brandXpress blog

Interesting article approaching the use of visual identity and positioning as main tools for a business to separate itself from its competitors.

Every day we are bombarded by millions of messages. They’re everywhere, from print media to highway billboards, local supermarkets, public phone booths, our mailboxes, radios and television sets.

Add to that the explosive growth of the internet and the new communication opportunities this medium presents, and today’s business owner or manager has a near-impossible task at hand; making his or her message stand out among the noise generated by others.

Next the article is presenting the 5 key strategies for a competitive visual identity (logo) as the first of the two crucial components of branding:
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Karen Post’s excellent book Brain Tattoos: Creating Unique Brands That Stick in Your Customers’ Minds is presenting eleven tatoo tactics that speak loudly even when you whisper.

The strategy is set. You clearly know who you are, you’ve decided on your brand difference, you’ve found folks who want what you have, and you’ve mapped out the great experience you will deliver. Now you must employ the big brand bang and let your message resonate through every point of market contact.

The next step in building your brand is tactical. What specific weapons are you going to launch, at whom, and with what frequency? How will you be heard, noticed, and remembered in a crowded, chaotic playing field, possibly working with less money than your competitors? I refer to this engine as ‘‘speaking loudly even when you whisper,’’ by which I mean making sure that even your smallest effort is on target, relevant, and working to build the brand.

Tactic 1: Visual Identity

The footprint of a brand—your corporate identity, graphic system, or visual voice—can take your brand many good places. It can also head you straight into a wall if it does not accurately project what the brand is and consistently stick to the story.
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Based on the BusinessWeek/Interbrand Top Most Valuable Brands in the world, FutureLab ranks the online relevance of those brands.

The purpose: to highlight to senior executives the importance of paying close attention to their brand’s performance in the online arena.

The method: ranking is based on the number of times the brand’s name appears in leading search engines like Google, Baidu and Technorati, the number of links to the brands website, its reach and Page-rank relevance, and the number of times people express their “love” or “hate” for the brand.

The Top 10 (Interbrand/BusinessWeek position in brackets):

1. Google (38)
2. eBay (55)
3. Apple (41)
4. Amazon.com (68)
5. Disney (7)
6. Yahoo! (58)
7. Microsoft (2)
8. Canon (35)
9. Nokia (6)
10. Sony (28)

The PDF: here

Lyle’s Golden Syrup has been named as Britain’s oldest brand, with its green and gold packaging having remained almost unchanged since 1885. The Guinness Book of Records gave the breakfast and teatime sweetener, whose tins bear the image of a lion and a biblical quotation, the prized honor.

The syrup came into being as a by-product of sugar refined by Scottish businessman Abram Lyle in London. It was first stored in tins in 1885 - a million tins are now produced monthly.

Read the BBC story here.

Continuing the engagement of the employees in internal branding, October issue of HRMagazin is running an extensive material on internal branding and its importance for the success of any re-branding efforts .

As the people who deliver the brand promise are employees, making sure they understand and can deliver the brand to customers is vital—especially for companies within the service industry, where the relationship between employees and customers essentially is the product the company sells.

Re-branding takes time. The planning process that produces a new brand can take as long as two years. Educating employees about the new brand, and its implications on the company and their work, can also last years. That effort typically starts several weeks to several months before the new brand is unveiled to customers and continues after the official unveiling to external audiences.

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Corporations must be very concerned with branding and advertising practices that attract customers or retain them, as effective branding and advertising can have postive impact on corporate profitability.

Here are six suggestions that Howard D. Hill, Ph.D., president and CEO of Associates in Education in Orangeburg is proposing to assist corporations (and smaller companies) in maintaining dominance in desired areas of operation:

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Since we talked here earlier about Naming Don’ts, let’s see some DO’s on the matter. Without any doubts, choosing a name is one of the most important decisions a company can make when launching a brand. More than that, when we’re talking about small businesses it seems that the most stressful thing about starting a new company was not manufacturing of products or advertising to customers, but coming up with a name.

Here is a list of 9 things that should be taken in consideration when naming a new business or product:
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BusinessWeek is running an interesting article, presenting three checkpoints in creating a slogan:

Try to create complementary relationships between your business [tag]name[/tag], its [tag]slogan[/tag], and other communications devices, such as the Web address. Avoid redundant messages. In other words, don’t pick a slogan that simply reiterates your company name. It should enhance and complement that primary statement about your company and provide would-be customers with new, positive information about you.

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There is an interesting article on Influx pointing out six key learning points behind the Lacoste brand comeback.

Lacoste has coming roaring back from obscurity to become one of the hottest sports/apparel brands around. The company’s US sales grew in the US of 1000% in 5 years. Not bad for a brand that was once languishing under General Mills’s ownership.

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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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