Integrated Brand » branding

Plain Talk
June 22nd, 2010

The art of plain talk is critical for anyone who has a message that needs to be understood by someone else. Whether you’re a marketer, a teacher or even someone who emails a lot at work, your writing can either win someone over or just create confusion.

Google the topic and you’ll find a ton of rules like avoid euphemisms, bullet your points, make it short, only use words with 3 consonants or less, etc.

I simply say: Picture an actual person from your target audience in front of you. If you wouldn’t say it out loud, don’t put it in writing.

The better you understand your target audience, the stronger your writing will be. You might need to channel your inner 6^th grader to simplify the message or use the latest slang to build rapport—whatever techniques help you clarify it for them, do it.

- Bianca Abate

The Curiosity Factor
May 24th, 2010

What sparks your curiosity or motivates you to take action? Interests obviously vary from person to person, but there’s one consistent factor that significantly impacts our ability to draw others in: simplicity.

People gravitate toward concepts that are easy to understand in a few words yet still poke at the imagination. The goal of a message should be: when people hear about it, they ask questions.

Spanx is a great example. If I told you that Spanx are “body shapers” would you be interested in finding out more? How would your impression change if I called them Power Panties? A girdle?

Body shaper is a gender-neutral description that’s easy to understand—it’s obviously slimming. And their sub-brand Power Panties works really well in targeting women while fighting the stigma of control-top undergarments. Most importantly, upon hearing it you probably have questions. What do they look like? How do they work? Who wears them? And so on. It’s clear yet thought provoking.

Capturing that special element to compel people to action is less about wordsmithing and more about figuring out the key concepts you want to focus on. And those drilled-down concepts form your brand’s foundation. Examples:

Home Depot- Home improvement center for the do-it-yourselfer
The Simpsons- Dysfunctional family cartoon sitcom
Staples- Office supply ordering made easy
Levi’s- Classic American jeans

Ultimately, it’s this over-arching concept that helps you answer the fundamental “why?” question for your customers. Leverage your first impression by giving an easy-to-digest tidbit that hints at that “why,” and their curiosity will bring them to you with an appetite for more.

- Bianca Abate

GoTime.com’s Brand Formula
April 21st, 2010

In a hyper-connected, over-communicative world, the simplest ideas are often the most compelling, which GoTime.Com discovered with a website that began as an online event, club and restaurant directory.

The happy hour tab, initially a minor aspect of the site, quickly became the most popular section—no surprise given the economic climate at the time. And the creators quickly saw and acted on that trend in the right way by taking happy hours to the nth degree and making it the site’s focus.

Thus, an ingenious happy hour directory was born (accessible via the web or iPhone/Android app) that puts the city’s drinking deals at your fingertips. Check it out and you’ll find all the happy hours within your geographic radius with detailed info regarding prices, times, reviews, and additional features like “water view” or “cute staff.” And, it’s just been launched nationwide in 35 cities and counting.

But the best part? Their brand’s key strength lies in how they’ve thought critically about deepening their user relationship well beyond their level of technological prowess. “Some people ask us why we don’t charge for our app, but that feels like an oxymoron. It’s our mission to save people money and it just doesn’t feel right to charge $2 for an app when people are on a budget. We’d rather you take that money and put it toward buying another round,” says co-founder Jeff Khadavi.

It’s clear these guys are serious about putting the “happy” in happy hour, but how do they go about delivering on that goal?

By looking at what’s happening in the market and responding to it in their unique way.
Getting focused. Like GoTime.com learned, it’s better to excel at the one thing people care most about, versus being mediocre at a lot of things that aren’t relevant.
Making it simple. If it’s not simple, it won’t stick.
Being flexible. As Jeff Khadavi puts it, “Early stage companies have to adapt to navigate the waters and make something out of whatever arises.”

- Bianca Abate

Five Opening Day Lessons from Brand Red Sox
April 5th, 2010

For my hometown Red Sox, 86 years of Wait-Till-Next-Year ended in 2004 with the team’s first championship since 1918. However, the Red Sox brand renaissance started long before three-plus million jammed the streets of Boston for that celebratory Rolling Rally. In fact, Fenway Park hasn’t had an open seat since May 2003, a record streak currently standing at 551 consecutive sellouts.

While a hundred years of brand history can’t be dismissed, much of the credit can be given to the fresh blood that bought the team from a family trust in 2002. With a renewed focus on the customer (and organizational success on the field), the Red Sox have marketed themselves into a place in baseball – and business – history.

Here are five lessons from Brand Red Sox you can use to hit your own branding home run:

LESSON 1: Develop your brand around something you can control.

After 2004, experts were predicting the end of the Red Sox brand. How could the ‘lovable losers’ ever overcome their greatest success? How could the team replace the shared purpose that 86 years of losing had lent the fan base?

Simple – they built their brand around things they could control: history and tradition. Some traditions are old (such as Friendly Fenway) and some are new (“Sweet Caroline” during the 8^th inning). Today’s uniforms have been largely the same since 1933; ditto for Fenway’s unique shade of green. These elements carry the weight of brand continuity regardless of who is playing (and whether or not they win). The brand does not strive for relevancy; instead, it has defined what is relevant and what is not.

The lesson? Establish who you are as a brand and make that your own. Just make sure that your associations are valued by your customers, are able to be owned over time and in the competitive marketplace, and are things you do well as a business.

LESSON 2: Sell a customer experience.

Baseball is an emotional sell. ‘America’s pastime’ has strong associations with a shared national history. Consumers of baseball are not just looking for a winning team, they are looking for a story, a connection – and an experience. Red Sox Nation (a team-sponsored fan club) was launched in 2004 and offers a selection of benefits including a ‘citizenship card’ and a variety of behind-the-scenes benefits. But most importantly, it gives fans a deeper experience and a ‘card carrying’ identification with the brand.

Even if you sell emotionless widgets, you are still in the end dealing with customers who buy (or balk) on emotion and justify with their brain. Examine your customer touchpoints for ways you can add and improve emotional experiences. If, like the Red Sox, you have a subcontractor (their concessionaire is Aramark) remember that your customers don’t see that distinction. If the beer’s warm, or the service’s rude, you’re still to blame.

LESSON 3: “Yankees Suck!”

Other than the obvious lesson here, remember that competitive differentiation is important in every industry and that a little rivalry rarely hurts.

LESSON 4: Make a commitment to yourselves and your customers.

Your brand is your promise to your customers. What exactly is the level of service you provide? Is your organization aligned and incented towards achieving these goals?

The Red Sox management team has succeeded in clearly identifying what they provide. GM Theo Epstein has openly committed to building a team to win 95 games each year. Similarly, new ownership quelled Bostonians’ fears shortly after taking over the team by committing to renovating Fenway Park rather than a tear-down-and-rebuild scheme that had been on the table. Eight years later, Fenway is larger, cleaner, more accessible, and every bit as characteristic as it ever was (and is still the centerpiece of the brand).

LESSON 5: Have fun.

Beyond giving you a reason to get out of bed in the morning, bringing fun into your business will come through in your brand. There are times to be serious, of course, but the more often you can say ‘Play Ball!’ with yourself, your customers, and your employees, the stronger and more resilient your business can become. Be your brand – but be yourself as well.

–Dan Liska

Tune in to The Best Business Show and listen to Lynn Parker on naming
April 1st, 2010

The Best Business Show will interview Lynn Parker about our naming process this Sunday (4/4) at 7pm PST. Just go to www.kvor.com and click the “listen live” icon on the top right-hand corner.

And to read about our naming process, check out Lynn’s article on WomenEntrepreneur.com, “Accomplish the Impossible: Choose a Name.”

The Facebook Page Master’s True Challenge
March 25th, 2010

Life as a Facebook fan page master can be tough. Learning the functionality and navigating many application choices requires a great deal of patience and gumption because there’s no right or wrong way to manage your page.

There are tons of helpful blogs out there that list helpful apps and tips, but this is not one of them. Instead, I offer help in answering a tougher question that we face:

“If I’m the voice of my organization, what the heck do I post and say?”

The answer lies in:

Understanding your audience
Using your brand as a filter

Understanding your audience means you know what they like, don’t like and how to add value to them. What makes social media enticing is that it requires people to run it—it can’t be automated. Understanding their needs informs your interactions and builds a human connection behind the corporate entity. How to start? Just listen. Tap into the areas online where your customers and prospects are already hanging out and look for mentions of your org with free tools such as Google Alerts and Addict-o-matic. By listening, you can learn about relevant topics and turn what’s hot into ways people can connect with you.

Using your brand as a filter means that before posting or tagging anything, you weigh its content to make sure it aligns with the brand you’ve created offline. In an ideal world, you already know the whats, hows and whys behind your brand—this is your playbook. Capturing the spirit of your org consistently over time demonstrates your authenticity and builds relationships. An easy way to do this is to think of your org as a person. Does the tone or content match something she would post?

Good luck to all the Facebook fan page masters out there and if you need any help, leave a comment. And for an example, check out www.Facebook.com/ParkerLePla.

- Bianca Abate

Enhance your online brand with social networking
March 24th, 2010

Social networking is, of course, the hot button topic in online marketing. Low cost / high traffic platforms like Facebook are extremely attractive to brand owners after years of paying for search optimization or fancy media buys. But Tweeting alone does not an online brand make. Instead, look at social networking as a part of your larger strategy to acquire and retain customers.

Of course, the first step in social marketing (or really any pursuit) is knowledge: know your company and how it interacts, and know your customers and how they buy. If you sell hardware in a residential neighborhood, your networking strategies will be very different from an owner who sells vintage clothing near the university. Both brick-and-mortars are seeking to drive sales and awareness but their customer demographics, technographics, and buying patterns are widely different. Consider also that a vintage clothes enthusiast might be more likely than a hammer buyer to see their purchase as making them a part of the store’s community and thus be more inclined to include the business as a part of their online network.

Given that you know who you are and who you serve, the challenge is then to tailor your online presence to build and strengthen your customer relationships not only by providing an integrated brand experience to reiterate your key differentiators but also by creating and delivering greater value for the customer:

In the end, remember that today’s consumers demand authenticity. Social networking adds an additional level of challenge to that requirement because, online, customers interact directly with your business as if it were one of their Friends. They are not simply looking for a product or service but instead an experience – and only those businesses that provide such will succeed as social marketers.

– Dan Liska

The dynamic tension between branding and SEO
March 19th, 2010

Most marketers have probably noticed that branding (what we want to say about ourselves) and search engine optimization (trying to figure out what people want us to say) are sometimes in opposition to one another. For instance, a client of ours that is a custom home and home remodeling company is developing their brand around the experience they provide, yet when people are searching for remodeling companies, they don’t search for “remodeling experience”. They search for kitchen remodeling, or bath remodeling or custom home builders.

So, how do these two seemingly different marketing approaches work together? Well, you wouldn’t want to throw your brand out the window when doing search marketing. You want to use it to inform a few key things:
- Keyword quality–if you are living your brand well, you probably know your audience well. Use what you know about your audience to inform the types of keywords you choose. In our client’s case, they are trying to reach professional women, age 35-55 who are looking for high end remodeling services and not just a contractor. Therefore, they want to choose keywords like DESIGN, LUXURY HOME BUILDERS, etc. rather than words like contractor or remodel, as a) these will be searched by many of the wrong types of audiences for them and therefore be too competitive to make it cost effective, and b) they don’t really reflect what the audience they are targeting will value.
- Ad language–if you are doing Google Adwords or other paid search marketing, you will want to make sure your ad language uses both the keywords you have established for your audience, as well as the brand benefit they will receive with your company specifically.
- Landing pages–when developing landing pages to pay off your keywords, use your brand to inform the language, imagery and design you use to set you apart and give the search user a reason to choose you over others. In this game, it’s not really about search volume, it’s about stickiness of your landing page with the right people (your targets).

–Jen Travis

Branding’s help with mergers: delivering value arises from shared culture
March 8th, 2010

I’m speaking at ACHE (American College of Healthcare Executives) in Chicago in a couple of weeks with client Neighborcare Health, on the subject of branding and how it can help smooth the merger process. Our key message? You can’t do successful fundraising or service delivery if the various clinics aren’t bought into the larger promise of the umbrella organization. And a branding process is a great way to get newly acquired clinics to see they share culture: they are all providing the same value, for the same reasons. At Neighborcare, branding helped the staff work together in harmony, with the benefits of more efficiencies, increased donor engagement, and better teamwork.

-Lynn Parker