Five Key Ideas About Branding

1. Your brand is the sum of the experiences that your customers have whenever they are exposed to your product or message. It is this breadth that gives a brand depth and endurance.

2. You control your brand if these experiences are planned and conform to your vision. At this level, branding is strategic, not tactical.

3. Your brand is consistent if these experiences all say the same thing to your audiences. Do all customers feel that they are valued and cared for? If they do, your brand is consistent across all venues and will experience great synergy.

4. Your brand is working if these experiences create the desired impression in the minds, hearts, and pockets of your target audiences. And remember, the impression you want to own is one of relevance.

5. Your brand is successful if the perception you have created makes people act in the right way. In other words,do people follow through? Do they enroll? Do they give money? Do they commit? Or better yet, do they talk you up? Do you get buzz?

Two Essential Elements of an Effective Brand

Contrary to popular opinion,a brand is not just a look. Rather,a brand is a trustmark,a warrant,and a promise. The purpose of marketing is to build a brand in the mind of a prospect. Truly successful brands are perceived by the target audience as the best solution to a particular need. The two essential elements of an effective brand:

First,there is the awareness component. In other words, among the 3,000 or so other messages they will receive this day,did your audience members notice yours? Did your message stand out from the background clutter? And did the audience know how and when to respond?

Second,there is the relevance component.After the message was noticed,did members of your audience begin to sense how the message—and you—might begin to fill a need they had? Was the message relevant to them? Did it lay the groundwork for future messages? Did it help create a relationship? Increasingly,selling is less about persuasion and more about finding needs and filling them.

Five Priorities for Brand Differentiation

Marketing leaders across various industries point to brand differentiation as their top challenge in 2005. Industry consolidation and buyer caution put a premium on brand leadership. Yet marketing budgets are barely growing and traditional brand building has fallen prey to the demands for quantifiable sales results. Buyer skepticism tunes out the constant chatter of me-too marketing claims. And the mergers and acquisitions reshaping the industry confuse buyers even more about who can do what for whom.

Real differentiation is possible, however, for companies willing to invest creatively in ongoing programs to build and promote a compelling story. Specifically, there are five investment areas that separate today’s brand leaders from the rest of the pack:

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Seven Types of Branding

Building strong and lasting relationships with customers and the communities in which the businesses reside as well as with their own employees seems to be (or should be) the focus of many companies.

Just as there are many branding techniques, there are also many different uses for branding. Here are the seven common types of branding.

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15 Most Common Branding Myths

Over the years, many myths about branding have taken hold in the business world and spread like wildfire. Branding is not one aspect of your marketing campaign. It is the combination of everything your business stands for. Branding is not created with a single, stand-alone event, it is created over time through a series of strategically thought-out actions.

Let’s check 15 most common myths about branding and confront them with reality.

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7 Steps to Design Your Brand

Every company has a brand whether they created it through design or accident. By creating your brand through design, you shape the way you wish your company to be viewed by customers and potential customers. This will remove some of the uncertainty concerning what others will expect from you and say about you. The power of a brand can?t be over-estimated.

Do you know what makes your company or its products unique? If you don?t you can?t begin to establish a brand identity by design. Here are seven elements to consider when designing your brand.

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Brand Limitations

Ideally, a good brand serves to enhance a sound infrastructure with a solid reputation. Branding is not a magic wand; it cannot provide a quick fix to a company’s problems or compensate for any shortcomings. Branding will help very little if your internal operations and cultural personality are opposite what you are trying to convey to the outside audience. Your internal brand personality is just as important as the external message. The average customer is not going to purchase a product or service without feeling comfortable with the company offering it.

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Q2 Nation Brands Index

The second Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index (NBI) report ranks the brand power and appeal of 25 developed and developing nations and is based on the opinion of 10, 000 consumers from 10 countries.This is the first analytical ranking of nation brands based on worldwide public perceptions of a country’s cultural, political, commercial and human assets, investment potential and tourist appeal

NBI report analyzes the brand values of more countries (25 compared to 11) than the first report published in May 2005. Australia, a new entry in the NBI, has replaced Sweden as the world’s strongest nation brand. Canada is ranked number two, Switzerland three and the UK is fourth, with Sweden fifth. Overall, the U.S. is now eleventh, rather than fourth.

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