Archive for the 'Branding' Category
What is BRANDING?
At the start of the New Year, I mentioned that we would be inviting guest bloggers to share their knowledge. Isabelle, Co-founder of Leapzone Strategies is such an expert. A brand expert. Over the next months, hopefully she can answer some of your branding questions and dilemmas.
– Christine
Before answering this question we need to establish what branding is not.
Branding is NOT a logo and it is certainly NOT marketing.
Successful branding is a combination of an authentic promise with a clear, aligned and consistent delivery. Why it is needed is because the promise and delivery are what build trust in your company and increase customer loyalty.
A great brand is earned.
Building a great brand takes time and needs constant attention. What you promise and deliver directly affects your customer’s experience. From the feeling generated by a brochure to a conversation with a customer service rep, each and every encounter a customer has with your brand needs to be considered, evaluated and aligned with who you are as a company and where your company stands in the market.
Creative Promotional Video
With the popularity of YouTube growing, entrepreneurs are understandably excited by the potential of the medium. I’ve consulted with people who are looking at taking their basic web sites to the next level of web marketing, and heard things like “We’ve got to have video. Video is so popular now.” To which I say: maybe. It depends on the video and how you use it.
Unless the video content on your site is somehow great, nobody cares about that video except you and maybe your Mom.
“Great”, on the web, means meeting a need. That need can be to have a laugh, to learn something, to be inspired.
In other words to truly leverage video on the web, you have to create videos that will draw your customers to view them. At it’s best, the video will help new people discover your website.
A fun example of this is The Human Flipbook by the restaurant chain Ebert & Gerbert. This is so creative & wonderful, it was mentioned on a site that I subscribe to. Because the video was embedded in the page at Do Something Pretty I didn’t even realize I was watching a commercial until the end. By then, I was so impressed I didn’t mind.
4 key times when a company should consider re-evaluating its brand
For some of us, summer is a quiet time of the year. With all of this free time it’s good to take a step back, take a look at your business and see if your brand needs refreshing. In her recent newsletter, Liz from Market Navigators wrote a great piece about branding and why it’s important to give it close attention. There are 4 key times when a company should consider re-evaluating its brand. Her colleague Rachel Bennett from Frank Branding explains:
- When you want to grow. Your brand is all about differentiation—what makes a customer choose you over someone else. Solid branding helps define what makes you unique. It provides focus, gives staff direction, and simplifies marketing decisions.
- When you’re competing to attract and retain employees. In a tough labour market, a strong brand can create an emotional connection with your employees as well as your customers. Brand strategy provides focus for decision-making, increases employee engagement and retention, and helps you attract the right kind of new talent.
- When you’re looking for funding. A strong brand communicates that you are serious about doing business, have a professional approach, and consider your business market-viable. In addition, a brand can be a corporate asset—the better you are known in the marketplace, the higher the value of your business.
- When your service reputation has slipped. Your customers are your most important promoters. If your reputation has slipped, evaluating your brand promise—the experience customers associate with your brand—offers insight. Once you clearly define it, you can ensure it’s delivered in all customer interactions.
I know that sitting on the beach is quite nice, but while your there take a few minutes to do some brand evaluation.
Stuck on the Tarmac and wishing I had flown with Air Canada
We often associate companies with negative qualities. A few of them have such negative brands that they fail to attract customers at all. Neither Wal-Mart nor McDonalds are known for their high quality and just the mention of Exxon brings out images of oil slick and pollution. Negative brands are often the result of poor ethical decision on the company’s part but more often than not, customer service is the reason why people dislike certain companies. For those unfortunate enough to have to deal with Telus on a regular basis, you will know that their customer service isn’t that great.
But Telus isn’t the worse culprit in Canada. No the company that brings all Canadians in agreement is Air Canada. Everyone has a story of having to pay for drinks, no food being served on 5 hour flights, being squished in seats so tight your legs can’t move. They are the worst company to fly with.
When booking our latest trip I had three goals. Avoid Air Canada, avoid Charles the Gaulle airport and lay-overs. We found the perfect flight with KLM. Leaving from Vancouver we would fly to Amsterdam, then Amsterdam Bordeaux. Unfortunately last night after spending an hour or so on the tarmac, we were told that our plane wouldn’t leave and we would have to come back today. After contacting KLM and chatting to them for what seemed like 3 hours, we are now booked on North West Airlines leaving today at 2pm. We’ll be flying from Vancouver to Detroit, Detroit to Paris, then Paris to Bordeaux, which involves 3 lay-overs and the dreaded Charles de Gaulle airport. All of this because Air Canada has a bad reputation!
It will be interesting to see if KLM will follow up on this situation and contact us to apologize. I’ll worry about that later, if I can just get to France…
Serve your clients, no matter what they need
Over the last two days I attended a self-employment workshop at the Sunshine Coast Employment Center, offered by Cassandra Gierden of Prophet Coaching. A valuable idea she offered was to create your own personal “yellow pages” - get out and meet somebody from every possible profession you can think of.
The idea is to be of service to your clients no matter what they need. If they can’t make an appointment with you, don’t just ask to reschedule. Ask them if they need a mechanic and refer them to a great one.
You can make the creation of your yellow pages like a scavenger hunt for yourself: find X contacts by X time.
The concept of serving your clients, no matter the need, is similar to what this blog and indeed many successful sites are all about. Share a little information or service for free, and you become a valuable resource that stays top-of-mind. In the end isn’t that what marketing is all about?
5 key characteristics of web brands
According to market researchers Millward Brown Optimor, Google is the most powerful brand of 2007. While discussing this, Gerry McGovern writes that the 5 most important characteristics of web brands are:
- Web brands are useful
- They have a clarity of purpose
- The embrace simplicity
- They interact and engage
- They are customer-centric
Now, maybe your business isn’t Google. Maybe your business is selling real live widgets in a brick-and-mortar shop. Even so, if you have a web site, these characteristics of web brands still apply. If your web site isn’t simple to use, doesn’t do what the customer needs it to do, and doesn’t make it easy for the customer to interact with your company, then your brand suffers for it. If you’re not easy to do business with online, why would the customer think you are easy to do business with offline? The trick for an offline business, I think, is to clearly evaluate what it is that your web site needs to be useful at. Why would a customer come to your website? What do they need it for? How can it help the customer meet their goals? To succeed online, businesses need to answer those questions, then design a web site that does all these things well. If your web site doesn’t do these things (at the very least), then it’s wasted everyone’s time.
The Value of Brand
More often than not, people come to us with questions about brand. There seems to be a lot of confusion our there so we asked the experts at Ideastream Design to give us an explanation.
Here is what they have to say:
Spring Clean your Brand
Still curious about branding? In collaboration with Twin Fish Creative, brand strategist Stephen Abbott outlines some of the aspects of a brand that can get overlooked, and how a little “house cleaning” can make a big difference in your customers’ experience, and ultimately, how they feel about your company.
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Branding to Reduce Risk
Brendan Sinclair, Editor of Sitepoint’s Tribune explains why he finds branding to be one of the most misunderstood aspects of marketing.
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Web Branding is More Than Skin Deep
Web Content Management consultant and author, Gerry McGovern explains how brands can’t hide behind clever marketing campaigns on the Web.
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