Employer Branding

Just found an interesting report published in February by European Management Journal on a pretty hot topic nowadays: Employer Branding.

One increasingly important claim for contributing to sustained corporate success is to build bridges between the HR and the marketing function and to draw from its literature and practice on branding. Thus building, or just as often defending, a brand has become a major concern of organizations in all industries in the private sector. In addition to the for-profit sector, increasingly public sector and voluntary sector organizations are coming to realise the importance of branding, investing significant resources in building brands and trust relations with their clients and customers.

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Seven Steps for a Brand Strategy

Successful brands are built on the twin foundations of awareness and relevance. If target audiences are not aware of you; if they don’t notice your message in the cacophony of messages they receive each day, then you will never have a chance to be relevant. And if they become aware of you—if you capture their attention—and fail to deliver relevance,then they will learn to ignore you. The seven-steps branding strategy outlined here will help provide the structure you need to assess and develop relevance and create awareness.

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Corporate Identity and Six Steps to Improve It

In a world full of confusion and contradictory messages, effective identity and brand can be the reasons why a consumer chooses one product over another. Market and production departments often pull in opposite directions. The competitive power of most companies are decreased because their [tag]corporate identity[/tag] is insufficiently defined.

Identity can be defined on two levels.

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The Functions of a Brand

A brand is a consistent, holistic pledge made by a company, the face a company presents to the world. A brand serves as an unmistakable and recongnizable symbol for products and services. It functions as the “business card” a company proffers on the competitive scene to set itself apart from the rest. In addition to differentiating in this way, a brand conveys to consumers, shareholders, stakeholders, society and the world at large all the values and attitudes embodied in a product or company. A brand fulfills key functions for consumers and companies alike.

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Building an Internal Brand

Employees, like consumers, are bombarded all day by information. Brands are a way by which we identify our priorities. Consumer brands help us simplify our lives and streamline our selection-making. Internal brands enable us to prioritize our most precious resource: time.

By linking your corporate brand to your culture and values – thereby creating an [tag]internal brand[/tag] – your organization can create a platform from which to communicate to your employees the vision, mission and urgency. Internal branding helps improve credibility and strengthens the bonds of trust between leaders and employees. When people are united in purpose and know where they are headed, positive results can occur.

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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?

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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.

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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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Posted on by Daniel 1