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Articles on Brand Matters:

The Big Pay-Off - Brand Value

Many CEOs and marketing directors find their time wasted evaluating marketing opportunities instead of acting on them. When every possibility is followed, a meandering trail of hit and miss effectiveness is the result. Despite significant expenditure of time and money, marketing tactics may not produce the desired gains.

What is their problem? They are missing a crucial step in the marketing arsenal -- branding. The power of branding is that it is not just for your customers. When done correctly, it also creates a roadmap for you to follow internally, streamlining your planning and decision-making processes for years to come.

Outward Brand
This is what many people relate to when thinking of a "brand:" a logo, tagline, style of advertising, product packaging, etc. These are not the brand, but rather the brand elements. To be truly branded however, all of these elements are developed based on the core value of the company. The core value will stay the same, through product changes, service changes, and staff changes.

The value of this is in attraction. If you have spent the time identifying your ideal prospect [read: most profitable] and created an emotional reason to buy [read: comes back and brings their friends with them], then all your time and money is now focused on creating interesting tactics to engage a prospect you know will be profitable, rather than baiting the hook with whatever you have and hoping you’re fishing in the right pond.

The investment in developing a set message to a clear audience is rewarded by recognition, recall and referral of your brand. You can change ad campaigns, update packaging, and replace staff and if all reflect your underlying message, the brand impact will be carried over to your audience no matter how or who delivers it.

Inward Brand
Developing brand clearly improves external communication. Impressively, it can increase your internal efficiency as well.

What often bogs down the marketing process is planning, and deciding on a case by case basis what actions should be taken. We have seen marketing efforts derailed and budgets drained by everything from an aggressive ad sales person to a company executive driving past a billboard and insisting the marketing department book it.

It is so easy to latch onto what sounds like a great idea or a sure thing or to give up on a plan when no immediate results are seen. However brand marketing is not direct response, it is viral, increasing in scope and intensity the more it is replicated.

With a brand built on focus features, key benefits and a core value, it is easy to plan strategy and tactics to capitalize on your goals. And the next time someone asks you to place and ad, sponsor an event, or recommends a billboard rental, you will know if that is on your brand path or an expensive joy ride to who knows where, what we call an "off-road vehicle."

The Reward
The effort of building and maintaining a brand must be constant. Your brand provides a roadmap but the destination is ultimately having customers so loyal they always choose your company and so zealous they bring their friends along. The value is in the opinion and the action customers are willing to take because of how they feel, and in the speed and accuracy of the decisions you can make to achieve your goals.

Beth Brodovsky
29 Mar 2007

Beth Brodovsky is the president and principal of Iris Creative Group, LLC. Brodovsky earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Communication Design from Pratt Institute, New York. Before launching her own firm in 1996, she spent eight years as a corporate Art Director and Graphic Designer, providing a sound foundation in management and organizational standards and structure. Iris Creative specializes in providing marketing and strategic communication services to clients in service industries and small businesses. For more information contact Beth at bsb@iriscreative.com or 610-567-2799.

Brand Your Website's URL with a Favicon

Have you ever noticed that when you look at your browser favorites menu or the address bar, some entries have their own little icon beside their URL?

It's called a "Favicon" (a graphic file with a .ico extension) and it's placed in the root directory of the web site. Everytime you bookmark a site that has its own favicon.ico file, it is added to your browser, and it will be visible from then on in the favorites menu and in the address bar.

At the beginning, only large websites had a favicon, but now you too can create one and use it to brand your website. The first thing you have to do is to create your favicon. To be displayed by browsers, it must have a size of 16x16 pixels. To create one, you can use a graphics program called Icon Forge (you can download a free trial version in CNET):
http://download.com.com/3000-2195-10128559.html

You can either create an icon from scratch, or import a 16x16 '.gif' or '.jpg' file and save it as a '.ico' file.

You will then have to save your icon with the default name of 'favicon.ico', and upload it to the root directory of your website (where your index page is). Finally, after that, you must associate your icon to your web page. You do that by including the following HTML code immediately after the HEAD tag of your page:

link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico"

Once you've done that, that's it. To try it out, go to your web page and add your page to your favorites. You should be able to see the favicon next to your bookmarked page title. Also, the next time you type your URL in the address bar, you will see your favicon to the left of the URL.
(Favicons work with Internet Explorer 5 or newer, and with recent versions of Netscape.)

You can freely reprint this article. Just include the following resource box at the end:
Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest (http://www.theinternetdigest.net) a website and newsletter that gives you free advice on web design and Internet marketing.

Mario Sanchez
03 Apr 2007

Mario Sanchez lives in Miami, Florida, where he publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ) a website and newsletter that gives you free advice on web design and Internet marketing.

Branding Trends: Delivery Channels Take The Lead

In looking at current business branding trends--and what might be around the corner in 2007--what strikes me most are not the tactics being used, but the mediums being called on to disseminate the messages. While you can’t ignore branding basics, you can no longer rely on traditional outlets such as TV, radio and print to get the job done; they must take into consideration all the new media at their disposal, including blogs, podcasts, mobile phone-based programming, social networks and RSS feeds.

Moving forward, branding success will depend on adapting to the rapidly evolving media environment and taking advantage of new opportunities to reach your target audience. Ongoing research into appropriate delivery channels will be critical to ensuring that branding messages are communicated in ways that resonate with specific consistencies.

Using “hot” media to spread your message will be especially critical for brands seeking to establish themselves with younger or more tech-savvy audiences, as these people are often the first to navigate away from traditional delivery methods. While this means it may be more difficult to determine the appropriate media in which to invest your branding dollars, it also offers a unique opportunity to more closely target your marketing efforts based on consumer tastes and interests.

Blogs are a great example of communication that’s typically focused on specific subject matter and/or directed to a well-defined constituency. By identifying blogs that are attractive to your target market, you have the chance to personalize your branding efforts like never before. Accurate research, combined with the ability to react quickly to new opportunities, will separate savvy branding campaigns from those that continue to rely on outlets that are less compelling than they used to be.

But let’s get back to those 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.

What remains most critical in the branding arena is being consistent, especially as the variety of media options continues to expand. The last thing you want to do is send confusing or conflicting messages, and that can be all the more likely as you add variety to your media mix.

As we move closer to 2007, the elements of successful branding will not be all that different, but the proper use of evolving media channels will spell the difference between successful campaigns and those that fail to hit the mark.

John Williams
29 May 2007

John Williams is Entrepreneur.com's "Image & Branding" columnist and the founder and president of LogoYes.com, the world's first do-it-yourself logo design website. During John's 25 years in advertising, he's created brand standards for Fortune 100 companies like Mitsubishi and won numerous awards for his design work.