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Posts Tagged ‘Branding’

Today is the world of Technology Professionals. Everything is possible by using internet such as communication, shopping and marketing etc. It is also possible to do Personal Branding in today’s technology world. Personal Branding does not mean talking only about your-self, it means to promote your-self in such a way that you are able to seek other’s attention by making an unforgettable image. Simply, Personal Branding is a process by which you can encorporate or promote your name or business in your e-mail address so that it is easier for people to remember you or your brand.

Personal Branding plays an important role for fresher or job seekers who are in the search of job. If you are a job seekers than you must have minimum 5 to 10 months to network and create a unique name and picture, this promotion might be valuable. By this method you must got a job after 10 months but if you need a job quickly, job seekers can able to identify what the employers want and what qualities and skills they require. By this you can have a section for your resume. You can have a section for your different skills, and you can have a section for projects and results. You can have an introduction video or video resume of your stuff that’s under two minutes.

A Professional mail helps us you in Self promotion. From all Internet activities Email is used many times. Almost everybody today has their own email accounts. Everyone is able to share; send messages to each others with whom they are connected. Various internet services like Yahoo, Gmail provide free email account. But if you have a business enterpriser, Professional mail can help you to attract more and more customers toward your service or product without spending any rupee in advertisement. It is an effective method of personal branding and helps to promote your product and services. For creating a professional email in Namedmail firstly, you have to choose a domain name that is relevant  to your business or your name or any name related with your brand. For example-roger@john.com, roger@infosis.com, roger@nike.com. After  this register a domain with Namedmail  based on the domain you selected in the previous step. Set up your new email address following the instructions provided by your host provider or email address service provider. Namedmail is a paid host provider Now so you have to pay amount specified by the site by various resources such as PayPal or WebMoney  or Visa. Now you can able to use your new e-mail for promotion of your business or brand.
There are three factors supported by professional branding:- Proposition, Differentiation, and Marketability. Professional needs to maintain a professional sounding email address, separate from their work email address and separate from their personal email address. These are the easiest and efficient way of personal branding.

Companies spend weeks examining and experimenting with tag lines and logos to develop a marketing message that they believe will work. A design team may spend hours of overtime just debating over which colors would look best on the logo.

The logo will become the brand, which will essential define who the company is. Though the design is important, it is crucial to make sure that the company, its actions, and its employees all reflect the vision and message you have established.

Though it may not seem like it all of the time, marketing is an internal force that is displayed outwardly. The employees need to believe in the products and services you are selling and the need to exemplify the mission of the brand.

If they are not, you will have no chance of convincing the public that you practice what you preach. In other words, you will be losing customers before you even make them.

The first goal of your new business should be to synchronize your brand personality, values, and corporate culture. You also need to get your employees to believe in and live out the values that the company has set forth as their central message.

This will be much easier if you choose people who exemplify this right off the bat in the hiring process. You need to make sure there is an incentive for workers to live by this code so they will be more willing to help out with the image and success of the business.

You also need to make sure that management reinforces and continually explains the brand values and behaviors, and whey they are so important. Communication within the company and having a unified message will ensure a seamless operation where the company mission and values become second nature for employees.

If you think that less time should be spent on employees and more time on customers, then you are missing an important opportunity to be successful. Your staff are the people who interact with the customer on a daily basis by greeting them, assisting them in the stores, and making sales; if they do not like the company it will show.

Treating your staff with respect and making sure that they are happy will better ensure that your customers are being treated well. This kind of support will give your company more opportunities to increase customer satisfaction and return rate; which will equate to increases sales and revenue.

A strong brand integrates multiple components; including customer interactions, employee communications, corporate philosophy and advertising/marketing efforts. Your values and mission extends to your employees, customers, the media, and even the general public.

If these components do not consistently reinforce your mission, customers will become dissatisfied. The negative impact of their perception, especially if they voice their opinions to other potential customers or the media, could have an extremely negative effect on your business.

This has the potential to destroy your brand equity and create misconceptions about your company in the market. This problem could lead prospective customers, employees and investors to pass on your organization.

On the other hand, consistency throughout all levels of the organization helps drive an organization to grow and prosper. Strong brands can drive an increase in sales.

The company is better suited to attract and retain the best employees. Vendors can see value in your company and look to establish partnerships with your business, while investors will see the business and your equity as a valuable commodity.

Maintaining consistency is essential to building a strong brand. You must establish consistency throughout all aspects of your organization to do this.

After you set the standard, you must constantly evaluate your actions. Establish checkpoints for each aspect of the business that interacts with customers and the general public.

Ensure that each employee is empowered to identify and address inconsistencies in your brand. It only takes a select few to dispel the image you are trying to build up.

What do personal branding and zettabytes have to do with each other? First let’s answer the question “what is a zettabyte.”

Last month Google stated, “This year the planet’s digital content will blast through the zettabyte barrier. This is about one million times the information stored in all of the libraries in the United States.”

According to the annual survey of the global digital output by International Data Corporation, the current total amount of global data is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes sometime during 2010. This is equivalent to the amount of data that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on the microblogging site Twitter continuously for a century.

A zetabyte is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Wow, that’s a lot of data! Enough said.

Let’s just say there is a lot of information stored on the Internet.

Somewhere in all of this information is your personal brand and your personal branding website. Also, buried in all this data is your product and service website. Perhaps you have implement additional Internet personal branding tactics increasing your percentage of bytes on the Internet through your blog marketing efforts, your article marketing efforts, your press releases, and your videos and podcasts efforts.  All of this data generated by you is creating a drop in the ocean of bytes stored on the Internet. So how do you get found in this enormous sea of data?

Let’s look at how Doctor Lewis Harper, D.C. did it. Dr. Harper recently moved his practice to a new city where he was unknown. He also expanded his practice to include new techniques and treatments for health problems. And, he gave his practice a new name.

His new location was pretty quiet for the first few weeks. However, he began consistently doing the basic search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO) techniques he learned from MyMark™. He spent time learning and implementing the search engine marketing techniques and social media marketing methods including blog marketing, article marketing, press release marketing, video marketing, and podcast marketing.

Initially, he stuck with blog marketing alone. Within a few weeks, in some areas, such as Fibromyalgia Treatment he was able to get first page search engine results. However, overall, he wasn’t being found on the Internet. So, Dr. Harper expanded his approach to include article marketing, press release marketing, video marketing, and podcast marketing.

A few weeks later his name moved from page twenty-something to number one of page one on a Google search. More importantly, searches for various health issues including Fibromyalgia, Kidney treatment, Amnesia treatment, and others in his new town now return number one results in Google searches for Dr. Harper and his practice.

Through consistent search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO) practices, Dr. Harper went from being lost in the zettabytes of data to number one in Google search engine results. By consistently applying good SEO and SMO techniques your personal brand will rise to the top of the zettabytes of data on the Internet as well.

Unless you’re a marketing or advertising company, you may not understand the importance of branding your company. Branding goes much farther than a logo and a color, branding is your company’s image, what it stands for, what it values and believes in. Branding your business is an important step in creating a reputable and profitable company. A few great ways to brand you company are:

Beyond the Logo – When you think of McDonald’s or Wal-Mart, you can clearly visualize their logo and colors, even the typeface they use for their name is very distinct. Big companies who have successfully branded their image can easily remove the company name and everyone would still know what company it was. When you’re branding, don’t just think of color and logo, but think of the kind of emotion you want to elicit.

A spa, for instance, may want a relaxing brand of pastels and flowing lines, whereas a night club would want the exact opposite.

Mixed Media – All forms of print and electronic media should be branded to fit your company’s ideals. If you have business cards and a website, they should look very similar. The same should go for any flyers or presentations that you give out to clients. They should be able to use your business card as a guide to finding your website, your physical location and even your ads. Once all forms of media are tied together, you need to make the feeling internal by branding your offices and workspaces.

Office – Your office should carry out the branding of your company, whether clients and customers will be visiting or not. Branding your office is a great way to show your employees that you’re the kind of business they want to work for. If you’re a cutting-edge, innovative company, you will want your employees to always be thinking outside the box. To do this, you want a creative atmosphere. Using a clear dry erase board and an industrial workspace can help put your employees in a innovative and forward-thinking mentality the second they walk in the office.

Mission – Not only should the office look a certain way, but the mentality of the owners and operators should be united. Creating and following corporate mission statements helps to show what you value as a company. If customer and community service are important, keep it in the mission statement and make sure that your employees practice it daily. A brand should be an all-encompassing feel for your entire company, and starting internally is one of the best branding techniques.

Why does a company need to be concerned about branding inside the organization? After all, isn’t branding supposed to be about how prospects and customers view your business?

Consider this. Won’t your customers have a better experience with your brand (aka your business) if your employees treat the customers exactly how you want, can accurately answer all customer questions and quickly resolve problems, and communicate how important each and every customer is to you? Of course they will!

So, what is internal branding? It is a strategy that establishes and strengthens your competitive positioning from within. Your internal branding objectives are to connect employees, board members (and volunteers if you are a nonprofit) to your brand; cultivate a passionate, highly engaged workforce; create a seamless, differentiated experience for your target audiences; and maintain your edge in the market (at a minimum) or surpass your competition (if you can).

Internal branding can yield dramatic results.

When employees respond in ways that your target audiences expect, they reward you with business. Also, consistent, professional behavior is perceived as competence, particularly when there’s an expectation about a level of technical expertise. Haven’t you ever had an interaction with a business (electronics store, a bank, a billing department, health insurance company, navigating and completing an on-line transaction through a web-only business), and found yourself thinking “They obviously don’t know what they’re doing”? If you want repeat business, you better be sure that you can deliver on consistency.

Last, and certainly not least, information remains one of a company’s most valuable assets (after its employees) for achieving a competitive edge.

Information comes from many sources and in many forms — formalized market research, comments from customers, and feedback from employees (what’s working, what’s not, how can we do it better). Once you have the information, then you have to evaluate it to decide what it means (identification of trends, problems, and opportunities). The more you inform your employees, the more your employees know how they can help your customers, prospects, and business partners. That’s how you generate repeat business and great referrals. It’s your direct line from the inside out.

So, work to make your brand have a vibrant life inside your organization on a daily basis. There’s a developing body of evidence that delivering engaged internal brand communications can impact your bottom line in a dramatic, positive way. According to that same Watson Wyatt study mentioned in the earlier posting, significant improvement in communication effectiveness is associated with a 29.5% increase in a company’s market value.

Start today by tapping into your business culture for successful internal branding:
• Synchronize brand personality, value and organizational culture.
• Get employees behind the brand through actions that demonstrate “one company, one vision, one brand.”
• Reinforce and repeatedly explain the brand values and behaviors you want and need for business resilience and sustainability.

Would opt for an airline that gives your complete baggage allowance? Does the ‘safety rating’ matter? Or you simply would like to have some eye candy in the form of attractive stewardesses? The above parameters depict a few ways through which companies formulate their brand perception strategies in order to ensure a definite impact on its clients/customers, both current and prospective that plays a vital role in influencing their future buying decisions.

However, experts point out that in today’s turbulent scenario, best way to foster a company’s brand image is by looking internally and by allowing employees to serve as brand ambassadors or they can, in way more than one’ contribute immensely towards building a successful, living, employee brand.

The employee brand is an image of the organization presented to an organization’s customers and other relevant stake holders by its employee.

Here is how employees can gain through employee branding, even during though times.

a.

Prospective job seekers look forward to such organizations as a model employer capable of creating champions. Wouldn’t you take pride in being associated with such a company.

b. An employee who leaves the organisation and becomes successful outside, indirectly enhances the erstwhile company’s brand value, they always remain brand ambassadors, a title to be proud of and it also enhances your own market value.

An employee actively involved in the employee branding process is an asset to the company for he/she isn’t just an employee working for it, but someone enhancing it as well. Wouldn’t you like to be that asset?

While I am not sure we ever really lived in world that was not “demanding,” the concept of “Connective cheap louis vuitton handbags Branding” is a catchy new, well, brand of brand management that is worth checking out.

The book offers a comprehensive and detailed framework for practitioners to create a holistic brand experience that bridges the gap between strengthening the employee brand and building external brand image by synthesizing the two approaches. In more than 120 interviews with marketing professionals, branding experts, and academics, the authors (Christina Vallaster and Claudia Fisher) examine the driving forces behind the shift from traditional branding to “Connective Branding” including (the following is an excerpt from the book micro-site):

• Broadening of audiences – moving beyond a sole focus on the customer and building brand-consistent relationships with employees, investors, partners, suppliers, distributors, special interest groups and any other key stakeholders
• Networked collaboration – moving beyond the notion that the marketing department is the sole owner of the brand by empowering deputizing brand champions within the organisation and encouraging systematic collaboration with all functions touching the brand
• Living Brand Values from within – moving beyond the emphasis on external image creation and harnessing the power of employees to enact the brand, thereby creating a brand that permeates the entire organisation and cultivating authenticity
• Building Interactive Relationships – moving beyond one-way, disruptive and manipulative communication to interactive brand co-creation
• Addressing Corporate Social Responsibility strategically – moving beyond a paradigm that sees profitability and doing good as conflicting goals, and embracing CSR as a strategic opportunity that benefits both the cheap gucci handbags  company and society at large

Alright, now we’re in 2009 so this may come a little late.

But anyway, the year is still young, so here are the social media predictions for 2009 from the collective expertise of the Junta42 bloggers.

Excerpts: Marketers will get cheap coach handbags  - Twitter will be officially mainstream – Twitter will suffer a backlash – marketers will lack control over content – combining traditional media with electronic media will increase – distributed eventing – news articles with images and video syndicated in RSS feeds – content will be more focused around conversation than messaging – innovative brands will start to provide engaging content that allows them to intertwine the brand rather than push it as the primary selling point – employees across the company will be content creators – more brands will develop a personality or a persona to represent the core values of the company – laid-off journalists will find a home as “content producers” and “content managers” on the corporate side – small business comes out to play – execution is the new strategy! – more “ombudsmen,” fewer PR flacks – webinars & live or pre-recorded video events – the big challenge for brands is going to be reaching consumers without appearing to be selling anything – marketing messages will follow a less-advertising, more journalistic approach that offers relevant stories that show impact, offer counsel and demonstrate fairness.

When a company is planning to enter some international market and is looking for a suitable strategy to brand its products there, it’s always very important to appraise all the nuances in order to make the right decision. There are three possible variations of how to brand your products on the foreign market and you should choose one basic strategy which is most suitable in your particular case.

The strategy of international brand

Company operating in the international market don’t make a broad adaptation of its offers, brands and marketing to different local conditions. So, a brand, designed for domestic market is used on external markets in the same form. Such a strategy is suitable for companies whose brands and products are truly unique and they don’t face any serious competition on foreign markets. For example, Microsoft Corporation.

The strategy of global brand

Company that uses this strategy don’t adapt the concept of branding to possible national differences and use same brand name, logo and slogan all over the world (like Intel Corporation did at the beginning of its operation).

Market proposal, brand positioning and communications are identical. So, everything is originally developed for the multinational audience. Branding operations standardization leads to significant economies in terms of investments needed.

The strategy of transnational brand

Company using this strategy develops individual concepts of branding for each of foreign markets it’s interested in. Not only brand name, but also market proposals and marketing events are specially adapted to local conditions.

Nevertheless, the concept of corporate brand is quite visible and it works as a framework, which guides local adaptation. So, a brand can be positioned different ways and an appropriate price can be settled and trade policies used. High investments needed to match all local requirements, as well as the absence of benefits of standardization are negative aspects in this case.

Implementation of branding strategy involves certain difficulties. Constant adaptation is important because of changing conditions and dynamic development of the market. In addition, these three main strategies are hardly seen in their purest form in practice. In reality we are dealing with a lot of options and a wide variety of hybrid forms. Nevertheless, these strategies provide a good starting point and help to characterize a general direction of brand strategy.

Brand assets and touch points are like words in a sentence. By themselves they might have their own independent meaning, but when combined they add up to convey a larger meaning and message or voice. Everything a brand says or does has an impact on a brands voice.

Historically brands and the business they represent were viewed by the general public simply as a business, with basic economic and strategic issues to deal with. However, right now we are witnessing a shift in the way consumers think about brands. Consumers are now seeing brands more as living, breathing entities with personalities and voices all their own. As a result, brands are being asked to act more like good citizens and have an overall net positive impact on the world or at the very least to limit their negative impact.

It wasnt that long ago that the majority of consumers had no clue about a products life cycle. They didnt know or care where their food came from. They had no idea what a brands policy on energy was or if it was green. Consumers didnt think about human rights issues in the factories of the developing world.

Fast forward a decade or two. Thanks to the Internet and its 24/7 fact-sharing availability, consumers are much more informed about all facets of the way brands do businessand they have learned to care. As for brands, its not just about earning a merit badge and sleeping well at night. Being responsible and working in a sustainable manner is seen as an aid to business growth and attracting top talent.

Managed brand assets such as ads, packaging, websites, etc. communicate your message to the consumer. As such, they need to help reinforce a brands citizenship initiatives. When the consumer knows more about the good work your brand is doing in the world, brands improve the chance that consumers will select your brand over a competitor. But they need to hear it in your voice.