Many people in business believe their logo and slogan make up their corporate brand. And while they are integral to a company’s image, there is so much more to what a brand really encompasses.Your brand is your/company evidence of distinction.

In developing a brand strategy for a business, you have to understand that your brand reaches far beyond the artistic components such as how your website looks or the uniforms your employees wear. A brand is the entire experience that a person has from the moment they hear the business’ name, their experience on your website or with customer service and how well you stand behind your product. The visceral reaction that people have when hearing the name of your business or seeing your logo, is your brand.

Developing a brand strategy requires consistency in what your business delivers and how it is delivered. The corporate brand also needs the support of management from CEO on down the chain of command. The brand essence must be reflected by every employee. This does take time but today, with consumers communicating through social media, it is imperative that every company have a brad strategy.. Interacting with customers on Facebook or Twitter in a positive and timely manner raises the customer’s experience. Any message you send will directly impact your brand, keeping these messages positive, customer focused and consistent helps to quickly develop a brand. The company with a strong brand strategy will have a marked advantage  over their competition.

Your brand will also be secure because you stand behind your product or service. Customers will be willing to pay because they know your business supports them and you deliver. Top quality will always win out.

Change is important to brand strategy. Ask customers what they like and don’t like, and listen to them. Customers appreciate a business that is willing to go the extra mile to accommodate them.

Brand is the fundamental beliefs of your company. It helps bring definition and certainty to your name making it recognizable and trustworthy.

by Bob Grant

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” This famous line by BillyShakespeare comes to mind after reading John Colapinto’s recent engaging New Yorker article “Famous Names” on David Placek and his company Lexicon.

In the world of business, marketing, and advertising we pay a great deal of attention and money to how companies, products and services are named. Brand names are important.  Brand names help us remember and help us associate a good or bad experience with a product, service, or company.

But where do successful brand names come from? Colapinto illustrates how David Placek and his company came up with the name BlackBerry for Research In Motion. Placek’s staffers interviewed commuters riding the ferry from Sausalito to San Francisco. The company also conducted mind mapping brainstorm sessions, generating hundreds of word associations. They dismissed words that contained mail or email references as not being joyous enough. One word that made the final cut was blackberry.  Lexicon’s word smiths and linguists felt black evoked the color of high-tech devices, and the oval keys looked like drupelets of a blackberry.

Colapinto points out that not all successful brand names are professionally developed. He notes that Google came out of a misspelling of googol, which is defined as the number 10 raised to the 100^th power. I suppose that it was one way of expressing infinity.  Coca-Cola was devised by an accountant who thought the two C’s looked good in advertisements.  Many companies, from Hewlett Packard to Grant Marketing simply name the company or product after the founder. However, naming is just the first step.

This brings us back to Shakespeare’s question, “What’s in a name?” Bernd Schmitt, marketing professor at Columbia Business School, asks in the New Yorker article, “Would Amazon be just as successful if it was called Nile?”  The answer is likely, yes, just as a rose by any other name would likely smell as sweet.

What makes BlackBerry, Amazon, and thousands of other brand names successful is not just the name itself, but the product and company that stands behind that brand name, and the brand strategy and marketing strategy that brings that product to the minds of the consumers who will buy the product.

BlackBerry is successful because of the technology that made it easy for consumers, many of whom were business people who needed to rely on instant communication with their associates and customers. The BlackBerry name set it apart from the generic names of cell phones or mobile phones, and made the device a brand that stood alone. Alone that is until competition from I Phones, Androids, and the like.

Whether a brand name is developed by name branding professionals like Lexicon, or from the mind of a business owner, an accountant, or company research department, there are a few fundamental steps a company should perform before bringing the brand name to market.

1. Have the name, along with some other name possibilities, reviewed and critiqued within the company
2. Connect the brand name to some kind of association with the product, no matter how vague. Recall the “Blackberry” explanation.
3. Test the name through focus groups or survey of existing and prospective customers
4. Research the name through a trademark search to be sure there are no conflicts with existing names that would be close in appearance, application, and would cause confusion.

Once a brand name is determined, then move forward developing a brand and marketing strategy that will make that name resonate in its marketplace like Google, Amazon, Apple, and BlackBerry.

With the introduction of YouTube, and since the purchase of YouTube by Google, videos have become one of the most used forms of media today. This is not really news. We have been captured by video ever since the invention of silent movies. Then there was TV and commercials, 8MM cameras, hand held video cameras. Then came the Internet, and with the increase of broadband and the improvement of digital devices like IPads, Smartphones, and Flip video cameras, video is bigger than ever. Check out these facts:

• Video shares 51% of all Internet traffic
• YouTube is second only to Google for search engine share
• 490 million unique users worldwide per month

Grant Marketing has partnered with photographer and videographer Wayne Dion, to offer our clients professional video production and marketing. Grant Marketing has been helping B2B companies with their branding and marketing for more than 25 years.

Wayne Dion isn’t just jumping on the video band-wagon either. His career started in video production more than 30 years ago. Dion worked with crews on commercial video productions out of the Boston market. TV commercials and political infomercials were day to day work. His projects included video and lighting for ESPN, BBC, Fidelity Investments and local politics.

Whether or not you use the services of Grant Marketing, consider integrating video into your marketing efforts.

To discuss your video project, contact us at video@grantmarketing.com

By Bob Grant

Integrated marketing expert, Professor Don E. Schultz, in a recent article in Marketing Management magazine describes quite accurately the importance of the value of brand as an asset.  He points out that the value of the brand makes up 48% of Coca-Cola’s enterprise value and 37% of that of Google. However, the point of his article is that marketing and brand managers do not understand that relationship which makes it difficult for them to get the support of financial officers to back brand and marketing initiatives. From my experience it is just the opposite.

While I don’t doubt for a second that big brand companies like Coca-Cola, Google, IBM and Apple  senior financial management totally understand the value of brand and I imagine that they are in sync with their marketing and brand managers. However, in smaller and less brand visible companies, it is my experience that the marketing and brand managers understand the financial benefits of the company brand and struggle to convince the financial managers to support brand initiatives.

Mr. Schultz does point out that short-term fiscal year accounting systems work against support for long-term brand funding. This may be why financial managers of small to medium size companies find it difficult to justify expenditures on brand development.

I would be interested in hearing from others about who has the better understanding of the company’s brand value.  Is it the marketing and brand managers, or is it financial managers?

by Bob Grant

Facing poor sales in September, 2010 The Gap decided to make a logo change, as if an updated logo was going to turnaround slumping sales. The new logo immediately received negative reaction from customers, publications and independent bloggers. The Gap quickly reverted back to their old logo.

According to the April 8, issue of the NY Times, in March with Gap’s North American sales of same store sales down 9% The Gap recently announced a reassessment of its brand. According to John Seifert of Olgivy, the Gap, “sort of lost its story and lost its focus on what made it different and special.” Seth Farman, Gap’s chief global marketing officer, is reported to have said, the Gap “needs to set a clear point of view for the brand.”

It was at first surprising that a large corporation like the Gap would think that a logo change would change the brand of the company. Logos, being a visible representation of a company, are often thought of as the company brand. The very definition of a brand goes back to the wild west days when cattle ranchers “branded” their cattle so one ranch’s cattle could be differentiated from another ranch. Today, well established logos do connect us immediately to the company, think Nike, IBM, and Apple. However, the logo is just a recognizable reminder of the company it represents, but the true brand of a company is what the company itself represents in the minds of it customers, potential customers, and its employees.

Developing one’s brand is not an easy process. A company needs to evaluate who they are as a company and who they want to be as a company. It’s important to ask stakeholders and employees inside the company about their perceptions of the company. It is equally important to uncover what customers and potential customers think about the company and what the company is promising to them. Once the research is complete, how do you synthesize that research into brand messaging and positioning statements that will resonate with audiences inside the company and outside the company. Then comes the awesome task of turning that brand into reality by altering the way the company does business and getting everyone inside the company on board to back up the company’s new brand.

The Gap is on the right track and it will be interesting for us brand strategist and marketers to see how they will improve their brand and increase their sales.

As reported in the New York Times, Google announcement that it is changing its algorithms to reduce ranking of what it calls low quality sites, meaning sites with little original content or content built solely from third party sites like Demand Media. Google said that it will raise the rankings of higher quality web sites while reducing the rankings of lower quality sites.
Google makes about 500 changes a year to its algorithms and most of them are minor. However, according to Armit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who worked on this recent change, announced in an interview that users were likely to quickly notice this one. If we believe Google, this change is in the best of interest of consumers who rely on Google for reliable and original information when they go “Googling”.
There are hundreds of companies whose business model revolves around navigating Google’s algorithms and helping their customers increase their searchable rank among Google’s pages. The Times article reports that Demand Media, for example, uses software to track what people are searching for on Google and other sites, generates headlines based on those searches and pays small amounts to freelancers to write the articles. Demand Media is reported to be worth $1.9 Billion.
While this change may have some impact on Demand Media and, other companies that seek to grow their businesses around Google, what impact, if any, does it have on business-to-business companies and their web sites?
If we trust that Google, yahoo, Bing and other search engines’ goal is to provide relevant content for consumers, then those of us in marketing and branding need not be concerned about this latest Google change. We have always recommended to our b2b and industrial clients, that the best way to gain good search engine results is to have excellent content on their web sites.
If you are an expert in spring manufacturing, you serve your customer best by providing detailed information on the types of springs that you offer, the sizes, the materials, the applications for these springs, and a lot more. With well thought out and written content you offer a beneficial service to your customers and those potential customers who need information on springs.
Whether or not you make springs, gaskets, bearings, or any other product, we need to depend on major search engines like Google and Yahoo to direct users looking for quality information. It’s to Google’s credit that they make it easier for this to happen.

Bob Grant, Grant Marketing

www.grantmarketing.com
For the full article on Google in the NT Times go to:
New York Times – Google

Wael Ghonim the Google marketing executive who became one of the leaders of the youth movement to unseat Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, invoked the importance of brand, according to a recent article in the New York Times.

Mr. Ghonim had little experience in politics but an intense dislike for the abusive Egyptian police, the mainstay of the government’s power. He offered his business savvy to the cause. “I worked in marketing, and I knew that if you build a brand you can get people to trust the brand,” he said.

The result was a Facebook group Mr. Ghonim set up: We Are All Khalid Said, after a young Egyptian who was beaten to death by police. Mr. Ghonim — unknown to the public, but working closely with Mr. Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement and a contact from Mr. ElBaradei’s group — said that he used Mr. Said’s killing to educate Egyptians about democracy movements.

If a strong brand communicated through social media can topple a government, just think what it could do for growing a business.

Ready or not B2B marketers, including industrial marketers, will need to be ready to embrace, real-time marketing, social media, blogging, and online PR sooner rather than later. Watch just the first 3 minutes of this video presentation by David Meerman Scott and you will get a quick idea of what real-time marketing is all about.

Text Test

David Meerman Scott keynote at BMA 2009 national conference from David Meerman Scott on Vimeo.

Along with 100,000 plus visitors to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta I started out from our hotel at 5:30AM to be sure to watch hundreds of balloon enthusiasts ready their hot air balloons for launch. The hot air balloons came in all shapes and sizes and included the shape of a Pepsi can, a cow representing the Dairy Association, as well as a variety of cartoon characters and the head of Darth Vader from Star Wars. It was a spectacular visual site to see these colorful monster balloons blown up and ascend into the early morning sky.

I very much enjoyed the networking breakfast in Boston last week hosted by B2B Magazine. The featured speakers were great. I particularly liked Frank Days of Novell’s presentation on agile marketing (www.agilemarketing.com) which is consistent with our advice to our clients that in addition to an annual marketing plan, we need to be focused on the tactical marketing strategies within a 2-3 month framework. With today’s web analytics you can launch a campaign, analyze the results, and respond with a follow up or edited campaign.

I also liked Elizabeth Williams of Rogers Communications presentation. Rogers new marketing focus is on small businesses. They actually created a website dedicated to small businesses (http://www.celebratesmallbusiness.ca/)  From their research they learned that while small businesses are experts in their own field, when sourcing partners or vendors in services where they are not experts, they search for companies that are knowledgeable in that field and that can make their jobs easier.

When it comes to B2B marketing, there is a great deal of marketing communication clutter for small businesses to deal with. We at Grant Marketing try to make it easy for a company to navigate through the clutter and make sound, creditable, and traceable marketing decisions.