{"id":171,"date":"2010-02-24T09:24:30","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T16:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/?p=171"},"modified":"2010-04-05T10:41:52","modified_gmt":"2010-04-05T17:41:52","slug":"what-does-your-brand-stand-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/2010\/02\/what-does-your-brand-stand-for\/","title":{"rendered":"What does your brand stand for?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deliver Magazine<\/a> provided some thought provoking questions for many organizations and their marketing teams.<\/p>\n

You spend hours crashing through strategy documents<\/strong>, pulling out nuggets of customer insights<\/strong>, determining differentiators<\/strong> in the industry and understanding what it is that makes your corporation unique<\/strong>. And in the end, you have a vision of who and what your company is about. It\u2019s that vision that helps establish relationships with customers, win over prospects and get your company noticed in this increasingly chaotic and fragmented world.<\/p>\n

Then, after all of that strategic work, comes the execution<\/strong> part of the marketing plan and you decide to go digital. You send an e-mail \u2014 which looks just like any other e-mail in your best customer\u2019s inbox.<\/p>\n

Oh, we know, you finely tune the colors to match your brand (despite the fact you can\u2019t calibrate how that color appears on any one monitor) or you include photography and graphics (which don\u2019t 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).<\/p>\n

So, maybe it\u2019s not the optimum branding experience, but it\u2019s cheap. Boy, is it cheap. And it\u2019s efficient \u2014 you can reach hundreds of thousands, even millions in a single blast \u2014 and really, you\u2019re getting the word out there.<\/p>\n

Then the economy picks up, but your sales don\u2019t jump as much, and at the next marketing meeting, as you\u2019re puzzling over the numbers, someone asks why your customers aren\u2019t so loyal anymore. What\u2019s happened to that great relationship your brand used to have with them? And there\u2019s a lot of this and that around the table, mutterings about \u201cempowered consumers\u201d and \u201ceverything\u2019s a commodity,\u201d and the meeting rolls on. You shrug your shoulders and concentrate on the next campaign. There\u2019s work to do.<\/p>\n

We understand. It\u2019s not an uncommon problem. It\u2019s just that, well, you could stand for something. You could put something in your customers\u2019 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\u2019s right there at their fingertips.<\/p>\n

And inside that package, something amazing \u2014 something they could never get digitally. A sample<\/strong>, a tchotchke for their desk, a magnet<\/strong> for the fridge, a baseball bat,<\/strong> a brick, a salami \u2014 who knows? Something that\u2019s amazing<\/strong> and brilliant<\/strong> and relevant<\/strong>, just like your brand<\/strong>. A piece that says \u201cHey, I know you,\u201d and reminds that customer why he or she came to you in the first place and what your brand is really all about.<\/p>\n

You could do that. But that\u2019s direct mail<\/a>, and some say that is old. No point in doing that, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,33],"tags":[11,26,41,19,17],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-direct-mail","category-marketing-strategy","tag-brand-awareness","tag-customer-retention","tag-deliver-magazine","tag-economy","tag-maintain-customer-relationship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":294,"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deansmailing.com\/rationalmarketing\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}