Know and Avoid the Brand Identity Traps

In order to avoid possible mistakes in managing your brand there is a need to clarify and identify some of the main brand and branding terms.

When analyzing your current brand situation there are three elements that should be taken in consideration:

  • A. Where is your brand at the moment? – how’s your brand perceived by your audience. Where you stand in the eyes and minds of your stakeholders. This is your Brand Image.
  • B. Where do you want it to be? how do you want it to be perceived. There might be some surprises in making the differences between how you wish your brand to be perceived and how it is actually happening. And this is Brand Identity.
  • C. What are you communicating? What are you actually doing to move from point A to point B. What part of your brand identity you actually communicate to your audience. What is the value you communicate, how do you do it. How do you translate your identity into valuable propositions for your audience. And this is Brand Position.

We should keep in mind that the target audience for your brand should be either your current customers or potential new ones, your employees, your partners etc. You should carefully consider appropriate ways to communicate with each of them in order to have a message that converge to your brand identity.

Since you have to start with the final purpose in mind you should, first of all, correctly have a clear vision of what do you want your brand to be. How do you want it to be perceived? Defining a brand identity should be step one. In his “Building Strong Brands” book, David A. Aaker identifies four traps you can get into when you approach the development of the brand identity: Continue reading →

Posted on by Daniel 0

Pick The Right School Online For Brand Marketing

Many people nowadays are turning to the Internet to receive their education from online schools and universities. Marketing professionals have much to gain from taking online; not only is it cheaper to pay the tuition for an online class, but going to school online allows you to have a flexible schedule so that you can work in your spare time. While taking online classes is easy, the process of finding the best online school is not and not every school that offers a marketing or social networking program is worth your time. To separate the best from the rest, here are a few points to consider. Continue reading →

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How to Protect Your Brand Identity on Social Media?

Whether you are a start-up or an already established business, you need to take necessary precautions to protect your brand identity. Due to extreme popularity that social media has received, businesses are utilizing the power of this medium for their personal benefit. However, with benefits, there are some disadvantages as well, such as people will try to distort the image of your business by creating fake pages on social networking sites. So, protecting your brand identity on social media is crucial.

We will now discuss some important elements that will allow you to save your brand identity from getting distorted by frauds and cheats.

First Thing First – Create Your Presence:

The first thing you need to do is to create your presence. Find the most famous sites and create your accounts there. For example: Facebook, YouTube, Digg, etc. You can easily get a list of some of the most famous social media sites. After you create your account, you need to personalize your profile with your company information.

Logo Design plays a crucial role in building your brand image. Thus, it must be on every profile page that you create on all different websites. You need to also mention your contact details, so potential clients or interested people may contact you.

Create Personal Pages and Videos:
After you sign-up and upload your logo along with necessary details about your business, you should now work on creating personalized business pages and videos. This will enable you to represent and promote your business and products. Plus, who is better than you to represent your business?

If you create a Fan Page, make sure you mention that it’s the official fan page of your business. This is what other businesses do as well to stand-out from fake pages created by competitors or other people to distort your business image.

Start Adding People to Your Network:
The next thing you should do is to start expanding your network by adding people, especially from your own industry. Start interacting with them and avoid posting excessive marketing and promotional material and discount offers. The first thing you need to do is to win the trust of your network. Only then it will be right to promote your products.

You Have Now Created Your Presence on Social Media:

After following the steps mentioned above, you will be able to create your presence on social media effectively. Plus, all the information about your business will be authentic because it will be posted by you.

It’s Time You Search for Thugs and Frauds:

Once your presence is created, it’s time you start searching for frauds, cheats and thugs who are planning to distort your business image by creating unethical pages and creating wrong videos in your name.

At least once a week, you should visit all the social media sites where you have created your presence and search for information about your company posted by others.
Let’s say you come across a fake fan page, you will be able to report it and it will be removed. So, this is an ongoing process where you will have to create your presence and search for cheats who are trying to destroy your brand identity.

This is a Guest Post by Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is the Alliance Manager at Logoinn, a custom logo design company. He writes about the effect of design on marketing and brand identity and helps small businesses find design solutions for effective marketing.

Posted on by Daniel 4

The ten most most valuable brands in the world

Brand Finance has published its 2010 Global 500 Survey of the world’s most valuable brands.

Brand Finance’s league tables provide a point in time valuation of leading global, sector and regional brands enabling clients to track their brands’ performance on an annual basis.

A brand valuation provides an objective framework within which crucial decisions around marketing and branding strategy can be made objectively and with a high degree of financial rigor. Subsequently, investment decisions can be made in the context of their impact on business value in order to understand more accurately the return on marketing investment.

Here are the top 10:

1. Wal-Mart (-) – 41,365$M
2. Google (+3) – 36,191$M
3.  Coca Cola (-1) – 34,844$M
4.  IBM (-1) – 33,706$M
5. Microsoft (-1) – 33,604$M
6. GE (-) – 31,909$M
7. Vodafone (+1) – 28,995$M
8. HSBC (-1) – 28,472$M
9. HP (-) – 27,383$M
10. Toyota (-) – 27,319$M

Full top here

Posted on by Daniel 4

How to Create a Cult Brand

Customer communities are commonly found among many reputable lifestyle brands. Brands that embrace and harness these communities enjoy a high level of customer loyalty, which drives long-term profitability.

Brands like Apple, Oprah, Harley-Davidson, Ikea and Southwest Airlines have made their competition irrelevant through brand communities they have helped nurture over the years. But why do brand communities form? And what can we learn about them?

Psychologist Jenny Lee, a brand consultant at The Cult Branding Company, explores the social and psychological motivators that fuel the development of brand communities in a compelling new white paper.

The white paper titled, “Why We Join: A Sociological and Psychological Analysis of Brand Communities,” along with an illustrative presentation can be downloaded freely here.

Here are seven steps to take in order to create a cult brand:

  1. Determine how customers are emotionally connected with your brand
  2. Determine what your brand symbolizes in the minds of your best customers
  3. Support the community so that it reinforces psychological attraction customers have towards your brand
  4. Whenever possible create a space where your customers can meet and interact with one another – either in person or online
  5. Sponsor social events that reflect your brand’s mission
  6. Set up conditions for a fun, playful environment where friendships can be made
  7. Don’t control community. Instead participate as a co-creator
Posted on by Daniel 4

Brand Starts and Ends at the Core

Gord Hotchkiss in MediaPost in an article on Brand Promises Vs. Brand Religions:

One thing that both these natures of brand have in common: ultimately they depend on the values, integrity and effectiveness of the organization that creates the brand. If the brand is a promise of a level of quality, you can’t break the promise with immunity, especially in a digitally amplified world of blogs, forums and buzz. Each of the “promise” brands I used as examples, GM, United and Microsoft, stand in danger of their promises losing all meaning with customers. A promise is only as good as the level of trust you’ve built with the recipient.

But if the brand is a religion, the culture of the organization becomes even more important. Irrational decision factors run amok: the perceived culture of the organization, how the brand label connects with who we are, the social circles it places us it, or the circles we wish it would place us in, the values the company stands for, the exclusivity of the brand. The brand relationship becomes a complex stew of beliefs and emotions. We only make this investment for brands that hold a unique position in our mindscape. We feel we have to get as much from the brand as we’re willing to give it in terms of our emotional loyalty. And if a brand doesn’t reciprocate, it is quickly downscaled from a religion to a passing fancy.

Posted on by Daniel 1

Brand Value vs. Brand Recognition

Interesting article in Fast Company Magazine, basically an interview with John Wang, HTC chief marketing officer — AKA Chief Innovation Wizard.

The HTC brand was already there among its users. A few years ago we started to put the HTC logo on the phones. We basically formalized the brand recognition on the physical product.

Let me share with you how we think about brand. There is a very important difference between brand value and brand recognition. Brand value means something to the end user. Brand recognition, all it means is a bunch of advertising to make people recognize the brand name. At HTC we care about brand value, not brand recognition. Building brand value is like earning respect; you have to earn respect, you cannot buy respect.

The brand value vs. brand recognition point is generally true. But in certain markets (either geo or in terms of products) you might not have the time, the patience and the resources to wait for the recognition to come from the market in an “organic” way. Without a push on the recongnition pedal, you might not have the chance to put the brand value in customers hands. Definitely what a brand is looking for mainly is value. Value for the customer, for the brand itself or for the company that owns it. But I don’t think you should leave aside, by all means, the recognition effort.

Posted on by Daniel 4