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Journal Archive

Branding

Standing Apart: How a Blender Creates Affinity

The central goal of online marketing isn’t awareness, it’s engagement. And the five key tools to produce engagement are affinity, personality, community, co-creation, and advocacy. Engagement at the broadest level is getting the customer involved with your company, with your products and often, with your people. You want your customers to get to know your organization, its values and services. When customers like what they see and experience, the relationship deepens and it leads to affinity. Thus what was once a distant relationship becomes personal. Another way to same thing perhaps is to say that “Personality replaces traditional brand marketing”
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The Buying Experience: Part of the Brand

When some people thing of “brand” they might think of the stuff that the PR team or the corporate marketing team does to create a tag line or the pretty slicks of stuff to “position” the company. But a brand is (and I know you readers have heard me say this before so my apologies for being redudant!) more than the fluff. It is the ultimate integration of everything a company does. It is the packaging because the ease, simplicity, etc of “getting the product” is part of the experience.
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Online Marketing as Personality Marketing

People want to know more and engage the company at a different level than just a one-way read of a site. Great companies have figured how to embody their full persona, online. I’ve been collecting distinguished online marketing methods to showcase what can really be done online.
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RIM’s Blackberry Campaign Commentary

Blackberry’s been running a great campaign. It started with a banner ad. The banner asked you to share with Blackberry “why you loved it”. From there, you could read other stories of why people loved their blackberry. There are lots…
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Spotlight on HP’s Campaign

Great marketing is about demand creation. It’s about filling an unfulfilled need, or creating a need and then filling it. When done right, it’s magical to experience. Marketing has many elements, of course. There’s: - inbound marketing which helps define…
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Branding 301: The Advanced Level

Branding. Is only as meaningful as it is consistent. That means colors and type fonts. But it also means experience vs. marketing. So the questions: How consistent is yours? What will you do to make it consistent? What has to…
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Employees Co-Create Brand

A bunch of writing has been done by myself and others about how “consumers now co-create the brand”. But what about employees? Are they co-creators, too? Many, many fortune 1000 companies are afraid to let their own employees blog. “What…
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Metrics: The Long and the Short View

In business, metrics matter. It’s key to make sure you’re looking at things that indicate truth or at least a pattern of truth. I’ve been working for the last few weeks on a client Optimization project where we’re drawing…
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HP redefines their value proposition for PCs!

Do you know what you are selling to the user? Is it a thing (a unit, a box, a software package) or does that thing get associated with a solution, or feeling or a belief? In this day and age…
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Sweat the small stuff, sweat it all

Last week, I attended a roundtable of CEOs. And one CEO of a well-known and privately held firm provided a showcase of his upcoming rebranding effort. Interestingly, the consumer company had done focus groups and figured out what they needed…
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B2C Marketing Has Its Nuances

Typical business sales process will involve several steps including: research, product application, and consideration. Consumers respond to simple, clear messages. Businesses are full of mavens. They are hungry for content and if a vendor produces a 20 page piece of collateral, business folks will actually search for the relevant information and plug away to understand the product. Consumers are nearly opposite; they are hungry for ease. Even the sales model is radically different. A typical sales process in business has multi-step meaning see a brochure, seek a meeting, get a demo, perform a trial and then get a proposal. Buy one and see if you need to buy more. Consumer sales process is much more about connecting to the consumer, and positioning products well to communicate the benefits; at the time the consumer is looking for that. Most electronics or technology products have a sales cycle of less than 30 days from awareness, to consideration, to purchase. So in a business marketing setting, you can afford to do multiple sets of features and solutions and take time to get the message accurately and richly across. Consumer marketing has to capture the key ideas into a simple phrase or pitch. Simple, simple, simple. Getting that pitch to be both simple and differentiated is elegance.
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Market Entry Moves by Cisco Warrant Review

So what do I think of Cisco’s latest moves? I’m game with the vertical strategy. It’ll put them in the same place as several other good vendors but competition amongst this class of firms will only lead to goodness in the market. On the consumer play, I have concerns but if I suddenly see some good consumer folks joining the Cisco team, or some way of running their new acquisition as a stand alone company, I’ll gain more confidence.
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Making a Better Widget isn’t a Competitive Strategy

During my day job, I help both start-ups and billion-dollar tech companies pick market niches and position themselves to compete successfully no matter what size. Most of them start with a competitive mindset that is something like “we make…
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