But, there are some branding constants that will remain critical for establishing and maintaining brand awareness with your target audience. Regardless of the medium chosen for distribution, you must:

• Ensure your brand promise is clear. Be simple, be direct, and by all means, be consistent.
• Focus on creating a well-conceived brand name. Even the cleverest branding strategy will fall flat if the name you seek to brand is poorly conceived.
• Understand the competition. No one operates in a vacuum. While originality is important, it’s critical to be aware of your competitors’ branding strategies.
• Set branding goals. You can’t very well determine your success if you don’t have a benchmark against which to measure it. Know where you want to go and when you want to get there.
• Remain committed yet flexible. Branding success doesn’t occur overnight; it takes commitment to maintain focus and build loyalty. But that doesn’t mean strategy changes might not be necessary along the way, so be open to tweaking your approach as necessary.

Read more in the Entrepreneur.com article Branding Trends: Delivery Channels Take the Lead

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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:

1. Be unique
2. Instantly communicate the nature of the business, product, or service.
3. Be appealing to the target audience
4. Be able to withstand the test of time
5. Be able to work in context of all potential communications’ media

The second and equally important component of branding is a verbal one. It is often referred to as a slogan, tagline or a positioning statement.

1. Be as unique as the company logo
2. Be brief and memorable
3. Be honest

Read more here.

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When building your personal brand, you need to have a sturdy brand foundation of rational brand attributes. Those attributes illustrate your competence and make you credible. Even the most lovable among us won’t get too far without being able to demonstrate results.

But when building your personal brand, emotion is an essential component that will help you create greater loyalty among your various constituencies.

As a “careerist” you can build loyalty beyond reason with your employer, peers, managers, and among all those people who need to know about you so that you can reach your career goals. To do this, you must be keenly aware of your brand attributes, how others perceive you. What is your combination of rational and emotional brand attributes? What makes you lovable?

Here are five tips for inspiring loyalty beyond reason:

1. Take inventory of your personal brand attributes (rational and emotional).
2. Get external input on your brand attributes. This will help you validate your self-assessment and provide insights into how you are currently perceived. You can’t change perceptions if you don’t know what they are.
3. Decide which attributes (that are authentic to you) are relevant and compelling to your target audience and are differentiating from those of your peers.
4. Live in the inquiry. Ask yourself how you can inject more of these brand attributes into everything you do-every report you author, every email you write, every telephone conversation you have.
5. Assess. Ask for feedback. Measure results. Are you being perceived more consistently? Are you more fulfilled? Are you more successful? More loved?

Read full article here.

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1. Establish a strong brand position

Defining a market position is the most critical step in developing a brand. You must know who you are before you can get to where you want to be. Brand positioning characterizes the way a company wants its target audience to think about its brand. It is the core message you want to deliver in every medium, and it creates clarity, consistency and continuity in the way the organization speaks to the market. Essential to an effective positioning statement is the concept of narrowing rather than broadening a company’s focus. The secret to a good brand-positioning strategy is a clear message that talks about your strengths and explains to customers why your product is the best in your category or industry.

2. Use market research to create a strategic plan

When most of us think of market research, we think of statistics, focus groups and expensive surveys. In most cases, that is overkill. Market research needs to answer only a few key questions — the simpler, the better. Big businesses take feedback and apply it to a strategic plan. They evaluate sales and segment performance, predict sales growth, compile market trends and consumer insights, identify key drivers from the previous year’s successes and failures, set firm marketing objectives for the coming year, estimate costs and craft tactical programs and marketing initiatives to achieve those objectives. Good planning allows companies to continuously measure, refine and optimize their marketing mix. You should demand that all programs have financial benefits and amplify sales. Spend wisely, and know your cost per generated lead.

3. Everything you do communicates, so be consistent

The perception of your company and brand is defined by the interactions people have with your company. Your message must be consistent and compelling at all points of contact with customers.
Take a look at any coupon, print ad, television commercial or Web site for IBM Corp. Every message is marked by a vivid blue color, graphic elements influenced by the geometric shape of the logo, a single-minded tagline, uniform font type in headlines and the same tone across all printed material.

4. Being unique is crucial, even if you’re coming in second

Companies that grab market share first often grab the glory, but they aren’t always the last one standing. At one time, The Procter & Gamble Co. was second to Union Carbide Corp. in marketing disposable diapers. Dell Inc. unseated Compaq Computer Corp. by marketing to the upcoming college generation. The secret to second-mover advantage: You can’t propose just a me-too idea; you need a unique angle to spin. Me-too businesses rarely survive. They usually end up in price wars because they don’t have anything unique that establishes value in the minds of their prospects. They are left with only one competitive weapon: price. Unless you have a significant cost advantage over your competitors, you will lose.

5. Speak to the consumer and create value

Does your marketing material directly address the value of doing business with your company? Can it answer any consumer’s basic question, “What’s in it for me?” Some companies forget communication is about getting consumers to see brand benefits for themselves. To get that across, a brand must speak from the consumer’s point of view, not the marketing department’s. Remove all those meaningless benefits from your Web site and other communications materials. Replace them with the added value customers are after.

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1. Identify the essential qualities that your audience desires from you and the needs your audience expects you to fill
Obviously, this will require market research. And because you will use this research to customize communication strategies and as the baseline for measuring progress.

Assessing the needs of your target audiences represents a significant paradigm shift. Rather than telling the marketplace what you want to do, you are asking the marketplace what it wants you to do within the constraints of your mission.

2. Assess how well your audience perceives that you deliver on these qualities and fill these needs
In this step, we measure how well audiences compare your performance with their ideal.

You cand achieve this by asking respondents two questions. First, how much do they value a particular quality or characteristic? And second, how do they perceive the organization is delivering on that quality or characteristic?

Generally, the larger the gap on highly valued qualities and characteristics, the more problematic for the organization. When the gap is large, the target audience does not believe that the institution is credible, or relevant, in something they value.

There are two ways to interpret gap data. Some organizations may,in fact, not be relevant and need to respond strategically. This is a performance gap. The second option is that the organization may be highly relevant, but target audience simply is not aware, the organization is not communicating this information to prospective customers.This is a perception gap. Of course,if you have a gap problem, it is better when the gap is perception, or in this case, misperception, rather than performance. The key to differentiating between the two is the quality of the external research and the analysis.

3. Identify which performance and perception gaps you want to fill
At this point you must think about which gaps you want to close. Here are three suggestions to help clarify your options:

1. focus on your mission and vision. For your branding efforts to be truly strategic, they must flow from these two core statements.
2. consider your competitors. If a competitor is already known for doing something that you aspire to do, you might want to reconsider. Brands and positions are amazingly tough, and if someone else has a lock on a key quality or characteristic, it will take a great deal of time and money to dislodge them. You might be better off heading for unclaimed territory.
3. don’t forget collaborations. Your gap research might have identified an issue that you do not have the resources to address. One alternative, then, is to seek a strategic liaison.

4. Respond strategically
The next step in the branding process is to spend the necessary time, talent, and dollars to fill the gaps and build relevance.

5.Revise and prioritize your vivid descriptors
At this step we are beginning to transition from building relevance to building awareness for that relevance. The first task, then, is to revise and prioritize your vivid descriptors, the essential qualities or characteristics that you want to communicate to members of your target audience.

First, remember that your vivid descriptors must emanate from the mission, vision, and strategic plan. They should represent core values, and they should be long term and enduring. Second, keep the number of vivid descriptors small. This will help you focus your messages. Third, make sure you define your vivid descriptors from the perspective of each different target audience. Fourth, gather the anecdotal and aggregate data you need to give credibility to your vivid descriptors. Don’t just tell; show! And finally,learn to project your vivid descriptors across multiple mediums and in multiple formats.

6. Develop and execute a brand communication strategy
Position your vivid descriptors in the minds of your target audience. Remember, in order to be successfull your messages should be:

• noticeable
• salient
• persuasive
• memorable

7. Test and refine
After you have strategically responded to the needs and expectations of your target audiences and created awareness of your relevance, it is time to repeat the gap analysis research you completed in step two. If you have heightened your relevance and created more awareness, the likelihood is high that you closed some gaps. If you were not able to close those gaps, a careful assessment must be undertaken. Perhaps the initiatives you undertook were not relevant to your target audiences. Or maybe your strategic changes were simply overlooked.

Continually testing and refining the degree to which your target audiences are aware of you and perceive your relevance will help keep your branding efforts on track.

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Cost-cutting measures include co-branded advertising, consolidating outside vendors, and cutting down on printing costs by creating more electronic promotional materials. More than that, here are 4 key areas, proposed by Lippincott & Margulies, to review in order to increase brand and branding efficiency in slowing economy:

1. Tighten the communications reins

During prosperous times, when companies are constantly unveiling new products and services, marketing materials can often grow out of control. An objective communications audit is the first step to ensuring that all marketing efforts are consistent and not wasteful.

A review of all marketing support materials can help companies to identify what materials are being produced, who’s producing them, the cost for each, and then the total marketing communications cost. This is often a surprisingly large pot of cash. It also results in identifying the audience for each communications vehicle. Completing this kind of company audit can help companies identify where their efforts are repetitive, and possibly even unnecessary.

2. Brand head count

Through a brand portfolio analysis, companies can take a serious look at their products and services to determine their target audience. After evaluating each brand by grouping it in a designated category and assigning it to a key audience, a company can then step back and decide if support for some of those brands can be consolidated, cut back or eliminated.

3. Assess advertising spending

Heavy advertising spending is not a prerequisite for building a strong brand. Understanding who your targets are, and then prioritizing those audiences, can help in ascertaining where advertising is a necessity and where it’s a luxury. By narrowing the focus and sharpening the message content, companies can use creative, less expensive alternatives to communicate to who’s critical and not to who isn’t.

4. Centralize brand management

Develop decision-making tools based on a set of criteria to manage naming, co-branding and marketing expenditure. Developing a permanent set of criteria will also ensure that future branding issues are decided upon consistently and efficiently.

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