you.

Branding is not just about logos or updating your Website. It’s the entire “feel” associated with your company.

When defining elements of your brand strategy, the most important priority is to articulate your brand’s promise. You need to have a consistent visual brand image, including a set of strong, unique brand messages, outstanding service and business conduct at each customer touch point. A strong and effective brand will create, build and increase awareness and brand loyalty with your customers.

With the increase in technology, companies have many more points of brand contact with stakeholders from e-mail, Websites, social media, blogs and much more. As online marketing continues to evolve into new spaces, your brand should be closely guarded and represented to protect your brand and company reputation in places, channels and formats that you use.

In order to develop successful branding strategies, your brand and business have to stand out. You must emphasize what you have that the your competition does not have. You need to tell your customers what makes your business different than all the other companies that they can also choose.

You need to be consistent, proactive and informative with your brand messages. Brand awareness and purchase intent are highly correlated with repetitive viewing and consistent branding. For example, you should encourage viewers to return to your Website by placing frequently updated and informative content.

Taking time to carefully develop and maintain your brand will set your business apart from other businesses. It will encourage frequent brand engagement that creates strong brand loyalty through successful branding.