Search results for brand

25 Feb 2011
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

Repetitive Sounds in Brand Names Affect Moods

The Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat summarized some findings from a Journal of Marketing article titled, the Sound of Brands.

A restaurant name containing repetitive sounds puts patrons into a good mood, and they are thus more likely to order chocolate cake for dessert than fruit salad. But the effect vanishes if the name represents too great a departure from linguistic norms: 80% of participants ordered cake when they were asked to imagine they were in a restaurant called Rantifanti, compared with just 30% for Ranthfanth.

The sound of brand names can affect product evaluations. For example, names such as Coca-Cola, Hubba Bubba, Tutti Frutti, Jelly Belly, Kit Kat, Bits & Bites, Lululemon, and Tostitos might elicit positive feelings, especially when the names are spoken aloud.

Exposure to a brand name that has sound repetition in its phonetic structure and is spoken aloud produces positive affect, which favorably affects consumers’ brand evaluations, reactions to cross-selling, and product choice.

We hope you remember this as you work on your next naming and branding project.

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04 Feb 2011
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

Branding Basics

The Harvard Business Review in promoting an article for sale titled, The One Thing You Must Get Right When Building a Brand, offered some information to entice readers.

It’s wrong to think we’re entering a world in which traditional marketing activities will become irrelevant. Yet the scale and speed of social media make it urgent to get the branding basics right. The obvious danger is failing to keep pace with social media developments. An equal, less obvious danger is getting distracted by them and losing sight of the fundamentals.

We have a passion for helping you build your brand and your relationships with your customers. Call us for ideas to integrate your marketing and get everything working together.

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26 May 2010
Marketing Strategy

Brand Butlers

A recent briefing from Trendwatching.com listed “Brand Butlers” as a trend to watch. This may be the time to consider ‘service as the new sales’ to provide more service and care to jaded, time-poor, pragmatic consumers. Brand Butlers can be defined as providing instant access to supporting services and tools to pragmatic, convenience-loving consumers. This is encouragement to focus on assisting consumers to make the most of their daily lives, versus the old model of selling them a lifestyle, if not identity.

Here’s why consumers are embracing these BRAND BUTLER-style services:

  • For consumers, time, convenience, control and independence are the new currencies: this need requires B2C brands to turn many of their interactions with their customers into broader services. In short: a shift from ‘broadcasting’ to assisting.
  • Relationships with brands are now more down to earth and less reverential. From individualism to eco-concerns to decreased spending power in developed economies: for consumers, the practical and pragmatic rule.
  • Yet, in uncertain times, there’s also a consumer longing for institutions that truly ‘care‘, which is more about showing empathy and providing customers with a status fix than being purely practical. This too requires brands to master more service-oriented personae.

BRAND BUTLER services equal interaction, meaning they can provide brands with valuable feedback, metrics and other learning opportunities about what interests, drives and triggers customers.

BRAND BUTLER service categories:

  1. Transparency & ‘In the know’
  2. Saving money
  3. Finding
  4. Connectivity
  5. Health, nutrition & exercise
  6. Skills & advice
  7. Eco
  8. Tools & amenities

Examples:

  • Since 2006, personal care brand Charmin has been offering New Yorkers access to clean and comfortable restrooms in Times Square. The brand opens the free facilities during the festive period each year.
  • To launch Stove Top Quick Cups, Kraft Foods offered warmth and hot food samples at cold Chicago bus stops. In November 2008, Kraft began heating ten bus shelters to give consumers relief from the cold.
  • 3M’s Airport Privacy Havens aim to create peaceful zones in major American airports, giving business travelers privacy during important phone calls, and hiding their computer screens from the eyes of passers-by.

BRAND BUTLERS is about turning marketing into a service, and thus it is one of the most important branding trends currently out there. A start would be to establish the themes your brand is about, and dream up an integrated ‘suite’ of BRAND BUTLER services. Use the eight categories above (Transparency and ‘In the know’, Saving money, Finding, Connectivity, Health, Nutrition & Exercise, Skills & Advice, Eco, and Tools & Amenities).

When plotting your BRAND BUTLER, your ideas may revolve around existing customers. However, there’s a huge win in services that are open to non-customers, too.

We hope you see these posts in the same light, we want to share knowledge, tips for saving money, ways to find the resources you need, ways to connect you with the people and services, new skills and tools.

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11 Mar 2010
Marketing Plan

Ideas to Define Your Brand

We have posted a few articles about branding and why it is so important in marketing. We thought it might be helpful to suggest some ideas to help you refine and define your brand.

What is a brand?

  • the outside view of the company, product or service.
  • the sum of all relationships between buyer and seller.
  • the most important asset that the organization owns.
  • the symbolic embodiment of all the information connected with a product or service.
  • the set of expectations associated with a product or service.
  • what leads customers to choose you over the competition.

Questions to get your thinking started

  1. What do your employees think sets your company apart?
  2. What is your company best at?
  3. What are your core strengths?
  4. What do you offer that one else offers?
  5. What do you love about your business?
  6. What makes your employees proud?
  7. Why has your company been able to stay in business when others have failed?
  8. If your company were to close, how would you want to be remembered?

Every contact or interaction with your customers and prospects is an opportunity for you to communicate your brand

  • Sign
  • Building
  • Letterhead and business cards
  • Packaging
  • Company vehicles
  • Staff attire
  • Advertising
  • Direct Mail
  • Web site

What do people (customers, prospects, audience) experience with your:

  • Product or service
  • Pricing
  • Customer service
  • Employee attitudes and actions
  • Atmosphere of your place of business
  • Role in the community

Now that you have a clearer idea of who you are and what you are all about, how can we help you share it? Direct Mail is a great way to reach the people who most want to hear from you.

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10 Mar 2010
Marketing Plan

Help Your Brand Stand Out

Andrea Syverson suggested some ideas in Target Marketing Magazine to get you started in your thinking about how to differentiate your brand.

We like to cheer for the underdogs, they try harder. These “underdogs” seem more comfortable in their own brand skins. They are original. They are daring. They are independent thinkers.

What about your brand? I bet your customers know the answer.

Stand Out from the Crowd

What are the differences between the many companies jockeying for customers’ minds and market share these days? Is there a difference between OfficeMax, Office Depot or Staples? What differentiates Barnes & Noble from Borders?

What is different between your offering and your top two competitors? If your brand is sandwiched blandly between others, it’s time to rethink both your brand positioning and your merchandising concept. Don’t bore your customers with this sea of sameness. They deserve better.

There is no formula for authenticity. Either you are authentic or you’re not. Unfortunately, we have become accustomed to living in a faux society, where entertainment is disguised as news, celebrities are disguised as heroes and Internet connections are disguised as relationships. And, yes, there are faux brands and transaction-based companies focused on themselves and short-term profits.

In “Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want,” authors Joseph Pine and James Gilmore propose that authenticity is a completely new management discipline, and they outline three axioms for authenticity:

  1. If you are authentic, then you don’t have to say you’re authentic.
  2. If you say you’re authentic, then you’d better be authentic.
  3. It’s easier to be authentic if you don’t say you’re authentic.

This may seem simple, but it isn’t. Many brands fall back to being faux. It’s easier.

Authenticity in Action

Consumers crave the real deal. They desire companies that deliver on their promises and brands that listen and do what their taglines say they do. They seek independent thinkers, product creativity and originality in solving their problems. They want brands that respect their time.

Authentic companies have one thing in common: They are true to themselves. They beat their own drums. And, most importantly, their customers thank them for it.

Steven Covey, best known as the author of “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” writes:

The more authentic you become, the more genuine in your expression, the more people can relate to your expression and the safer it makes them feel to express themselves. That expression in turn feeds back on the other person’s spirit, and genuine creative empathy takes place, producing new insights and learnings.

We believe the same is true of brands. Authentic brands are infectious. They draw people in. Authentic brands stand out. Authentic brands feed people’s spirits. They give customers what they crave today: realness.

So, how can we help you communicate your authentic brand message?

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03 Mar 2010
Marketing Strategy

Strengthen Your Brand

Andrea Syverson recently asked some great questions for readers of Target Marketing Magazine.

Questioning is the precursor to innovation. Alfred North Whitehead, a British mathematician and philosopher, said, “The ‘silly question’ is the first intimation of some totally new development.” After years of questioning, there really are no silly questions.

Even Jerry Greenfield’s (of Ben & Jerry’s fame) lighthearted question, “If it’s not fun, why do it?” is one of utmost importance to its brand. Fun is an attribute at the top of Ben & Jerry’s brand and product fit charts. It is even a tab on the Web site.

In 2003, Frederick F. Reichheld wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called “The One Number You Need to Grow.” His research showed if brands concentrated on improving just one measure, it should be the answer to this question asked of their customers: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”

Author James Thurber wrote, “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.” What other questions is your brand grappling with, or perhaps should be grappling with, these days?

Try these steps to get things going:

Create an Environment for Questions. First, do you cultivate a question-asking environment? Without the freedom to raise questions or question decisions appropriately, your brand may have a blind spot.

Question to Build Loyalty. Secondly, can you handle the answers to tough questions? Many brands have solid customer loyalty programs in place. These are indeed important parts of retention strategies. But take a moment to turn that question around for your brand—just how loyal is your brand to your customers? What have you done for them lately?

Listen Up. Thirdly, what are your customers’ pain points? What makes them mad, frustrated or just plain tired in relation to your product, service, category or overall brand experience? If you spend time uncovering these issues and then creatively addressing them, both your customers and your competitors will take note.

There are many examples of product/service/experience rage out there. Are companies listening? Do they care?

So, take some time to question your culture, your customers and your results.

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02 Mar 2010
Buying Behavior

Brand Experience Matters to Consumers More Than Loyalty Clubs

In a recent message from the Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat, some 52% of people in a survey said their memberships in loyalty clubs (from credit cards, banks, and other companies) influence their buying decisions; but 54% said they’d give up their memberships if they had a negative product or service experience with a brand, according to the Chief Marketing Officer Council. The average U.S. household is enrolled in 14 loyalty and rewards programs.

Can we help you strengthen your ties with your customers? Is there a way that we can help you strengthen your brand?

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24 Feb 2010
Direct Mail • Marketing Strategy

What does your brand stand for?

Deliver Magazine provided some thought provoking questions for many organizations and their marketing teams.

You spend hours crashing through strategy documents, pulling out nuggets of customer insights, determining differentiators in the industry and understanding what it is that makes your corporation unique. And in the end, you have a vision of who and what your company is about. It’s that vision that helps establish relationships with customers, win over prospects and get your company noticed in this increasingly chaotic and fragmented world.

Then, after all of that strategic work, comes the execution part of the marketing plan and you decide to go digital. You send an e-mail — which looks just like any other e-mail in your best customer’s inbox.

Oh, we know, you finely tune the colors to match your brand (despite the fact you can’t calibrate how that color appears on any one monitor) or you include photography and graphics (which don’t download until the users request them) or you include the all-important link to your heavily branded Web site (although fewer than 10 percent click through).

So, maybe it’s not the optimum branding experience, but it’s cheap. Boy, is it cheap. And it’s efficient — you can reach hundreds of thousands, even millions in a single blast — and really, you’re getting the word out there.

Then the economy picks up, but your sales don’t jump as much, and at the next marketing meeting, as you’re puzzling over the numbers, someone asks why your customers aren’t so loyal anymore. What’s happened to that great relationship your brand used to have with them? And there’s a lot of this and that around the table, mutterings about “empowered consumers” and “everything’s a commodity,” and the meeting rolls on. You shrug your shoulders and concentrate on the next campaign. There’s work to do.

We understand. It’s not an uncommon problem. It’s just that, well, you could stand for something. You could put something in your customers’ hands, something branded. Imagine that: those finely tuned colors, the carefully selected images, the perfectly worded summation of what your brand is all about sitting right there in the hands of the people you most want to reach. It’s right there at their fingertips.

And inside that package, something amazing — something they could never get digitally. A sample, a tchotchke for their desk, a magnet for the fridge, a baseball bat, a brick, a salami — who knows? Something that’s amazing and brilliant and relevant, just like your brand. A piece that says “Hey, I know you,” and reminds that customer why he or she came to you in the first place and what your brand is really all about.

You could do that. But that’s direct mail, and some say that is old. No point in doing that, right?

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20 Jan 2010
Marketing Strategy • Tough Times Marketing

Branding

Now is a great time to take advantage of direct mail and other underused marketing channels.

Many businesses have shifted advertising to online efforts. Maybe this is the time to see our current economy as an opportunity. What a great occasion to increase brand advertising!

Successful brand advertising is all about building a connection with your customer, this establishes your business or product as something which is known and trusted. Brand marketing helps us trust a company and buy when we see their ads later on. One of the greatest challenges for smaller businesses is to establish a name for themselves, and a downturn actually provides an opportunity to do that because it tends to suppress brand building advertising. What a great chance to be able to jump over your competitors, especially if the market leader has curtailed their advertising spending during the downturn.

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11 Mar 2011
Advertising • Design

The Power of Color

There are many sources and resources about color and color psychology, we stumbled across this image that was a part of post.

Color's Influence on Buying Behavior

How Colors Affect Buying Behavior

There was some great information that we hope you can use in your marketing and mailing creative.

  • 93% of consumers placed visual appearance and color above other factors when shopping.
  • 85% of shoppers placed color as a primary reason for buying a particular product.
  • Color increased brand recognition by 80%.
  • Color can increase comprehension by 73%.

North American online shoppers found:

  • Yellow to be optimistic and youthful, often used to grab attention
  • Red connotes energy, increases heart rate and creates urgency, it is often used in clearance sales
  • Blue creates trust and security, it is often used by banks and businesses
  • Green is the easiest color for the eyes to process, it is associated with wealth, used to encourage relaxation in stores.
  • Orange is perceived to be aggressive, can create a call to action
  • Pink is romantic and feminine, used to attract women and young girls
  • Black is powerful and sleek, used to market luxury products
  • Purple used to soothe and calm, often used for beauty or anti aging products

We are here to help you use and maximize all resources and information as you put together your mailing and marketing campaigns.

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