Web Presence

An English major wouldn’t choose an online school that featured a web site or brochure with grammatical errors and misspelled words, so if you’re interested in marketing why would you choose a school you’ve never heard of? Granted a school’s ability to advertise itself to potential students relies on the amount of money it has in its budget for marketing purposes, but at the very least a good marketing school should have some sort of web presence beyond the school’s home page.

A school that has a presence on social networking sites is also easier for you to research as you will have the ability to read more about what current students and alumni have to say about their educational experiences at the institute. A school with a good web presence will also look better on a resume as employers are more likely to have heard of the school and to know what kind of education it provides.

Success Stories

If at all possible, try to find out some information about graduates of certain online schools to see what types of careers they end up with and what kind of companies they work for. The best online marketing schools are the ones where students go on to have success in the marketing field, working with companies and brands that you have heard of. By evaluating the marketing strength of the companies where graduates from a certain school work you start to get a sense of what kind of education you might receive from that school or how well they prepare their graduates for working in an evolving field such as marketing.

Educational Needs

In order to be successful as an online marketing student you have to be completely honest about your educational goals and needs and pick the best strategy for fulfilling them. While studying online can give you the freedom to complete your degree in your spare time it also requires a great deal of self-discipline and focus. Some students may find they need online courses with more structure where virtual classes are held at specific times, while other students may prefer programs that allow them to complete coursework whenever they have the opportunity to do so.

When considering online schools you should pay close attention to how the classes are modeled and what types of educational resources are utilized. The best online schools give students a multi-media education with videos, interactive educational modules and topical discussion forums. Your education should reflect your future career so if you want to pursue a job in a specific field, such as social media marketing, choose the online school that has the best curriculum regarding social media.

Mixing Online and Offline Courses

Students already attending school for marketing may have the option of taking some of their courses online through the school they already attend or another magnet program. It’s also possible for students to take graduate level courses online while finishing up an undergraduate degree at a university, community college or business school in order to complete a master’s degree quickly. Online courses can also be used to complete additional graduation requirements, such as math, science and English courses needed for a bachelor’s degree. Find the schools that make it easy for you to transfer the credits you receive online or look for schools that offer a mix of on campus and off campus courses.

Guest post by Stella Waldorf from www.onlineschools.org.

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Trust means your future customers believe you’re likely to be honest and competent, and will deliver a good experience. Sometimes trust comes from friends telling friends they had a great experience. But most of your future customers wont have word-of-mouth to rely on. They have to decide on their own whom to trust. Thats the mission of your logo, website or brochure, to create your business dress and body language–your visual branding.

Here are a few basics to help your business look credible:

1. Go for simplicity and lack of clutter. (Think Apple, the master of simplicity in branding.)
2. Create or demand a clean, well-balanced graphic design.
3. Use one or two basic colors that go well together, not a hodgepodge.
4. Choose one font and stick with it. You can express almost anything by using variations within a single font family: size, weight (boldness), italics, etc. If you really must, choose a second font for major headlines. But first try it with one font.
5. Coordinate a single look – design, colors, etc. – across everything you do, including your logo, website, brochures, ads and signage.

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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.
In an emotional economy, success is judged by a profound and indelible connection with people through sensory experiences. The challenge for CEOs, CMOs, and clients the world over is to remember what’s at the soul of their brand: the credibility of a well-respected product and the passion of the culture behind it. Design is the expression of that culture and the link that will cause people to be irresistibly drawn to the brand. If your brand doesn’t connect emotionally, you will have to rely on media or advertising hype, a short-term and risky proposition.

By forgetting to focus on the way your product will be experienced, and failing to respond to people’s need to be stimulated, you fail their expectations. No amount of money can buy the media to fix a boring product, no PR message will work once you lose that trust. The best brands of all jam with their consumers to invent and imagine ideas designed for the future—ideas designed to revive the advertising impact and exponentially maximize your communication dollars.

Read full article here.

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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.

Other key factors that influence the initial selection process are price/promotion (29%) and retail location (12%).

While this strategy is adopted due to high competition in the field, I honestly don’t find it sustainable on the long term because promoting the cell phone instead of the service plan and the carrier that provides that service may lead to sales growth in the short term, but it can potentially have a negative long term impact with higher churn rates.

The study actually shows this. As such, among customers who are most influenced by the cell phone brand, the likelihood of switching carriers in the next 12-month period is 60 percent higher than among customers who cite the brand of the wireless provider as their key factor in the selection process.

On the other hand study shows that among major wireless carrier-owned retail stores, T-Mobile ranks highest in customer satisfaction for a fourth consecutive reporting period. T-Mobile receives particularly high ratings in all four factors that determine overall satisfaction. T-Mobile is followed in the rankings by Verizon Wireless and Alltel, respectively.

Volume 2 of the 2006 Wireless Retail Sales Satisfaction Study is based on experiences reported by 7,530 wireless users who completed a retail sales transaction within six months prior to being surveyed. The results are from the two most recent reporting waves, which were conducted in April and July 2006. More about the study here.

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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.

Trend #1: the power of the network

Marketers have long known the power of engaging in dialogue with customers. But those who push the boundaries of customer dialogue also understand the power of communities of consumers united in affinity for a brand, bound by geography, or engaged in similar lifestyles.

In the loyalty game, helping to create customer groups bound by shared interests is a way to develop a sense of community around your brand. The better your ability to grow dialogue between you and your customers and among your customers themselves, the stronger your brand will become.

Trend #2: the power of data

It’s a hoary truism: Information is power. Simply put, you can’t manage a relationship or enhance the in-store experience without knowing whom your customers are. And indeed, before you can really leverage loyalty-program information to enhance your company’s core product, you need to understand what insights you can glean from the data you’ve already collected. Basic ROI analysis is no longer the end game. It’s just the starting point.

Trend #3: the power of convergence

An epic confluence of events and factors outside the loyalty space will form the third seismic shift that will influence your loyalty strategy. In the global marketplace, three major areas of convergence are giving rise to a second generation of multimerchant loyalty coalitions: corporate convergence, in which mega-corporations continue to gobble one another up, with the corresponding size of their customer bases growing more astounding every day; CRM convergence, in which the next generation of CRM technology helps these same companies organize every aspect of their businesses around customer segments; and point-of-sale (POS) technology convergence, in which the next wave of payment and identification innovations will eventually collide in their ability to enable sustainable brand-customer relationships.

As consumers pull out their coalition cards several times a week while shopping at top brands, coalitions will win the battle for share of mind. And the first companies in each sector to align their brands with a top-tier loyalty coalition will enjoy a formidable first-mover advantage. The bottom line: You’ll need a strategy to evaluate whether an emerging coalition is the right one for you.

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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

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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.

2. Using technology to better meet consumer expectations.
Consumer expectations in all categories will continue to grow. Expectations have increased more than 26% in the past five years while brands have kept up with these expectations by only 8%! Watch for smart marketers to take advantage of unfulfilled expectations via such values as “convenience” and “customization.” More and more marketers will rely upon Web sites and high-tech capabilities to accommodate these values and differentiate themselves from the competition. Professional services and other non-traditional brands will probably take advantage of the new technologies and start build up brands for themselves.

3. Expanding the potential of Websites and blogs
Engagement concerns and attempts to meet or exceed customer expectations will fuse and be most observed online, particularly on blogs. Watch for increased development of blogs and Websites in general beyond propaganda, information, and use as an electronic cash register toward the creation of “communities of ones.”

4. “Recombinant” experiences.
Disney and Vegas: Oil and water? Consumer values indicate a bipolar continuum for recombinant experiences. Watch for this to reveal itself in more online gaming, especially for adults. Interactive gaming with more and more players being able to compete at once will become table stakes for online games. Marketers concerned with engagement will close their eyes to “appropriateness” and leverage online gaming as a more acceptable venue for virtually every brand.

5. More branded entertainment.
Popular culture, with its rabid consumption of music and technology, will see market and brand leaders leverage plugging-in as a method for customizing entertainment and selling products. For instance, music-related paraphernalia such as T-shirts, posters, and artist-related merchandise will infringe more and more on the dominance of bricks-and mortar retail.

Read full article here.

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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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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

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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.

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