The 3 Most Important Marketing Strategies to Get Right in Your First Year of Business

When you’re starting a business, chances are every aspect of your budget is lean. From office expenses to marketing, you want to ensure you get the greatest return on investment for every dollar you spend. Even well-established small businesses can struggle to identify the marketing strategies that will give them the most bang for their buck. However, during your first year of business, three marketing strategies should take priority.

The 30 Magic Marketing Words You Should Be Using

Savvy business owners, copywriters, and designers know how language influences emotions and persuades action. Certain words and phrases are time-tested to boost response and conversion rates almost across the board. Of course, different motivating words and phrases work better in different situations, and it’s up to you to figure out which work best for your business. It isn’t all that difficult to figure out, though: If your intuition doesn’t tell you, your customers will. Test the following 30 “magic marketing words” in your next email, social media or blog post, on a direct-mail postcard or website to see which yields the best response.

The 4 Best Inserts for Subscription Box Marketing

Have you entered the rapidly-growing subscription box industry? Companies such as CrateJoy make it easier than ever to get started, and many subscription box companies start as home-based businesses. If you operate a subscription box business, inserts are ways to increase sales and attract new customers. The following presents some of the best inserts for subscription box marketing.

6 Reasons Why a Strong Brand is Important for Your Small Business

Beyond just a memorable logo, good branding increases the value of a company, provides employees with direction and motivation, and makes acquiring new customers easier. So what exactly is a brand? 

The Importance of Company Branding

Company branding is the most efficient way to show potential customers what your business is about. It is reflected visually via the logo and company design elements as well as through verbiage in marketing materials, slogans and informational copy. According to Fast Company magazine, “The brand is a promise of the value you'll receive.”

Brands And The Boundaries They Must Keep

Marketers face this dilemma every day. They must push some boundaries past the point of pain in order to get the jump and be competitive. At the same time, they must clearly stay within constraints such as ethics and regulatory requirements in order to retain integrity, reputation and a clean record.

5 Metrics For Measuring Brand Potential

While the measures for evaluating what a brand is worth are well established, those for quantifying a brand’s potential seem less so. In general, brands are valued on their residual equity (what they are associated with and the depth and competitiveness of that association), their competitive performance and how much they are assessed to be worth.

4 Ways Brands Should Support Sales Teams

While there has been plenty of discussion around how marketing and sales teams should play well together, the onus on brand owners to proactively support people in the field seems to have attracted less attention. Customers, of course, make no distinctions between which parts of the organization they are dealing with at any one time. In that sense, brand is sales: a brand is only as good as its ability to attract, convert and retain fickle buyers.

Linking Wellness And Brand

According to a new study conducted by Edelman Wellness 360 in partnership with Edelman Berland, attitudes to health and well-being are changing with some ironic twists. Modern wellness goes beyond doctor’s visits, clinics, and gym memberships. A growing sense of mindfulness is bringing the mind and mind-body aspects of health into the norm, versus looking at health in terms of muscle and organ “mechanics”. What it means is: Well-being is no longer a health measure; it’s a life measure. And that holds great potential for marketers.

Are You Managing A Deceptive Brand?

We all want to do best by the brands we work for. We want them to be competitive, to gain share, to win…But in the bid to make that happen, some brands push the boundaries too far. Here are 19 signs your brand has lost sight of the truth.

Brand Strength Is Found In Brand Meaning

Changes in what consumers value in the brand relationship are driven by a number of factors. The manner in which consumers (and we marketers) determine value is absolutely subjective and based on how we describe things to ourselves. A few key trends are evidence that when it comes to shared values, we see that like at Oahu’s famed Waikiki Beach, ‘many surfers ride a common wave.’

Brand Transparency Vs Brand Authenticity

Last week, brand leaders from many industries gathered for The Blake Project’s annual Un-Conference at the Versace Mansion in Miami Beach. During a segment led by Mark Di Somma on Evolving Customer Engagement, one participant smartly reminded the group that transparency and authenticity are each unique.

Power Lies In Changing The Brand Context

Recently at New Zealand Fashion Week, models walked the runway in lingerie and the crowd went wild. It was a world first. Not because the show was radical – but because the underwear was from a start-up brand named Confitex and it was specifically designed for people with incontinence.

Building The Optimal Marketing Budget

There are two ways to come up with a marketing budget. There is the foolish way and there is the strategic way.

Let me review both options for you. Those of you who do it strategically and work to a January-to-December planning year started the process back in June. If you set budgets the foolish way, you are way behind.

Growing A Brand Beyond Its Defining Characteristic

Twitter was built on 140 characters. Even though the limitation was serendipitous, it remains a defining characteristic of the brand in the minds of many. Concise thinking, hash-tagged to provide simple, global connection – there’s the Twitter value equation in a little under half the consigned quota. But the question Carl Miller asks is a good one. What happens when the idea that defined you starts to work to inhibit you?

How Brand Accessibility Builds Strong Brands

Accessibility is one of the five drivers of customer brand insistence in our proprietary BrandInsistence brand equity measurement system. How does accessibility contribute to customer brand insistence? First, accessible brands insure that brand preference is converted into brand purchase. Why wouldn’t I purchase my preferred brand if it were completely accessible to me? If it were inaccessible, I might purchase a substitute product or brand or perhaps nothing at all. But I am getting ahead of myself. First let’s define accessibility. Accessible brands are brands that are easy to find, purchase and use.

To Refresh Or Rebrand? A Marketer’s Guide

Every brand must change, but the extent of the change, and the size of the calls that accompany those shifts, are very different. So when should you refresh what you have to bring it up to date, and when should you “kill” the brand and start again?

6 Ways Of Putting Truth Back Into Your Brand

So you’ve looked long and hard at how your brand is managed, and it’s clear that the truth has been allowed to slip. If you no longer want to be managing a deceitful brand, how do you find a way back?

Brand Name

Brand name is one of the brand elements which helps the customers to identify and differentiate one product from another. It should be chosen very carefully as it captures the key theme of a product in an efficient and economical manner. It can easily be noticed and its meaning can be stored and triggered in the memory instantly. Choice of a brand name requires a lot of research. Brand names are not necessarily associated with the product. For instance, brand names can be based on places (Air India, British Airways), animals or birds (Dove soap, Puma), people (Louise Phillips, Allen Solly). In some instances, the company name is used for all products (General Electric, LG).

Features of a Good Brand Name

A good brand name should have following characteristics:

1. It should be unique / distinctive (for instance- Kodak, Mustang)
2. It should be extendable.
3. It should be easy to pronounce, identified and memorized. (For instance-Tide)
4. It should give an idea about product’s qualities and benefits (For instance- Swift, Quickfix, Lipguard).
5. It should be easily convertible into foreign languages.
6. It should be capable of legal protection and registration.
7. It should suggest product/service category (For instance Newsweek).
8. It should indicate concrete qualities (For instance Firebird).
9. It should not portray bad/wrong meanings in other categories. (For instance NOVA is a poor name for a car to be sold in Spanish country, because in Spanish it means “doesn’t go”).

Process of Selecting a renowned and successful Brand Name

1. Define the objectives of branding in terms of six criterions - descriptive, suggestive, compound, classical, arbitrary and fanciful. It Is essential to recognize the role of brand within the corporate branding strategy and the relation of brand to other brand and products. It is also essential to understand the role of brand within entire marketing program as well as a detailed description of niche market must be considered.
2. Generation of multiple names - Any potential source of names can be used; organization, management and employees, current or potential customers, agencies and professional consultants.
3. Screening of names on the basis of branding objectives and marketing considerations so as to have a more synchronized list - The brand names must not have connotations, should be easily pronounceable, should meet the legal requirements etc.
4. Gathering more extensive details on each of the finalized names - There should be extensive international legal search done. These searches are at times done on a sequential basis because of the expense involved.
5. Conducting consumer research - Consumer research is often conducted so as to confirm management expectations as to the remembrance and meaningfulness of the brand names. The features of the product, its price and promotion may be shown to the consumers so that they understand the purpose of the brand name and the manner in which it will be used. Consumers can be shown actual 3-D packages as well as animated advertising or boards. Several samples of consumers must be surveyed depending on the niche market involved.
6. On the basis of the above steps, management can finalize the brand name that maximizes the organization’s branding and marketing objectives and then formally register the brand name.

Balancing Efficiency And Brand

In the hunt for more streamlined businesses that are less resource intensive, how real is the risk that brands are actually putting people off dealing with them? When does an efficient process become so rationalized that it loses its humanity and therefore its appeal?

Great Brands Grow Beyond Their Origins

So someone’s supposedly discovered the recipe for Coca Cola. What does that mean for the world’s most popular drink? Very little I would have thought. Because the world’s most closely guarded beverage trade secret has already done its job – it has helped build perhaps the most consistently powerful brand in the world. Beyond that, its value as a formula today is questionable.

Founder And Brand: Forever Linked

At first sight, an MBA student called Philip Knight, a bee-keeper called Ingram Shavitz and a designer called Donna Faske perhaps don’t appear to be the most fascinating subjects for a branding post. But I write this week not about who these three people were, but rather what they became.

The Varying Ways Consumers Engage With Brands

It’s tempting to think of consumers in binary terms in relation to the brands you are responsible for: in, or out; buying, or not buying; loyal, or not loyal. But for many brands, the status of an individual can be more complex. At any given point in time, people can take on other roles in relation to your brand, and in relation to your competitors’ brands, that nevertheless have a direct influence on your competitiveness.

7 Rules Of Brand Management

1. Remember your roots

Strong brands come from people, places and times, and they remember it whether they are luxury brands or not. Brands too often forget about or ignore their origins, and marketers in the English-speaking world are the guiltiest of it. For example when Starbucks lost its way, the real problem was that it forgot its origins. It took former chief executive Howard Schultz to return to the company and help rediscover its roots. All brands have a story of their founding: it describes why the business came into being. Most marketers don’t know how powerful theirs is.

2. Work out what’s in your brand’s DNA

A brand’s DNA should comprise just one strong concept and no more than five words that define how it behaves. In luxury it is defined by history and the consumer has no say in it. But brand DNA is about walking the walk, not talking the talk, and it isn’t necessary to communicate explicitly what it’s made up of. People find George Clooney sexy for what he says and does, and for the way he looks, not because of the structure of his genes. Brands that have their words hanging up in the lobby are missing the point. If a consumer doesn’t repeat those things back to you verbatim, it’s not a problem.

3. You can play with your codes

Codes are what make brands recognizable to their consumers – they are not just logos and they are not just visual, but they are motifs that the brand unmistakably owns, however they appear. Brands need to recognize that they can and must play with their codes to balance heritage with modernity – the constantly changing Google ‘doodle’ on the search engine’s homepage being one example.

This also means brands shouldn’t submit to “logo tyranny”, where marketers think the same typefaces, colors and proportions have to be rigidly repeated. This is not branding. This is what people do when they don’t understand branding.

4. Brands need to change to stay consistent

This is the “paradox of time”. Brands make their name through the way they act at a particular point in time, but doing the same thing again and again will cease to have the same effect. The Dior fashion style that was provocative in 1950 had become tired by 2000, and it took John Galliano’s shocking ‘hobo chic’ collection, with dresses inspired by homeless people wrapped in newspapers, to restore Dior’s reputation as a disruptive brand.

5. No one hates vanilla, but no one loves it either

Being exclusive means excluding some people and welcoming others, and it is an important part of creating a brand. In luxury it means you can engender passion in the higher segments and not care about the mass market as a whole. While non-luxury brands can’t afford to be as selective, the principle holds true for all marketing. You have to believe first in segmentation and second in targeting. You can’t have a brand if you try to appeal to everyone. Marketing is not democracy.

6. Consumers don’t care what marketers say

At the most successful brands, senior executives stay silent, and don’t try to push their messages through mass media. Consumers want to hear from the artisan, let the creators closest to the product explain their enthusiasm for it.

7. Your premium products power your brand

At a luxury brand, it is the couture fashions, the catwalk clothes that define its image, like the star on the top of a Christmas tree. They are also the products that almost no one buys, and overall they lose money. Marketers need to ask one question about their product lines: “What is the reason behind the product? Some products are there to generate profit, others are there to build the brand.

Never Forget Marketing’s Most Basic Principles

There is no consensus around when the formal discipline of marketing actually began. For British marketers it is common to cite 18th Century businessman and potter Josiah Wedgwood as the inventor of modern marketing. More accurately, most scholars point to America where the first marketing courses were offered back in 1905 and where the first marketing textbook was published a year later.

The Death Of Digital Marketing Is Upon Us

When I was a young professor stalking the corridors of American business schools there were certain courses you could rely on to be popular with MBA students: financial statement analysis, corporate strategy and international marketing. Yes, international marketing.

The World's Most Popular Gun Is Getting A Fashion Line

There are already upwards of 70 million AK-47s in circulation worldwide.

But amid domestic unrest, global criticism of Moscow, and EU and US sanctions, the state-owned Russian company responsible for the gun's production is trying to rebrand itself.

In Moscow on Tuesday, the Siberian company behind the rifle unveiled new slogans ("Protecting Peace" was one of them) and a red-and-black logo shaped like the letter "K."

'Shark Tank' Investor Daymond John Shares The Biggest Mistake A Brand Can Make

Today's top-selling brands have their mantras down cold. For Apple, it's "Think different." Nike has "Just Do It." And FUBU asserts "For Us By Us."

Each iconic slogan is short, simple, and easy to digest. That's precisely what makes them so memorable.