@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Digital & Internet Marketing

Latest Trends in Branding or Rebranding of Companies

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The latest trends in branding or rebranding of companies are developed of necessity. To be successful at rebranding all elements must be consistent and the effect on all stakeholders must be taken into account. Rebranding should be done in a way that it doesn’t alienate current customers but does attract new customers and opens up new markets for the brand.

 

 

Rebrand to Counteract Negative Publicity

When tobacco became a product with many negative connotations, the tobacco giant Phillip Morris rebranded to Altria. At the time this happened, the company also owned over eighty percent of the Kraft Corporation. Changing the name gave the company a chance to show people that the company was involved in more than tobacco. This helped counteract the negative publicity that smoking tobacco was bringing to the industry.

Successful Rebranding

Rebranding requires that the various processes in the marketing campaign make sense. Everything should flow comfortably into the new brand image so that current customers will feel comfortable. When done properly rebranding will make potential customers take a second look while comforting current customers that their favorite items will still be available.

Successful rebranding should

  • Provide opportunities to communicate the brand shift in the business model
  • Allow the migration of your brand into new markets and new audiences
  • Help shed a negative image and disguise negative business events 
  • Allow the company’s mission to be updated bringing new vision to the team involved

Successful rebranding encompasses much more than changing a logo; there should be significance to the changes and this should be communicated to the stakeholders. They should be able to see the purpose behind the change so they will be receptive to it.

Branded Brands

The trend in branding today points to Branded Brands. To make this simple say you are taking a United Airways flight, while on the flight you will be offered Starbucks Coffee, cookies from Mrs. Fields and a Friendly Skies Meal complete with toy from MickeyD’s. This also affects the airlines popularity since the people receive brands they are comfortable with and enjoy.

Brands that Support a Good Cause

Cause marketing is also a growing trend in branding. This trend identifies a brand with a humanitarian cause. This approach has been very successful for many brands such as GAP. Most people feel good about their purchase if part of the cost is going for a good cause and this way of thinking doesn’t seem to be hampered by the recession.

The latest trends in branding or rebranding of companies are out of the box. A lot of creative thinking and marketing techniques are required to be successful in today’ tough economy.

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Social Brand Visibility: Klout

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Klout measures the impact a brand or a person has on the social media network. It is a social media analytics company.

Launched in 2008, they currently have more than 250,000 users and more than 300 API partners. Its founder and CEO, John Frankel, says his company is “well positioned to capitalize on the distinct need for a new layer of intelligence for the social web. Klout is a service that makes sense of what it means to be and to become influential.” It uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure true reach, amplification probability and network score.

True Reach – measures the size of your engaged audience. It does not take into account spam and inactive accounts. They answer a few questions; are your tweets interesting enough to build an audience? How far has your content been spread? Are people adding you to their lists?

How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?

Amplification Probability – The likelihood that your content will be acted upon. How diverse is the group you’re in touch with? How likely are you to be retweeted? Do a lot of people retweet you or are they the same followers? Are you tweeting too much or too little? And are the tweets effective in generating new followers?

Network influence – How influential you’ve become? How influential are the people who follow you? How influential are the people who list you? How influential are those who retweet you?

Klout identifies influencers and provides tools for influencers to monitor their influence.  According to their research the three most retweeted users in the world are: Justin Bieber, I Confess That (a Spanish language) and Raise Your Hands (another Spanish tweeter).

The company got $8.5 million in funding a few days ago, a sign that investors believe in the future of this company.

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What is Groupon? How Does it work?

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Groupon – a deal a day website, brings buyers and sellers together through a web and mobile application that offers the customers a great deal, while businesses get a large number of new customers.

Groupon Picture

The idea behind it is the power of group buying. The deal Groupon does with businesses specifies a minimum number of buyers. If enough people sign up, the deal will become active. If less than this minimum of people sign up, the deal is canceled. This way, businesses can offer great deals because they rely on valium.

The company offers one deal per day per a certain geographic location. It doesn’t cost the merchant a thing, but he has to share in the profits with Groupon. There are certain businesses that Groupon is staying away from; shooting ranges, abortion clinics, plastic surgeons and strip clubs, top their list.

The company sends scouts to different cities to research the businesses, and when they identify the potential, salespeople approach the business. By helping shoppers save while letting local businesses advertise, Groupon seems to have tapped into the intersection of the internet’s social media and physical shopping.

An example – 1,600 people in one day bought skydiving lessons in Chicago, getting a 44% discount on the $229 price. The company making the offer normally sells 6,000 lessons per year.  On one day they got 25% of their yearly business. They sacrificed some profit, but got lots of new customers.

And it sure feels like they hit a nerve. Groupon’s spectacular rise since 2008 turned meteoric in 2010. What started in Chicago with the first deal – half price off pizza in the building where their office was located – turned within a few short years into an amazing success. Groupon has expanded to 35 countries, growing their subscriber base by 2,500%, from 2 million to over 50 million.

With the sign of this huge success came attempts to buy them out. In October Yahoo was rumored to try and buy Groupon for $3 billion. A month later, Google offered $5.3 billion. Google was rejected in December 2010.

They now have a few competitors:  LivingSocial, Group Swoop and Scoop Street have tried to cash in, as have social networks like Facebook, with Places, and Foursquare, with Deals.

The main market of Groupon is composed of young, educated women. Deals are often focused on health, fitness and beauty.

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Social Brand Visibility: Connotea (Great Academic Tool)

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Connotea has been in operation since 2004, but is not widely known because it caters mainly to scientists, researchers and clinicians’ communities. It is a free management service; it is a social network bookmarking service, similar to del.icio.us where users can save links to their favorite sites.

Although it is aimed primarily for the scientific community, it is growing among other academic disciplines; it incorporates special functions for academic resources.

Connotea is linked to a number of scientific sites and collects metadata for the page or article being bookmarked, including author and publication information. When saving a page to Connotea, users tag the articles with keywords of their choice so they can retrieve the information easily.

To make it easier on researchers the site has the capability to export the references in RIS format to a citation manager program, which means it is possible to save references without bibliographic software. It also allows easy sharing of bookmarks with colleagues.

As for the social aspect of this website, it recognizes what people have bookmarked and alerts them to related material. It also provides RSS feeds that allow users to keep track of interesting articles published by the websites they have bookmarked.

Each user can comment any number of times on any bookmark in his library, and comments from different users are combined to display a chronological, and conversational, thread about a resource.

References can be accessed from any computer, and can be saves with just one click, without leaving the page you are viewing at the moment.

Essentially you can create a library of important articles for research and study. There is nothing to download to your computer and there is no need for cutting and pasting. References can be public, private or shared with a selected group.

As of November 2010, Connotea had about 40,000 visitors a month and has 6,557 sites linking in.

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Social Brand Visibility: Multiply, Social Media for Grown Ups

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Another way to look at, and benefit from, social media aside from the ubiquitous Facebook, is a site called Multiply – a social media site that has been in existence since 2004 and is just now gathering speed, after many improvements and modifications.

While Facebook is hip, young and aimed at teenagers and young adults, Multiply’s average users range from the late 20s to the upper 30s. Facebook wants to help you increase the number of your virtual friends, while Multiply aims to help you stay in touch with your existing, real friends, colleagues and family.

This social network grew nicely throughout the years. As of September 2010 it has 20 million unique visitors. A small fraction of what Facebook has, but not to be discounted with.

Multiply allows its users an easy upload of pictures, videos and music. Each user who has a contact list on the site, gets his own page which he can customize and on which he can post text or media. It means having the capability to have your own blog among the users of the community. Another helpful feature allows users categorize their contact lists to groups like family, friends, co-workers etc. and decide, very easily, who gets to see the new post.

Since 2009, Multiply is offering a premium service. For about $10 a year, the site can be used as a digital locker. You can upload all your family photos and videos (up to 20 minutes long), in high resolution, to safeguard your family memories and other important pictures. That service allows for easy access and sharing. You can import all your photos from Google’s Picasa and Microsoft’s Photo gallery.

Of course the social side should not be forgotten. Easy access to friends, family or schoolmates. Easy sharing of videos and links.

Multiply has a Social Newsreader. This is a collection of not only the user’s posts but those of his contacts and groups. It is customizable, so users can set filters to show specific posts only.

There’s a section for reviews, recipes etc. and a marketplace to showcase items people want to trade or sell.  You can have your own business page on the site, easily upload photos of your products and connect to your website.

A social media site for adults who don’t feel their co-workers need to see all the baby’s new pictures. But grandma will surely be delighted.

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Can you buy Reviews? The new marketing tools to beat the system?

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There are many sources for reviews on the web to help your product or service get the attention it deserves. It is also a great way to find out what the public thinks about you.  Some are well known like Amazon.com but there are many others that can be a valuable resource too. Some of the sources for reviews are targeted towards specific products but most are varied.

If you are an author of a self published book you might want to check out Kirkus Discoveries reviews. This can help your book get noticed by readers and includes a review of your book on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. If chosen your book review may be featured in a monthly newsletter that is read by journalists, school librarians, publishers, and booksellers. To have your book read and reviewed can be quite pricey, starting at $425, but the rewards can be great.

Another site that is recommended by many people is ReviewMe.com. They do not allow advertisers to require positive reviews but note that at the worst case most reviewers will only give constructive criticism even if they are not particularly pleased with the product.

SponsoredReviews.com is another well rated source for reviews. They have a great selection of blog writers and start their pricing at just five dollars per post. Smorty.com is another source that has strict requirements for their participating bloggers which should ensure that reviews draw in the right traffic to your product or service.

Many of the sources for reviews pay bloggers to write about your product and post it on their blog. There is also the opportunity for link backs through the information posted on the blogs. The more popular the blogs the more traffic you should receive from link backs.

There are many other sources for reviews that might be of interest; BuyBlogReviews.com, Linkworth.com, and ReviewParty .com are just a few of them. Reviews can add to your brand image so you want to connect with reviewers that will review you in a positive light.

There are many marketing tools on the web today and product and service reviews are one of the best. There is also a market for blog writers who don’t mind writing a review of products and services that they have tried and use. These sources for reviews will help you connect with people who want to tell people what they think about your company.

Beware:

Customers are not without intelligence, if you get caught with false reviews they will leave honest ones, especially with companies like yelp that have strict protocals to et your name be dragged through the mud.

Take A One Up! Lets look at how someone is using reviews in a positive light and pushing away the chance that you think its a fake review.

Petri Plumbing & Healting uses scanned copies of their review cards that have been hand written by their customers! It doesn’t stop there as they also have text copies of some of the reviews, likley for SEO purposes.

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How to be Proactive about Social Networking and protect your Brand

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Social networking is here to stay and if you want to stay in business you had better learn to proactively manage it.  It involves more than setting up a Facebook page or Twitter account, it involves searching, responding, and making sure there are positive things said about you on the web. It also involves employee training so rules are defined before a problem occurs.

  • Reserve Your Spot

The first step in getting involved in social networking should involve setting up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other pertinent groups. This will prevent someone else from setting up a page using the moniker that you would like to be known by. It also prevents fake pages that are set up as if they are your business or entity without proper permissions.

  • Monitor Your Social Networking Page

Once you have set up your page or account, you should post information that may be of interest to others and information that contributes to your brand image. Most importantly though, you should monitor your pages for links to porn sites and other unwanted attention. It reflects poorly on a brand if undesirable posting are posted on your Facebook account and it is left for everyone to see.

  • Search for Yourself or Brand

On a regular basis, you should perform a search for your name, business, etc. This will allow you to find out what is being said about you and yours on the web. If you discover untruths you should contact the source and ask for them to be removed. If the things that are written are undesirable but true, it is time to start damage control by responding or burying the unfavorable comments.

  • Plan a Response

If unfavorable information is recent and growing in number, you should carefully plan to respond to customer concerns. Customer trust is more important than privacy in today’s changing world. This can be a learning experience for all involved since you may see where you can improve your brand image by listening to what people are saying about it.

  • Read the Fine Print

Facebook is a great tool for social networking but all involved in posting to the social media page should be aware of a clause in Facebook’s TOS. “We take an…irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute….” This clause is in effect even after a Facebook membership has been terminated.

***This is important to the business user as well as the individual since many employers study social networking sites before making a hiring decision. A 2008 article on PC World stated that twenty percent of employers admitted checking an applicant’s social networking profile before making a decision to hire. In 2009, Careerbuilder.com reported that number had risen to forty-five percent. A March 2010 survey by Microsoft discovered that seventy percent of hiring managers had rejected an applicant due to information they found online***

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Social Brand Visibility: Gowalla, Mobile Web

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A relatively unknown as of yet, Gowalla is a mobile and web service that allows people to connect, communicate and win prizes for their effort. It helps people keep up with their friends, share and comment about favorite places and discover new ones.

Users can share their physical place with friends and family using GPS locator that lets people know where you are physically, so you can get together. Gowalla is geographically available in over 7,500 cities around the world and has categorized listings of businesses and location-based listing to search from. It has a social “to do” lists called Trips, and rewards users when accomplishing stuff, like checking in to an establishment or posting a good review of a place. The items can be picked up and dropped, and they are giving out a lot of prizes.

You can receive pings when your friends check in or ‘shout’, and you can meet other Gowalla users who happen to be in the same location as you.

Founded in 2007, and launched in 2009, this Austin Texas Company is the brain child of Josh Williams and Scott Raymond. It is a competitor to Foursquare and had a similar launch. Foursquare took off immediately and now Gowalla is catching up with them.

According to Williams, Gowalla has over 600,000 active users and sees about 20,000 check-ins a day. It is ranked 3,216 in US traffic.

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Top Ten Twitter Tools for 2011: Used by Banks and Businesses

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Twitter accounts are showing up in unexpected places, Citi Bank is training one hundred customer service agents to use Twitter to handle customer questions as well as complaints. This training is being done in expectation of a flood of Tweets as Citi representatives are being prepped to develop customer followings through Twitter.

On a smaller scale the Tofino Brewing Co of British Columbia, Canada is using Twitter to reap words of encouragement and to publicize important events such as the recent launch of their website on the internet. Besides being a way to communicate events easily to followers they feel it is an indispensable tool to reach the twenty-five to thirty-five year old age group.

The top ten Twitter tools that these companies and many other businesses use today to manage their followers, etc. are:

  1. CoTweet – a workflow management tool used by Citi, Coca-Cola, and Delta Air Lines is specifically designed for use with social networking. CoTweet assists banks with the creation of an audit trail, keeping track of conversations, as well as managing marketing campaigns and providing better customer service.
  2. TweetDeck – is useful for serious business users and people that want to save time by organizing their tweets. TweetDeck also allows you to connect through multiple Twitter accounts as well as FaceBook simultaneously.
  3. Sign in with Twitter – allows users to connect their Twitter account with third-party services in as little   as one click. This tool lets people interact with Twitter from your website.
  4. Nearby Tweets – lets you find twitterers near your area; your search can also be limited by radius and keywords
  5. Twello – is a search directory of people by their area of expertise, profession or other attributes that are listed in the users’ personal profiles on Twitter.
  6. Tweetmeme – A resource to see the most recent news and trends within your industry.
  7. Tweepler – allows you to sort through new followers and accept them or ignore them. This application also shows the followers’ stats and their last three tweets in one screen view.
  8. Twimailer – a free email client that allows you to receive email notifications when your Twitter account gets new followers. The emails contain the follower’s location, stats along with their recent tweets. Twimailer also gives you the ability to follow someone back without having to log into Twitter.
  9. Monitter – is a web-based tool that allows monitoring of Twitter in real-time for    mentions of specified keywords.
  10. Twitterfeed – allows you to easily feed your blog posts to Twitter.

One of the greatest things about using Twitter to promote your business is that it is free. Some of the tools used to manage Tweets are not free but many people find them invaluable and don’t mind paying for the benefits.

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Brand Marketing, not Brand Advertising! Difference?

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Establishing a Brand is most successful when the marketing campaign is performed in a consistent manner that projects the image that the brand stands for. In the case of tangible goods this will affect the packaging, logo, advertisements, and quality of the product delivered to the public. The same principle is true for intangible goods there are just slight differences in the branding process.

Just as a brand is the sum of people’s perception of a name, a company logo, the products carrying the brand, and the packaging of the product. Marketing is the strategy with how the brand is utilized, this can be anything from placement to targeting. This is different from advertising, as advertising is part of marketing execution. While you can advertise something in the local paper, on the internet or even with radio, it is the marketing plan that decides what is going to be presented and how, for the specific purpose of accomplishing brand recognition and the long term call to action.

One Fraction of an Example:

  • Advertising – 3 Month Banner Ad on a website. The banner ad has the company name and offers 20% off with mention of this ad.
  • Marketing – A strategic placement of a 3 month banner ad to support the brand image that offers 20% OFF “product” with the donation of a nonperishable good for the local high schools food drive.

Advertising in this case is the action of getting the word out, marketing is the art of strategic placement of different advertising means to engage the general public and create additional sources beyond the first form of advertising. The marketing example here still offers a discount, but has engaged the consumer in the sense of “community support” and developed cross promotion from the would be customers in the school and it’s students. The consumer experience is presented as a great deal, helping out a good cause. When they leave the experience should have been consistent from entering the location (visiting the website) and leaving. When it comes time to make a purchase again, they will recall your brand as a positive experience with value and be drawn back.

Loyalty to Brands

People become loyal to brands and that loyalty may come from many different areas. They may be attracted by the packaging or a commercial they see. It can be as simple as a color scheme and of course the customer will expect quality. Quality is always important since you want someone to purchase your products or services more than one time.  Maintaining a brand is a major part of any marketing plan.

Customers are Fickle

Once a brand has become established, anything done to change the design of the packaging or the way the brand is advertised must be done with caution. Customers are fickle, and it is very easy for them to forget your unproven and time tested brand. It is also easy for a brand to become unrecognizable to a consumer who may decide to buy another product since they can’t find what they are looking for.

Challenges to Marketing a Brand

Brand recognition can be very tricky and many people will switch brands when a product becomes unfamiliar looking to them. They may even perceive that the quality of the product or service has changed even if it is exactly the same. This creates challenges to the marketers who are paid to advertise the brand.

Trial and Error

Discovering the right way to market a brand can be a game of trial and error. This may require a lot of research into the buying habits of those loyal to a brand. The important thing is that someone is paying attention when the marketing plan changes and stops the changes if they are not being embraced by buyers of the brand.

Marketing Must Meet Customer Expectations

The marketing of a brand must remain consistent with what people expect of the brand. Their perception of the brand has a lot to do with why they purchase it. If that perception is ever tarnished it is possible to lose a good customer over a failed marketing plan to increase market share.

The challenge to marketing a brand is to attract new customers while maintaining a consistent feel with the brand. Marketing must keep some life in the product or service offered without alienating loyal customers. This keeps the brand strong and vibrant and prevents customer sentiment from becoming stale.

Summary:

It is my opinion that the development of a brand is the first stage in any successful business.

  • What do you offer?
  • How do you offer it?
  • What will it look/feel like?
  • What will it be associated with?

Now build a perception of it around what you have discovered here and with what need this product or business is meeting. Decide how you are going to market it, then decide which advertising means will help you accomplish your marketing goals to build that brand recognition.

TIME!!! It takes time to build consistent brand recognition, if your budget it $10,000 then make sure you invest smaller portions of that 10,000 for a longer period of time. The big banner ad for $1,000 a month will not bring the same consistent value as two smaller banner ads at $500 a month, and $500 more a month in community outreach and support. Spread it around a little and make it consistently last. Before moving forward consider how  this “spend” will fit into the brand in the next year, five years and ten years.

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