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

Advertising vs. Branding

Excellent article in current edition of Business Week, by Marc Gobé, the Chairman and CEO of Desgrippes Gobé New York, a brand design firm and the author of Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People and just released Brandjam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design.

The conclusion of the article tells it all: It’s time to remember that advertising needs brands more than the brands need advertising. A good product creates its own relationships.

Understanding what the consumers want and bringing solutions that will inspire them is the most powerful way to support any business strategy. Putting consumers and the product at the center of the equation is fundamental to a brand’s success. Design then becomes the message and the advertising, as it’s proof of a company’s commitment to people and to innovation.
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Brand – Key Factor For Customers When Choosing a Wireless Service

Brand and brand name is the key factor for customer when choosing a wireless service. What’s interesting in the J.D. Power and Associates 2006 Wireless Retail Sales Satisfaction StudySM whose Volume 2 was released today – is that the customers are increasingly influenced by the handset when selecting a wireless service.

While the summed importance of branding (of the carrier and the phone) in purchasing decision seems to remain constant at a total of 59% it is worth noticing that 19 percent of customers cite the type or brand of cell phone as a key factor during the initial process of selecting a wireless service, up from 11 percent in 2004. While the brand of wireless provider is still the most popular reason influencing the initial selection process, it has decreased significantly in importance, down 8 percentage points from 2004 to 40 percent in 2006.
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Trends in Loyalty Marketing

Brand loyalty will diminish as the defining metric of success. Marketing strategies will become more varied.

Brand loyalty reduces customer loss, which improves business growth. You are not replacing lost customers to stay at the same sales volume. Customers must have a favorable attitude toward the product to develop loyalty.

Looking at the future of [tag]loyalty[/tag]-[tag]marketing[/tag] [tag]innovation[/tag], three major trends will emerge.
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Branding News Roundup – 02/13/06

Maslow and Branding: Esteem

So yes, this really is all about ego. We don’t like to admit that we need our ego stroked, that we want to be recognized and feel important. But hey, it’s a fact AND it’s a huge motivator for purchase (like L’Oreal’s tag line: “It’s more expensive, but I’m worth it.”) Obviously all fashion, cosmetics, car companies, etc. are playing on Esteem, but as you can see from the above examples, any company can meet this need.

Re-Branding…

When re-branding ourselves – our organizations – we are making a declaration to be free of attachment to the comfort of the known. Free of the comfort of the predictable. We as organisms – be we individuals or organizations – seek stasis; predictability; comfort. The great trap of the human condition is a striving for comfort. As managers we organize work processes to gain as much predictability as possible. We become slaves to our forecasts and plans.

Coloring Your Brand Perception

Brands are defined by the perceptions and experiences that someone has with a company product or service, what it looks like, what it sounds like and how it acts. One element in shaping an image is the use of color. Although color alone does not establish your brand it is one element that effects consumers emotions, behaviors and perceptions in relation to your company, product or service. In designing it is important to pick the right colors for the right effect to help reinforce the brand. A good place to start is to recognize the product or service being advertised, the target market, and the desired reaction and response of the consumer.

Olympic strategy key to branding gold

How companies try to get the most from the Games is a sport all in itself. While some companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars for rights to the rings, marketers say there’s more than one way to play the sponsorship game around the Olympics.

Key Branding Trends in 2006

Robert Passikoff is president/founder of Brand Keys, which has published the Customer Loyalty Index of leading companies in 26 product and service categories since 1996., has an interesting article over at Chief Marketer about what he calls the five key trends that will determine the difference between success and failure for brands and marketers for 2006:

1. An emphasis on “engagement.”
Inserting itself between traditional marketing activities and an increasing demand for return on investment assessments, engagement will become the Holy Grail for marketers and advertisers. Defined as the outcome of ad and marketing activities that substantively increases a brand’s strength in the eyes of the consumers, engagement will be used more and more to allocate marketing budgets. Continue reading

Trends in Product Branding

There are two trends in product branding, which may at first seem disconnected: the focus on product experiences, and the growth of corporate branding.

People increasingly see the product experience as a key driver of the brand relationship. The quality of the product experience is growing in importance after a couple of decades when some companies perhaps lost focus on product performance, particularly in developed markets. If true innovation is defined as product change that provides real solutions to real consumer issues, then it’s not unfair to suggest that some brands ignored this in favour of quick-fix brand extensions which lacked any longer-term impact

Surface innovation that fails to truly innovate or differentiate can have a short-term positive impact on profits. This may be enough for a new product manager under pressure to deliver, but it can turn off consumers in the medium term, as marketing becomes a surrogate for product innovation and stops being truly effective.

Consumers buy products, and for many the product experience is by far their most important touchpoint. It should be stressed that, although it has been over-emphasized on occasion, the so-called softer side of the brand remains an important component of the brand alchemy. Through a brand’s emotional story, the product experience is amplified and linked to the consumer’s imaginative life – it is all a matter of balance.

The second trend is the development of corporate brands, which have traditionally stayed ‘behind the scenes’. Procter & Gamble’s name is increasingly visible on many of its brands. Its main competitor Unilever also announced early last year that they would use their corporate name in customer-facing marketing activities. We could also mention Nestlé, Danone and many others, which have been historically keen to hide their wide range of branded products from consumers. Many reasons drive the decision to appear as one company under an ‘umbrella brand’. In part it is a response to a global marketplace, but the main factor is the need to rationalise marketing spend.

Many companies have developed multi-layered and extremely complex brand architectures over the years – some for historical reasons (like brand acquisitions), some possibly due to a lack of internal cohesion or communication. The trends toward corporate branding and an emphasis on the product allow us a different perspective on what brand architecture could and should look like. They imply a simplified brand structure in which the corporate brand would directly endorse a range of product brands, with all intermediate brand levels progressively disappearing. This would clarify the offers, put the product back at centre stage for consumers, and force companies to really define their corporate brand and related values.

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Employees Branding Guidelines

The brand-developing process centers on the messages the organization sends and the processing of those messages in its employees’psyches.

Employee branding is a process by which employees internalize the desired bran dimage and are motivated to project the image to customers and other organizational constituents. The messages employees take in and process influence

  • the extent to which they perceive their psychological contracts with the organization to be fulfilled
  • the degree to which they understand and are motivated to deliver the desired level of customer service

In so doing, they drive the formation of the employee brand. The messages employees receive must be aligned with the employees’organizational experiences if the psychological contract is to be upheld. Therefore, the conscious development of organizational messages is the fundamental building block in this process.

The messages must then be delivered through appropriate message sources.The following guidelines provide a starting point in this process:

  1. Organizational messages should be carefully thought out and planned in much the same way mission and vision statements are thought out and planned.
  2. The organizational messages should reflect the organization’s mission and values.
  3. Messages directed toward external constituencies must be in line with the messages sent to employees.
  4. Messages directed toward external constituencies should be sent internally as well.
  5. The design of recruitment and selection systems should incorporate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
  6. The compensation system should incorporate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image. For instance, managers in organizations that value training must be held accountable when they fail to train and develop their employees.
  7. Training and development systems should help managers and employees internalize their organization’s mission and values and help them understand how the mission and values pertain to their roles in their organization.This should enable them to more effectively articulate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
  8. Advertising and public relations systems should communicate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
  9. Managers should be taught the importance of communicating messages that are consistent with their organization’s mission,vision, policies, and practices.
  10. Performance management systems should address inconsistencies between practices and policies to minimize violations of employees’ psychological contracts.
  11. Accurate and specific job previews should be given to new employees so that realistic expectations are incorporated into their psychological contracts.
  12. Corporate culture (artifacts, patterns of behavior, management norms, values and beliefs, and assumptions) should reinforce the messages employees receive.
  13. Individual output should be measured and analyzed to determine if there are message-related problems at the departmental, divisional, or organizational levels.
  14. Individual messages should be continually examined for consistency with other messages.
  15. Message channels should be examined to ensure consistency of message delivery.
  16. In the event that messages need to be changed or psychological contracts altered, organizations must take careful steps in rewriting the messages.
  17. Measures should be used to assess outcomes such as customer retention, service quality, turnover, and employee satisfaction and performance

Brand Naming – 5 Tips

The name is the brand trigger. When it is said or read or thought, all the impressions, experiences and promises of the brand are brought to mind.

Creating a new brand name, whether is a new company or a new product line, is an opportunity to take a deep breath, take stock of who you are and where you’re headed, figure out what new things you need to add to the marketing mix, and what baggage you may be ready to leave behind.

The following key attributes should be present in every company name:

  • Position the company/product within the markets it serves.
  • Attract customers and prospects, usually by stating a benefit, specific or implied.
  • Be memorable
  • Be easily pronounced
  • Have positive verbal associations and connotations.
  • Be unique, not at all like competitor names.
  • Be protectable.

Next is a list with some five things to be considered when you start naming a new company, product or service:

1. Determine How Important the Name Really Is

Having a clever name isn’t always important. Many companies thrive in industries that are based on government contracts, bidding wars, business friendships, etc., and their name is often just a unique identifier to be placed on legal paperwork.

For most companies, however, their name can be an integral part of their marketing process. A clever, memorable name can make a potential client think about the company for a few extra moments, which may be all you need to get the edge on your competitors.

2. Stand Out…

The most common mistake made when naming a new business endeavor is to make it sound like the others in that industry. This is based on anxiety about whether the new business will be taken seriously. In reality, it’s critical that you stand apart from your competition, and that you look to your competitors as examples of what to avoid.

There are literally 30 or 40 wireless companies called Mobile-something — Mobileum, Mobilocity, MobileOne. Make a rule and don’t pick a name with ‘mobile’ in it, if you name a wireless company.

3. …but don’t get carried away.

A name that doesn’t mean anything, or it has no depth won’t work ussualy. A name should connect with something already in the collective subconscious. Don’t forget, you’re trying to make an emotional connection.

4. Test your tolerance for going ‘out of the box.’

If you’re looking for something unusual, usually when it comes down to it, the obstacle is always fear. Make sure that the fears aren’t based on what happens to brands out in the world. It’s like Banana Republic. People don’t see the name and think, ‘Whoa, an ugly racial slur — I’m not going to shop there.’ It’s all contextual.”

5. Don’t involve too many people

Most corporations have no problem delegating marketing and advertising issues to the marketing department, but when naming is involved, especially naming the company itself or key products, suddenly everyone wants to have a say in the process, and it can quickly become politically and emotionally charged. Therefore, it is essential that you keep the number of people involved in a naming project to a minimum, that they have real authority, and that they all understand the ideas outlined above.