Tag: brand image

Do’s and Don’ts in Branding a Startup

Setting-up a start-up, especially online, needs attention to a lot of details, branding included. The enthusiasm of a new beginning is indispensable for a new endeavour but can put some important things in the blind spot. There are DO’s and DON’Ts, things to look up for or things to avoid. While there are no definite rules or sometimes is worth breaking some of them, here are some notes you should take in consideration before you “go out” to the real world.

7 To Do’s for Startup Branding

Define yourself and your product

Before you go out to your customers be specific and honest regarding your purpose. What are you going to provide? Clearly define your product/service in detail. Think what are the benefits for the potential customer, what’s the need that you cover. Continue reading →

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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 →

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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.

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Best Global Brands by Value – 2006

The previously announced Interbrand & BusinessWeek 2006 Best Global Brands by brand value is finally out with no major movements in the top 10.

Brand value is calculated as the net present value of the earnings the brand is expected to generate and secure in the future for the time frame from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006. To be considered the brands must have a minimum brand value of US$2.7 billion, achieve about one third of their earnings outside of their home country, have publicly available marketing and financial data, and have a wider public profile beyond their direct customer base.

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7 Rules for Great Marketing

For marketing executives seeking to build their brand in today’s frenzied, message-cluttered jungle, resting on their laurels seemed to be enough until not long ago — especially if they were meeting their goals, seamlessly executing ambitious programs, and keeping staff members happy enough to ward off corporate raiders. Nowadays, conditions are vastly different. To prove your worth as a marketer and brand builder, you need to tap into your entrepreneurial side.

Seven rules for marketing and brand building, based on a fundamental for entrepreneurial success, are now essential for compelling customers to embrace your brand.

Embrace 3-D marketing

Entrepreneurs are obsessed with building lasting, face-to-face relationships, a principle that only 3-D marketers can leverage to full advantage. 3-D marketing—encompassing events, exhibits, displays, merchandising, premiums, target market research, prospect follow-up and much more—enables marketers to truly “touch” their customers in ways that traditional mass marketing does not. It’s the most powerful tool in the marketing arsenal for creating customer relationships and building brand image on a face-to-face basis.

Make ROI your mantra

Entrepreneurs are notoriously impatient to maximize the return on every investment they make. Amazingly, in the world of 3D marketing, executives often forgo measuring ROI until called to the carpet — and by then, they have no assurance that they are looking at meaningful indicators of brand participation or brand loyalty.

Dive into your industry

Stellar entrepreneurs study their target industries in minute detail, zero in on the marketplace needs they’re uniquely positioned to fill, and develop brands that showcase their added value. Do you know what your brand is, what it isn’t, and what it needs to be? How should you be promoting your brand so that it resonates with a changing marketplace of prospects and buyers?

Focus resources through end-to-end planning

In the new world of 3-D marketing, you must champion end-to-end planning processes—beginning with market research and message development, graduating to creative conceptualization and implementation, and ending with customer follow-up and results measurement. As part of your marketing effort, you should be spearheading an end-to-end planning approach for each one.

Remember the vision

Entrepreneurs are “big idea” people with a compelling vision and the drive to see it through. Too often, marketing executives lose their dedication to understanding their corporation’s vision and strategy—and advancing them through several integrated tactics with a common set of underlying messages.

Seek new paradigms for achieving teamwork and synergy

The teambuilding spirit typical of entrepreneurs is a requirement for marketers, who should be taking it to the next level. Do you, for instance, organize on-site “pep-rally briefings” of your sales team just before major events—reinforcing the brand messages most likely to draw customers in? While sales would normally lead these meetings, your intimate branding knowledge should be compelling you to initiate this out-of-the-box approach.

Honor the team members

Like entrepreneurs, you depend on your team to help you shine. Learn to nurture and empower the people who work with you every day—encouraging them to take your ideas further, to continually focus on overall returns, and to develop new approaches. As the rules for brand-building success take a dramatic turn, you’ll need their talents to help you capitalize on future opportunities—and to maintain the luster of your brand.

via MarketingProfs.

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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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Sucessfull Online Branding

Web presence is nowadays essential part of the branding process. That’s because the Web is equally a:

  • Communication medium that conveys image. To take advantage of the inherent strengths of the Web — potentially endless depth and two-way communication — sites must provide content and function that support Brand Image. For example, to back up Apple’s claim to “lead the industry in innovation,” its site must describe the innovative aspects of Apple products and provide standout function like a best-in-class configurator. To reinforce multichannel marketing campaigns, sites also need elements like language, imagery, typography, and layout to be consistent with both the intent of the positioning and the style of ads in other media.
  • Delivery channel that enables action. Sites don’t just appear before customers the way television ads do. If a customer sees a home page, it’s because she typed a URL or clicked a link — and that means she arrived with goals like finding specific information, making a purchase or getting service. To avoid frustrating and annoying her — a bad way to build brand — sites must supply the content and function she needs to achieve her goals. For example, customers looking for a low-cost American Express card need content that includes annual fees and APR plus function that lets them apply online. Sites also need navigation that makes it easy to find the content, and they need presentation that makes it easy to consume the content.

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