Have you seen the new commercial from Office Depot about the Barber? It was recently featured on AdWeek, and made me think of how much we all have to offer in our businesses.

Recessions and other hard times we control come and go and the first thing many entrepreneurs want to do is cut their prices. Some of my partners on various projects wanted me to, just like the barber in the commercial. But I know what it costs to do a quality job, and our margins are thin enough already. If anything, we should be raising prices, but I refuse to do that until we can’t help it, at least until we’re clear of the recession.

So many people think you have to cut prices to compete, but experience has taught me that people who are only concerned with cost are not the greatest customers in the world. Not to mention that most of the time, to cut costs, you also have to cut quality.

If you want to compete, there are other things to compete on besides price. Like what?

Well, if you didn’t watch the commercial above, let me explain what it was about and you’ll see for yourself one obvious place. Quick summary: a local barber is charging $15 for quality haircuts. A chain moves in offering $6 haircuts across the street from him. He creates a banner to hang on his shop that says “We fix $6 haircuts”. The competition is run out of business.

You got it: quality.

You can compete on quality, speed, customer service, variety of selection, personal service, automated check-out, catering to certain demographics like Work at Home Moms, or personality types, like techies who don’t want to stand in line at the store and can order your widget online.

The only problem you may have is in finding that audience. If you do, call us up. Or email. Or reply to the blog post.

You get the picture.

From “Internet Branding: The Corporate Image Challenge of 2006” :

Author Naseem Javed goes on to point out the major areas that corporations need to work on to stand out online.

	Internet Branding: The Corporate Image Challenge of 2006
	Read the full article here
	http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/ORyedXsfsM2vUm/Internet-Branding-The-Corporate-Image-Challenge-of-2006.xhtml
	Give Your Site a Distinct, Branded Personality
	Contact us for assistance with enhancing your online brand, and stop getting lost in the crowd.

]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/internet-branding.php/feed 0 http://leveragedpromotion.com/interesting-article-on-branding.php http://leveragedpromotion.com/interesting-article-on-branding.php#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:09:16 +0000 Tinu http://leveragedpromotion.com/?p=332

In it he says:

While I don’t necessarily think a Super Bowl Ad is a bad purchase (ask Bob Parsons), I agree wholeheartedly that you can’t buy a brand… or else every company with the moolah would have a successful one.

It fits so smoothly into the mission of a blog as well. Definitely worth a read.

	Link to Main Page of Guy’s Blog
	http://blog.guykawasaki.com/
	Drag this link into your reader to subscribe to Guy Kawasaki’s Blog

]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/interesting-article-on-branding.php/feed 0 http://leveragedpromotion.com/ebranding-and-myst-topic-clouds.php http://leveragedpromotion.com/ebranding-and-myst-topic-clouds.php#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:42:15 +0000 Tinu http://leveragedpromotion.com/?p=326

I promise to answer in a moment. But just in case the same thing happened to you that happened to me the first time I saw one, I have to ask a favor.

Please, come back after your three or four hours of intense fascination – if not today, then tomorrow.

Thanks.

Oh yes, I’m serious. So serious that I had a hard time figuring out how to write about a Topic Cloud without getting sucked in again myself.

And failed. (I was playing around with it so long this time that the first time I lost this post – my login timed out.)

You will be bypnotized. And now you can’t say I didn’t warn you…

On with the discussion of what a MyST Topic Cloud is and what it can do for your site….

The best answer to our first question, comes, not surprisingly, from the Topic Cloud itself.

Clicking on the question mark in our Topic Cloud yields the following answer:

The addictive style of a MyST Topic Cloud is borne of its intuitive design. One of the most important things it can do for your site also lies here: your visitors can browse your site by their area of interest.

If I want to know more about blogging, I can just click on that word in the Topic Cloud.

There I find every reference to blogging from this Blogsite, with its date, link and related tags, such as business blogging.

To understand more about its benefit to potential browsers, you need only think about how search engines have been structured to catalog documents – and what the next step in the evolution could be.

Right now, we type in queries of phrases – sometimes entire questions. The result is that we get a list of the internal systems of the search engines have decided are related to that query.

But when we get to the site, we have to go to what is often a hierarchy of documents to navigate a site. How do we find the documents that are important to us, or related to the document we’re on?

MyST Topic Clouds address this question in a clean, straightforward fashion.

I could go on and on about just the user benefits of the MyST Topic Cloud alone. However, I need to get back to my “research” on the topic. Next time we’ll discuss the internal benefits to the Blogger who uses it.

The best way to see it in action is to take a look at a MyST Topic Cloud for yourself. If you’re familiar with tagging, it will look simiilar to you. If not, no matter. Just look at the first page, pick a topic, and get lost in the cloud…

(You can call the time you spend exploring “research” too, even though it’s so much fun.)

	Topic Cloud
	What’s a MyST Topic Cloud? The best route to discovery is to use one.

http://blog.leveragedpromotion.com/topics

A Topic Cloud Eases Visitor Experience and Enhances Your Brand

What is a MyST Topic Cloud? I promise to answer in a moment. But just in case the same thing happened to you that happened to me the first time I saw one, I have to ask a favor. Please, come back after your three or four hours of intense fascination – if not today, then tomorrow. Thanks. Oh yes, I’m serious. So serious that I had a hard time figuring out how to write about a Topic Cloud without getting sucked in again myself. And failed. (I was playing around with it so long this time that the first time I lost this post – my login timed out.) You will be bypnotized. And now you can’t say I didn’t warn you… On with the discussion of what a MyST Topic Cloud is and what it can do for your site…. The best answer to our first question, comes, not surprisingly, from the Topic Cloud itself. Clicking on the question mark in our Topic Cloud yields the following answer: A MyST Topic Cloud™ provides a simple view of important keywords and key-phrases used in a blogsite. The topic cloud view makes it easy to identify subjects that are discussed in the blogsite—frequently discussed subjects are presented in larger type and brighter colors while seldom-discussed subjects are represented more subtly. The addictive style of a MyST Topic Cloud is borne of its intuitive design. One of the most important things it can do for your site also lies here: your visitors can browse your site by their area of interest. If I want to know more about blogging, I can just click on that word in the Topic Cloud. There I find every reference to blogging from this Blogsite, with its date, link and related tags, such as business blogging. To understand more about its benefit to potential browsers, you need only think about how search engines have been structured to catalog documents – and what the next step in the evolution could be. Right now, we type in queries of phrases – sometimes entire questions. The result is that we get a list of the internal systems of the search engines have decided are related to that query. But when we get to the site, we have to go to what is often a hierarchy of documents to navigate a site. How do we find the documents that are important to us, or related to the document we’re on? MyST Topic Clouds address this question in a clean, straightforward fashion. I could go on and on about just the user benefits of the MyST Topic Cloud alone. However, I need to get back to my “research” on the topic. Next time we’ll discuss the internal benefits to the Blogger who uses it. The best way to see it in action is to take a look at a MyST Topic Cloud for yourself. If you’re familiar with tagging, it will look simiilar to you. If not, no matter. Just look at the first page, pick a topic, and get lost in the cloud… (You can call the time you spend exploring “research” too, even though it’s so much fun.)

Topic Cloud What’s a MyST Topic Cloud? The best route to discovery is to use one. http://blog.leveragedpromotion.com/topics Contact Us Learn more about MyST Topic Clouds – only Blogsite has them.

Some of the problems of the available standard solutions include:

• Templates that do not seamlessly integrate with the current look and feel of the site
• Software that is in the public domain, and as such, more susceptible to hacking, referrer spam, and various other security issues
• Lack of integrated metrics to faciliate the process of measuring progress and quality assurance
• Limited feed capabilities – even those that are available in more than one format only offer them for one channel of output.
• Lacks integrated monitoring of industry news – bloggers spend less time creating content and more time hunting for content and verifying facts

Not only does a Blogsite address all these limitations with corporate-level solutions, it also adds:

• Content channels available in every flavor, including RSS, Atom, OPML, Klip, Smart Tags, and of course, MyST (Blogsite is built by MyST technology)
• Briefing channels – Topical RSS feeds which automatically provide updates to your chosen spheres of content
• Professional Installation and on-going Technical Support
• Flexible features that include trackback, commenting, and tagging
• Inherent Keyword Positioning that leverages your content for better and wider search engine results
• Custom design of your Blogsite template included in every installation – include your logo if you like. Coloring and Layout matches your site as closely as possible.
• Remote hosting of the software (you don’t need to bog down your server), but all the content resides on your site, so you enjoy all the resulting traffic and linking benefits, which strengthens your entire site
• Consulting is included on a level customized to suit you – from an aggressive, traffic slanted plan to educate a team of experienced bloggers, to personalized, laid-back, brand-centrice training for the new Blogsite owners.

Those are just a few of the features that are part of the Blogsite solution. This brand-minded platform seamlessly fits into your site, creating a distinctive blog solution.

	Can Your Blog Do This?
	MyST Blogsites are more than just a pretty face. When you add a MyST Blogsite to your existing promotion plan, you’re adding a whole new layer of online exposure that no other blog platform in existence can match. Contact us and you can enjoy the power of a Blogsite.

]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/ebranding-tactics-how-a-blogsite-solidifies-the-integrity-of-your-brand.php/feed 0 http://leveragedpromotion.com/yoplaits-branding-winfail-the-final-analysis.php http://leveragedpromotion.com/yoplaits-branding-winfail-the-final-analysis.php#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:07:05 +0000 Tinu http://leveragedpromotion.com/?p=431 This post is the last of a series that examines the effects of a recent charity campaign by Yoplait on their overall brand. You can read the rest of the series here, and here. And here too.

The Scenario

Let’s say I’m a rep from Yoplait. I’ve read all the stuff I wrote in this series and I realize that although the campaign is going okay, it could be going better. In fact, maybe I’m the Vice President of Marketing at Dannon, and I’m wondering how I could turn this into a slam dunk and get a bonus or a raise.

So I start combing the internet for reactions.

I run into this blog and ask the writer their opinion, to see if I want to pay them to consult with us on branding and marketing.

Here’s the response I would get, if I were that person.

The Plan

First, I have to say that in this series of article, I downplayed how happy I was to hear that Dannon was doing this. I summarized what could have been a 1000 word response into two words “super win”. More companies should display this kind of awareness.

However, I also have to say again that from a branding and marketing perspective, it’s barely average. It’s not exactly negative, it won’t stop me from buying things from Dannon, especially Yoplait.

Honestly you’d have to tell me I was eating pureed pork to get me to stop buying yogurt in general, and there’s only one other brand of yogurt that I like, Activia, and you make that too.

Though sometimes we’ll get the generic from the store because Dannon doesn’t have one of those jumbo sizes my sister gets when trying to save money on our grocery bill, at least not at our supermarket. What’s up with that?

Having said that, I do feel some distance from Dannon and Yoplait, in light of the fact that the effort to prevent breast cancer doens’t have respect for my busy life. I’m scheduling my trips to the bathroom and you’re telling me to go to the post office with my lids.

On the one hand, yes, I would feel an incredible amount of guilt with the thought that more lives could have been saved if I could get up off my butt and go to the post office in the few hours a week of downtime I have.

On the other, you’re going to make a minimum donation even if I don’t eat your yogurt. Which takes me back from a slightly negative perception of you to slightly more positive than neutral. Still, I’d have liked to be included.

To achieve that, here are some things I’d love to see.

1- A blogger campaign.

Just link to bloggers who write about you and put the graphic of the lid on their blogs. I’d go after the Work at Home Parents first, then the Mommy bloggers in general, and hope that it spread to the blogosphere at large naturally and virally. Parents give Danimals to their kids, and Moms eat yogurt to stay in shape and still be full. So you’d be hitting two markets at once.

Worked for Flor.
2 – How about adding the option to email lids in, under certain restrictions.

You could impose a limit of one lid per person emailing per day until the deadline? You’d get more lids in, more participation, and you could respond with a request to put them on your mailing list, or “become part of the Save Lids Save Lives street team”, where you build an online community to fight breast cancer together.

Even better? Let us send the pictures directly from our cell phones to a special number. We’re not always near our computers and not all of us know how to work our cell’s email function. But almost all of us can and do, text. Even those of us who hate computers send quick messages to spouses to remember the milk, or to our kids to tell them where we’re waiting to pick them up.

3- Make a widget or iPod app (or both) that makes it real to people how they’ve helped. “X person sent in x lids. Because of them, x amount will be donated to this local charity.” You could then link it to a Yoplait Save Lids community, where they can then link out to their blogs or Facebook or Twitter profiles. So there’s incentive for them to connect there, and the ability for them to continue that connection elsewhere.

Which is really three ideas. But I consider this a part of my service for the cause of breast cancer.

4 – Pump up the mention of the charity. Until I went to the site, I had no idea that you donated to a local chapter of a charity when I put the lids in the mail. So it affects breast cancer awareness/treatment directly, in MY community. That’s huge. Blow your own horn! Louder!

5- Make the link on the Yogurt case bigger, much bigger.

I eat Yoplait or Activia about once a week and had no idea that you had a website. There’s a blank space under the fruit that you aren’t using. Put your link and an incentive there, like getting an occasional coupon. That way the link can be timeless, and when something special is going on, you can highlight it in the navigation – we’ll click it due to the “ooo shiny” factor. Promise.

I have about 20 more suggestions but I’ve been prattling on about this long enough. Feel free to write to me, Yoplait – ask@asktinu.com – and I’ll send you more, but I won’t believe you if you don’t write form a Yoplait or Dannon domain, just so you know.

That goes for the rest of you non-Yoplat people, call me to schedule quick consultations at 702.508.TINU. Or you can ask me one question at Ask Tinu.

You can read more about Yoplait’s Save Lids to Save Lives campaign at their website.

From the interview as reprinted on AOL.com:

What’s so interesting about that last paragraph is that you can see what visionary thinking does for companies that become wildly successful. Whether you’re a Playboy fan or not, you very likely know exactly what Playboy is. Expanding from the magazine into other areas doesn’t hurt the brand – rather it expands it to new audiences, and as Hugh himself said “keeps the brand relevant”.

If you’re still using traditional forms of media exposure, how relevant is your brand?

	At 80, Hugh Hefner Is Still a Hopping Playboy
	Bunny Trail Never Ends for Maverick Publisher

]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/even-the-playboy-is-expanding-his-brand.php/feed 0 http://leveragedpromotion.com/yoplaits-wins-vs-yoplaits-fails.php http://leveragedpromotion.com/yoplaits-wins-vs-yoplaits-fails.php#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:06:30 +0000 Tinu http://leveragedpromotion.com/?p=430 This post is part of a series examining the effects of a recent charity campaign by Yoplait on their overall brand. You can read earlier installments here, and here.

When we were last together, we were talking about translating my Yoplait experience as a consumer to a study of Yoplait from a branding perspective.

First, is Yoplait trying to achieve higher visibility through this breast cancer donation? Or are they just trying to do something good?

Before I answer – the reason we’re even asking this question is because of a common cop-out answer made by smaller companies. I know I’m guilty of it. It goes something like this: “Yeah, I know we probably screwed that whole branding/marketing/ publicity/website promotion up, but we weren’t trying to promote ourselves. We just wanted to do some good.”

To which I answer, doing good is great. But if you kill the effectiveness of your brand in the process, that affects the believability of all your other marketing efforts including marketing. If customers don’t believe, they don’t buy. If they don’t buy, you can’t do good.

But let’s answer the question anyway. Was the breast cancer awareness raising about doing good, or looking good?

I’d guess both.

I know some people look at a company that is doing charitable work and think,they’re just doing for the tax break, and they’re just telling us for extra brownie points, and I’m not falling for it.

And, if this were 1980, I’d agree with them.

But once I became a business owner for the first time in 1996, I started to see things differently. For me the process went, “I bet I could encourage other companies to band together and do non-profit work if I told people I was doing it.”

Companies are run, and owned by people. Making consumers aware of that is part of what branding is about.

To continue with my personal experience of this… Since my audience is almost exclusively B2B, I started having Non-Profit Sundays in one of my blogs, hoping to influence other businesses.

In this weekly series, I’d talk about low-cost and no-cost ways that micro-businesses can do good works. (I did this for years until I got sick the last time, and haven’t picked it back up on any of my blogs just yet.)

At some point, I went to my accountant, who said if I actually started donating as a company, I’d get a tax break. And she said it would probably be a good idea if I wrote about what I was doing because then I’d remember, since I kept the most horrible records at the time.

Then I spoke to my mentor, who said, hey, you’re already doing it, you may as well get some publicity out of it. So I did.

And I believe that variations of that happen at big companies – all of them were once small companies, right?

So maybe I’m terribly naive in this regard, and in generally believing that people are mostly good and intend to do good unless and until they run into a corrupting influence. But I believe Dannon and Yoplait set out to do something positive. And for our purposes, we’ll pretend that I’m right until Dannon or Yoplait comes here and tells us otherwise.

So, our first assumption is, someone at Yoplait thought of this great idea, then someone else at Yoplait in legal or accounting or the CFO said, let’s maximize this benefit.

Logically, if Yoplait intended to gain some positive publicity from it, to do so, they’d have to engage the part of their audience most likely to engage. Who would that be? You’d presume the most vocal of their audience.

It would follow that they’d have to figure out how to reach them. A commercial? Not for something that’s not going to make a profit, unless they can make the money back in publicity. If they’ve done it, as a consumer, I don’t know about it, because I don’t see most of my programming live. I fast forward commercials when we record them on our DVR, and I don’t read the paper or magazines.

Given that they suspect this, what’s the best way to reach those people? Packaging. The one thing all their customers on earth have in common is that we have to open the containers to get the yogurt in our bellies.

Elsewhere in the universe they may have some kind of osmosis process that allows them to absorb yogurt right though the plastic, but even then, they’d be looking down at the lid.

Assuming they have eyes.

Um.

Anyway, our second assumption is that since they put the promotion on the package, they expected to reach people who eat their yogurt. That seems like a “duh” kind of assumption, but all this starts to become relevant in a moment, I promise.

The third assumption is that they not only wanted to reach me and other people in their target market, but they wanted to involve me.

Fourth, if they want to involve me, it’s not to waste my time, but to increase my brand loyalty to Yoplait, thus ensuring that I continue to buy Yoplait, and probably, since they want me to collect lids, that I buy more Yoplait.

Why are these assumptions important? Because if they are correct, they inform us of what ought to be in the thought process as Yoplait or a company like them, puts this process together.

So How Did Yoplait Score?

As we said, that would depend on what their goals are, both for the campaign and  for the brand. If our assumptions are true, we can deduce the following (this is where I fulfill my promise of relevancy!)

A successful campaign of this sort  is supposed to make me as a consumer:

• identify with the brand through at least the appearance of similar goals,
• bring me an emotional connection to the brand through recognition of our common concerns,
• deepen that emotional connection through the knowledge that the brand understands my experience of life as it relates to the action they want me to take
• easily take their proposed action
• create an additional bonding experience through that action
• become part of their viral marketing machine by spreading their proposed action through word of mouth

Yoplait’s score here is  3 out of a possible 6.

They definitely scored as far as making me feel we had a similar goal in common. I would love to keep my breasts my whole life, and help other women keep theirs. (I could say we’re both anti-breast cancer but let’s be real here. If this disease caused youthful lift and appearance, rather than tumors and possible loss of mammaries, would we be fighting it? If I’m in a marketing mode, I’m talking to you in terms of brass tacks.)

Yoplait is telling me that not only do they want this, they’re putting their money where their mouth is.

Point.

Does that make me feel emotionally connected to them. Yes. Point.

Does it deepen the connection through my feeling that they understand and empathize with me as a person? No. “Save lives, save lids” is an awesome slogan. And if I weren’t a lazy bum like most of my cohorts who might find the idea of saving lids for an organization that’s already promised they’re going to save lives anyway? Maybe that would mean something to me in real life.

So now I have to take a half point away from the last emotional connection, dropping them to 1.5. Though I will give them half a point for realizing I’d want to help. So they’re at a 2 now.

In my view as a consumer, can I easily take their proposed action? No. I have an item that got returned to me in the mail that I’ve wanted to return for two months. But since the post office is not on my weekly, or even monthly errand list anymore, I haven’t gone.

It leaves me wondering why I couldn’t just email my lids. Of course, then people could cheat, but then you either cap the number of pictures that can come from a single phone number or number the lids. Or cap the donation amount to be the number of lids on the market.

Plus, what would people cheat for? Even if I have a relative who had breast cancer (and I do), I don’t have an emotional motivation to do it. It’s not as if more lids will definitely cure the cancer. And I don’t directly benefit if my family member has already suffered and/or survived, except the intrinsic possible benefit of more money for research.

So. No point.

Am I part of their viral marketing machine now as a consumer? Nope. I’m telling you about the campaign but not virally, not through word of mouth, as a kind of case study. If I look at this strictly as a consumer talking, not.

Bottom line: This won’t make me love Yoplait any less, but it also doesn’t convert me to a die-hard fan, or make me want to tell even my sister about it and we talk about Everything.

In fact, the only thing it makes me want to do is tell you what Not to do.

Important note here though: this is still an incredible opportunity for Yoplait to respond in a way that could bring them millions and millions of dollars in free publicity.

How?

Tomorrow we’ll talk about the first steps I would take if Yoplait came to me as a client and asked me what to do next. This will be helpful to you if you’ve ever wanted to figure out how to turn mixed or negative publicity into good publicity for your business.

Here are some additional resources online for in-depth study:

• BrandingBlog.com Dave Young talks about branding and points to resources in other blogs (see his siebar).
• Corante’s BrandShiftGroup blog reminiscent of a magazine style, compelte with an editor. Discusses “the evolution of branding”.
• Small Business Marketing and Branding Yaro Starak, who also runs Entrepreneur’s Journey, blogs about “how to build a small business brand in the digital age”.

This post is part of a series examining the effects of a recent charity campaign by Yoplait on their overall brand. You can read the first installment here.

My Yoplait Brand Experience

As I ate my Yoplait, I saw that the lid looked a little different, or at least different than I remembered.

On the lid, there was writing I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t on the container, so I assumed it was temporary.

I wouldn’t be able to decide if that was a good or a bad thing until I actually read what the lid said.

In a nutshell, I gathered that Yoplait was spreading breast cancer awareness. Super-win so far.

I’m a woman, I’d rather my breasts didn’t fall off, and I’m glad companies I interact with are going to bat to help prevent that from happening, through, I had to assume, a donation to the study of breast cancer, which would be used to attempt to find a cure.

On the lid it said “fight breast cancer” and that they were attempting to raise $1.5 million dollars.

Hey, that’s not just spare change, I thought as I read, even more pleased. I wonder if there’s something I can do to help or if they just printed it on here to let me know.

Then I saw the announcement in the middle asking me to mail my lid in-

Wait a minute.

Mail?

Like snail mail? Are you trying to call me old? Or what? How often does someone with my schedule actually go the post office to MAIL things?

Can’t I take a picture of the lid and email it?

I checked the lid for a web site.

They have a website. Which means someone there has email.

So why can’t I take a picture of my lid and email it? Or send it directly to them from my phone? Would it really cost more for them to get someone to check their email for the lids vs counting them as they come in? How much money does one lid represent anyway?

Then I saw at the end “$500,000 minimum donation.”

Oh, so if I do nothing, they’re going to make a donation anyway. Well then why should I bother myself? I’ll never remember to mail the lid in anyhow.

When I was done eating my yogurt, I crumpled up the lid as usual and put it in the container to be disposed of, as usually. (Not a typo. That’s an on-going Twitter meme based on a status update from a newbie last August. I’m Tinu on Twitter, same as here.)

Translating My Experience as a Consumer to Branding and Marketing Insights

Now, of course, how I feel about Yoplait’s efforts become more significant the more I match Yoplait’s desired demographic. Yes, every customer is important, but when you’re attempting to reach a certain subset of people, every response to a promotion is not necessarily relevant.

So, let’s do some completely unscientific deducing  and presuming that is likely to be borne up by statistical information. We’ll talk about that in the next post.

“Smaller companies aren’t the only ones delivering high-quality products at good value that people love. Disney and Apple spend millions telling people who they are, but why? They’re strong brands because they offer distinct products and services. And they’ve done so for decades. When Disney and Apple have struggled, the root cause has always been that their products weren’t as good, service slipped, or they weren’t living up to customer expectations. Diverting attention away from business problems by calling any of it by a new name wasn’t going to fix it.

Remove the hype, and branding is just commonsense strategy, rebranded. To successfully build a brand, says INSEAD marketing professor Amitava Chattopadhyay, "is to communicate your key value proposition to the key customer segment, and do so in an integrated and consistent way." In other words, Business 101.”

While that message rings quite true, it seems that branding has not hit home the same way for entreprenuers and small to medium businesses as it has with large corporations. In bigger organizations the company identity is established long before the hip, young execs hit the door, where in smaller companies, the idea is being molded as the company grows and changes, often from a one-man entrepreneurial shop to a company with 25 – 2500 employees.

So just as in the self-improvement industry, which the author alludes to later in the article, the need exists to out-source the R & D on branding. And as long as that perceived need exists, common sense though it may be, people will reference those who have built their brands on business-know how in general, like Fast company, or those who have built brands specifically on the knowledge of branding, for answers.

	Fast Company :: Obsessive Branding DIsorder
	The simplest branding advice from an article that says there’s too many branding books being written.
	http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/99/open_essay.html?partner=rss
	Ask Us How the Right Blogging Choices Help Shape Your Brand
	One type of blog makes the statement “I’m only looking for search engine results, and my potential clients are an afterthought”. Another type of blog says “We’re the professionals who will provide the best solution”. No blog at all says “We’re behind the times.” What does yours say? Ask us how we can help you tweak your message – or create a new one.

I love Yoplait yogurt.

Yoplait is made by Dannon, and I’m not affiliated with either of them, just so you know.

Being associated with them would make me a harsher critic, which you already know if you know anything about me. But let’s assume for now that you don’t.

And I even love what’s written on their Google Finance page, even though I have no idea where that description is pulled from. When I read it though, I get a vague sense of “Dannonness” from it.

Which is a good thing, considering that they may not have any influence over that area. It means their brand identity may be powerful enough to affect how other companies describe them, or at least that they are paying attention to the details.

And as we’re going to find today, attention to detail is quite important to the making of a brand.

Okay, enough introduction. Let’s get our hands dirty, and poke around at the brand.

As mentioned before, I’m going to go into my experience of the brand as a consumer first, then end off with some specialized insight for you as a small business.

Setting the Scene

It’s Sunday. I haven’t really had the chance to relax all week, and I have to work today. But I want my work experience to feel as little like work as possible, and part of that is a good breakfast, so my brain will operate at top efficiency.

Or maybe that’s just my way of procrastinating, who knows.

At any rate, that well rounded breakfast includes Yoplait. As I reached for it,  I recalled my last experience eating it, and how it felt like comfort food the way ice cream does, but that I had some fuzzy recollection that yogurt is good for me, though I haven’t got a firm clue as to how.

As I sat eating my Yoplait, I noticed there was lettering on the lid. Couldn’t remember if it had always been there or not. So as I was eating I started to skim it.

And here’s where, as a consumer, I checked both the Win/Fail boxes on my Yoplait scoring card.

Now remember, this isn’t my professional evaluation of their brand, not yet.

This is my experience as a consumer, which is a superior level of assessment if you think about it: all the work branding does is supposed to leave an impression on a consumer.

No amount of metrics, studies, or marketing savvy can overrule the consumer experience, even if it isn’t a typical one.

Every customer counts.

Next up: More of My Yoplait Experience. As you read it, think about how your consumers perceive your product as they are using it. Also look at how you can better scrutinize advertising or marketing campaigns that affect your brand.

It’s easy to say “branding is important” but without a concrete discussion as to why, and how it can affect your bottom line, it’s difficult to convey. Therefore, we’ll be doing just that. I’ll take brands I come across in my every day life, and yours too hopefully. We’ll discuss what I take away from those experiences as a consumer, then I’ll put my marketing/promotion/branding hat on and talk about what they could do better, particularly in using website promotion.

From this, my desire is that you’ll be able to glean insight into what your own brand should or should not be doing, and how to do whatever you’re already doing, better.

Next up, we’re going to start with a discussion of Yoplait, the folks who make my favorite strawberry yogurt.

To get to the answer, it helps to look at the advantage of gaining market exposure through branding.

One reason is that establishing a brand plays into several facets of human nature.

For example, when we are presented with a choice between the known and the unknown, we’ll naturally tend towards the known. And if there are several known entities, we further sort by the one we trust most.

Indeed, if someone says “search engine”, we often think Google, Yahoo and MSN by default. Which one of these becomes our default will correlate to the one that gives us the best results. Deciding which of these is the best often comes from our personal experiences

But just a few short years ago, none of us knew what a Google was. (Unless you’re a mathemetician, in which case we remembered it as a one followed by one hundred zeroes.)

Where would Google be without some sort of brand identity? And what if they’d never been able to leverage Yahoo’s brand, when they once provided search results for what would one day become their direct competitor?

Branding provides a message to our potential clientele, a way to summarize what our companies see as our mission to provide. It also sets us apart from our competitors. Godiva and Hershey are both chocolate brands – each one evokes a distinctive set of expectations.

So in this way, a brand is a representation of our company picture. It is also a focal point for our internal and external clients, a way to distinguish ourselves.

All of these components are ingredients in a arecipe for success. So as we learn more about branding and its tie to growing a known product, the answer to whether we should brand is simple. If we want to create a niche and dominate it, online or off, we need to shape that niche, to define it.

Subconsciously or not, if we want to be the best, the most profitable, the most recognizable, we brand.

We brand to humanize a company identity. We brand to be relatable, to define ourselves. All of these things give us a tangible direction and meaning.

We brand to excel.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul

	The 5 Es of Branding
	A post to the Casual Fridays blog.
	http://thepeoplebrand.com/blog/?p=20
	Google sushi anyone?
	Is Google’s Brand collasping? Thoughts from one of the authors of “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding”.

]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/ebranding-techniques-why-do-we-brand.php/feed 0 http://leveragedpromotion.com/ebranding-techniques-bob-baker-on-branding.php http://leveragedpromotion.com/ebranding-techniques-bob-baker-on-branding.php#comments Sat, 03 Oct 2009 03:42:44 +0000 Tinu http://leveragedpromotion.com/?p=312

He leads in with a short summary of effective branding:

The strongest point he makes later in the article is bullet number four, in which he states ” Develop a fan-club mentality.”

That seems like it would not apply to an online brand, or only to consumer-focused items at first. However, with a little extra thought, you can probably remember purchases in your business and personal life that you made due to an emotional connection and later justified with logic.

Taking that strategy a little further leads right into the fan mentality.

It’s human nature. We buy books on self-advancement, for example, spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a year improving ourselves or our businesses. And why do we want to go to their conferences, buy all of the author’s books, follow their “work”?

Because we’re fans.

And yet, we don’t think of them as a business, we think of them as people who fill the need for an area of our business, or a want for improvement, better than anyone else.

So why can’t we create fans in our businesses? Better yet, how can we?

We’ll revisit this question in the next segment.

	Bob Baker’s Branding Site
	From the home page: “Big companies understand the importance of brands — if the product is recognizable, customers are more likely to embrace the idea behind the product and buy it. The same holds true for individuals. People not only listen more intently to a familiar voice, they become raving fans for life.”

I’ll have to do a whole other post on how Technorati features blogs that are good, but not necessarily popular.

But what the post is supposed to be about is the way Rich signs his posts. He hyperlinks his name to a page that has his about information, and then there’s another saying beneath it at the bottom.

This does two things

1. Everytime you read one of his posts, you’re reminded of his name, as opposed to the name of the blog. Smart for branding purposes, as repetition and consistency are the glue holding that bad boy together.
2. If anyone syndicates his content, they’re promoting him, like it or not. Nyah Nyah Nyah to the content stealer!

And I, the reader, am quite impressed.

Tinu Abayom-Paul

	Google Blog search post at Flyteblog.com
	This is where I first noticed this smart trick, lo these many years ago….

]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/ebranding-techniques-neat-blog-branding-trick-i-saw-in-flyte.php/feed 0 http://leveragedpromotion.com/effective-ebranding-an-introduction.php http://leveragedpromotion.com/effective-ebranding-an-introduction.php#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:43:20 +0000 Tinu http://leveragedpromotion.com/?p=310

What is a brand? Why do I want to establish and expand my company brand? How can I do this in an streamlined, effective fashion?

Many of these questions will be answered in this weblog. Today, let’s start with what a brand is.

Here’s one accepted definition:

A brand is a product from a known source (organization).

The emphasis is mine. It’s an important part of the equation, becoming known. Which brings us to blogging.

To become known, you want to be referenced, indeed, to become the default reference in a consumer’s mind. You want to share information that helps your prospects make a buying decision. You want to become synoymous with your niche.

When someone says “chocolate”, many of us immediately think Nestle or Hershey. Not necessarily because we like chocolate bars. It’s because in a sense they “own” the brand.

Let’s summarize then we’ll get into some specifics another day.

To have a successful blog, you want one of its purposes to be building your brand. Building your brand means becoming known. To be known you want to become referenced.

So how do you use your brand to get referenced? What can you write about in your blog and in other online content that will engage readers in “an accessible voice”?

These questions and more will be answered in subsequent posts to this blog. Stay tuned to learn ways to use your blog and other web content to brand yourself across the internet.

Here, we’ll share methods, examples, ideas and case studies that will help you go from one of the experts on your industry, to THE expert in your niche.

Rodney Rumford
Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Co-founders: Leveraged Promotion

	Branding Definition aquired from Learn That
	Source of the eferenced definition of branding from LearnThat.com

]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/effective-ebranding-an-introduction.php/feed 0 http://leveragedpromotion.com/google-base.php http://leveragedpromotion.com/google-base.php#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:05:06 +0000 Tinu http://leveragedpromotion.com/?p=253

Who Should Use It and How to Upload

Google Base allows you to upload content in the form of a data feed, which is then made searchable by Google.   

In the Google Base help pages it states the following:

If you have information you want to share with others, but aren’t sure how to go about gaining an audience, Google Base is for you.

Items then have the ability to be labled with keyword phrases which describe or classify the items, and can also be affixed with attributes, which clarify the characteristic and quality of items submitted.

An additional benefit is the possibility of getting content included in other parts of Google, including its search engine. You can add items in bulk via XML, or use their form for a single submission.

 

---

	Google Base
	Direct Link to Google Base
	http://www.google.com/base/
	Google Base Announcement
	Original Google Base Announcement in Google’s blog
	http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/first-base.html
	Post about Bulk Upload in the RSS Blog
	We appreciate the link back, Randy

]]>

A higher percentage of homes with computers and Internet access were run by individuals aged 35-44 than by any other age group. That’s the finding from the “Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2003″ report released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2003, of the 35-44 age group 73.3 percent owned computers and 65.3 percent had Internet access at home. The next-highest penetration was households run by 45-54 year olds. Nearly 72 percent owned computers, and 65.1 percent of those households had Internet access.

Add that to the growth in Broadband access, as well as new updates to mobile online access ,and access to the Internet is quickly turning into a household fixture. Particularly with the growth of blogging and the advancing sophistication of platforms such as Blogsite, it’s increasingly easier and less expensive to reach your clients via online marketing.

But one day I realized that every person I bought from on a regular basis… was a person to me, not a company.

I don’t shop at Walmart – in my mind that’s where the funny lady with the pigtails works. I don’t buy music, I get the latest Beyonce CD. Even with brands like Amazon, I’m going there in search of something within the collection of brands they resell. I want the next Toni Morrisson novel, not just some book by anyone.

I started becoming really successful online when I tossed away the shield of anonymity, and displayed my personage, flaws and all. If I can publish a picture with my articles, I’ll do it. When I can share my voice on audio, even better. Haven’t worked my way up to video, but I’m getting there.

And watch out when I do…

Sometimes, with larger, corporate brands, the “face” on the company isn’t a person’s. It’s a logo that invokes a personality trait. IBM has a certain personality. So does Dell, Gateway or HP.

If you’re running a smaller business, you’re not exempt from the need for a brand. At some point you must create an association between yourself and the person you want to influence, the results they want to have.

Smaller businesses especially need not just a face, but a voice. It’s part of why blogging is so successful. People buy from people, not from vague entities.

Your brand needs a face, a representative, a personality. Develop a brand and get closer to your clients. ]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/your-brand-needs-a-face.php/feed 0