Tag: market

What Branding Is? What Branding Is Not?

Interesting post on the subject at Branding Management:

Think of your brand as a promise … a promise you make to your clients, prospects, employees, and even your vendors. But before you make that promise, be sure you never forget this fact. It is imperative that you are able to back it up. You cannot build a successful, long-term brand on unsupported claims and wishful thinking. History is littered with companies — big and small — that have promoted themselves or their products as something they would like to have lived up to but could not.

To separate you from your competition, your brand — your promise — has to differentiate you from others in the minds of your prospects. This is the reason you cannot use quality, integrity, or price when positioning yourself in your marketplace. So many companies claim to offer these particular characteristics that none of them stand out from the others. BMW has taken note of this. Although it is thought by many to be the best car made, the company has built its brand as “a driving machine.” It sells the experience. BMW knows that there are other high quality cars on the market, so a brand built on quality would be diluted and therefore, less profitable.

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Small Business and Branding

Interesting issue posted at AllBusiness.com, regarding small and/or emerging businesses and branding.

Answering the question: what’s so urgent about branding, when there are so many things to worry about when growing a business like making payroll and meeting sales goals? the answer comes like this:

Branding a small or emerging business is key to the early success of that business. It is the quickest way for the company to express who it is and what it does. Inaccurate branding of a new business can make it difficult for people to fundamentally understand why the business exists in the first place.

For start-up and small businesses, branding can often take a backseat to other considerations, such as funding and product development. This is unfortunate; a company’s brand can be key to its success. Dollar for dollar, it is as important and vital as any other start-up activity.

Basically you have to know who you are, what you’re doing, where do you want to go and how will your customer find out about it and these are as important as getting the funds to do them.

Read the full article here

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Best Marketing Book of 2005

strategy+business, published by the leading global management and technology firm Booz Allen Hamilton, has selected ProfitBrand: How to Increase the Profitability, Accountability and Sustainability of Brands by Nick Wreden as the best marketing book of 2005.

Mr. Wreden takes ambitious steps in explaining the significance of “sustainability” in customer relationships and the value of measuring marketing spending to establish accountability and profitability. Sustainability is critical, since by some estimates 80-95 per cent of products fail to become brands, he writes. Sustainability is also important because more than two-thirds of purchases are one-off buys. Only a brand focused on sustainability will take the steps that lead to second, third or even a lifetime of purchases.

ProfitBrand amplifies this concept, known in direct-marketing circles as the true value of a brand: “A brand is not built by acquiring customers; it is built by keeping them,” he writes. “Most competitive product advantages can be duplicated. The one advantage that cannot be duplicated is customer relationships.” Branding strategies that aim to make a company No. 1 in the market, for example, are doomed to failure, Mr. Wreden argues. That’s because brand sustainability can be achieved only on the basis of relationships formed on customer terms, not company terms.

Read the full review of the book here. (free registration required).

Other leading business books selected by the editors at Strategy + Business in marketing categories include:

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Top 25 Branding Blogs – According to Technorati

Following the example of Media Orchart blog which compiled a list of top 25 blogs tagged Public Relations in Technorati blog search engine, I did the same, getting a list of top 25 linked blogs tagged with branding.

Before the list itself, is worth mentioning that the list is problematic, in terms of there might be some blogs that are not exclusively discussing branding subjects (it all depends on the blog authors tagging their blogs with the term) on one hand or some others that are more visible branding blogs that are not present in the top (as their authors never signed up with technorati), on the other hand.

All in all, it is an interesting list of blogs, if you’re looking for more information or resources on the matter.
1. gapingvoid
2. Johnnie Moore’s Weblog
3. Thinking by Peter Davidson
4. The Social Customer Manifesto
5. Media Culpa
6. everyhuman
7. Influx
8. superchefblog
9. Piaras Kelly PR
10. IF
11. Advertising/Design Goodness
12. Emergence Marketing
13. Brand Infection
14. Cherryflava
15. 360east
16. brandXpress Blog
17. Jane Genova: Speechwriter Ghostwriter
18. Media Orchard
19. Jefte.net
20. Marketing Usabile
21. Shotgun Marketing Blog
22. Casual Fridays
23. My Name is Kate
24. The Brand Builder Blog
25 Day Care For Your Brain

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Make Brand Advertising Work Online, the Yahoo! Way

Considering the latest Forrester Research study about online advertising the future is bright for the 21st century’s media giants, like Yahoo! or Google, and here are some excerpts from this study:

  • 2005 growth in online advertising spending, represents a 23 percent increase from 2004, up to $14.7 billion and it’s estimated to $26 billion by 2010
  • This is not the return of “The Bubble”. The growth is coming from marketers having to make tough decisions about allocating scarce advertising dollars – in many cases, funding online channels from traditional channels. Back in 1999/2000, spending often came from exuberant spending, fueled by venture money.
  • It’s more than just about search. Search is great, it’s growing, but it’s not the whole story. In fact, I anticipate that search will become much more integrated into traditional brand advertising
  • Marketers will shift channels away from traditional channels to fund online marketing

With all these in mind, Fortune Magazine, published and interesting article on Yahoo’s Brilliant Solution, an in-depth analysis on Yahoo’s approach towards winning more and more of the online branding advertising dollars.

And in the scrum for online brand advertising—almost as large a market—Yahoo is poised to grab the biggest share. Its 181 million active registered users are probably the largest online clientele, which means Yahoo can tell advertisers it knows the habits of more users than any other portal—or any traditional media company.

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