BraNdINg...........

MOST POWERFUL PROFESSIONAL SERVICES BRANDING OF ALLBy John Doerr and Mike Schultz

Will it Go Round in Circles?

There you are, sitting in a nice leather chair in your firm's board room. The rest of the senior management team is amassing for the meeting you've been putting off for years: getting serious about growing the firm. Yes, you've met about the firm's marketing and branding strategy before, but this time the mood is different: serious, focused...determined.

So the meeting begins and you start talking about your branding and marketing strategy. Hours later (having taken no breaks, of course) the management team is still sparring about your firm's tagline, debating whether the logo looks 'modern' but still 'classy', arguing where you should place a series of ads so you can increase your brand recognition. PR campaigns are planned. Decisions are made, and off the firm goes towards unstoppable growth and profits.

Yet, nine months later, when you gather to have the same meeting all over again, you wonder: Why didn't the ads and the PR work? Why have the campaigns lost steam in recent months? What can we do that really will make a difference?

If this story sounds familiar, we apologize for the pain the retelling might have caused you. We also apologize for the (probably significant) amount of money you spent and likely wasted on branding campaigns that, while they may have made you feel good, didn't get you much leverage in terms of revenue and profit growth for your firm.

Most professional services firms, at one point or another, engage serious discussions and initiatives for growing the firm - and these discussions often center around 'marketing' or 'branding.'

However, as most professional services firms are headed by experts in their field (e.g. lawyers run law firms, technologists run technology service firms, etc.) and are not lifelong managers or marketers, they head down this ill-advised branding path.

Why? Because your competitors do it. Because this is what many marketing 'consultants' say to do. It's also an easy target to tackle: you can write press releases; you can critique your new logo and ad strategy; you can brainstorm new taglines until you are blue in the face. Unfortunately, none of these 'marketing' activities are central to service firm growth.

Yet, marketing and branding are, indeed, central to service firm growth. However, what you think you should be doing for marketing and branding, and what you really should be doing, may be quite different. To understand why, we must step back and look at the underlying goals of branding.


Goals of Branding

While the high priests of branding would like you to think there is some secret, difficult to comprehend goal of branding, there isn't. It's really quite simple and can be distilled into the following:


Recognize: Your target customers must recognize you and be aware of what you do.
Articulate: They need to be able to articulate what you do.
Memorize: When they need your service, your company should be the first option they think of.
Prefer: Your target customers should prefer to use your service versus all other options available to them.
Speaking of high priests, a man once came before the venerable Rabbi Hillel and asked of him, "Please teach me all of the Torah while I stand on one foot." Hillel replied to him, "What is hateful to you, do not do to any person. That is the whole Torah - all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it!"

Nearly as simple as the Torah, then, branding is about recognition (or awareness), articulation, memorization, and preference - all the rest is commentary. The only problem is, the commentary on branding - if you read the commentary preached by most advertising and PR-based branding gurus - will empty your bank accounts and drain your time without providing your firm the growth you are aiming for!

Much of this centers on a matter of perspective: firm vs. client. Firms sit around thinking about how they want to brand and market their services (from the firm's perspective) when they should be focusing on how clients perceive and buy professional services (from the client's perspective). If you understand how people buy professional services, it might lead you to new conclusions on what your marketing and branding activities should be.


Understand the Professional Services Buyer

Sophisticated buyers of professional services don't usually care what your brochure, your advertisement, or your logo look like. It simply doesn't matter to them that much. Sure, your marketing materials need to reflect the nature of your firm's work, and the level of quality of your services, but in general they simply need to be good enough, reflect well on you, and facilitate the buying process.

What most buyers of professional services want to know that will make a difference in their decision to buy or not is:


How good are you at your expertise? If you're a CPA firm, are you a really good one? Are you technically competent and, at the same time, knowledgeable about my business and passionate about my success?


Can I depend on you? If you say you are going to do something, what will lead me to believe that you will actually do it? Conversely, will you do something that will reflect poorly on me to my colleagues and clients?


Does your firm offer services that fit my needs? If you're an architectural firm and I am a school department, do you have deep and current knowledge about building schools?


How easy and convenient is it to work with your firm? If you're a technology consulting firm, can I get a hold of you when I need you? Is your accounts receivable department easy to work with? Do you have a local office to work with me if I need you?


Do I like you? If you're a law firm, do I feel comfortable having conversations with your legal staff? Does your firm's culture and personality fit mine? If I have to spend a lot of time with you, will it be enjoyable (or at least bearable)?
If, indeed, these are the major buying influences for professional services, why do so many so-called marketing strategy discussions focus on what your logo should look like? From a will-it-generate-revenue perspective, does it really matter how many people see your ad? It might matter to the egos of the people at the firm, but not very often to its long-term revenue generation success.


The Most Powerful Branding of All

So, if branding is our task in a professional services firm, what do we do? Assuming the underlying goals are to generate awareness, understanding, and preference:

If you're shooting for brand recognition, what do you think a potential client will remember more: seeing your ad in a trade publication many times or hearing a great presentation from you that gave them a sense of your personality, expertise, style, and competence?

If brand articulation is your goal, do you think people will remember your snappy tagline, or will people remember the articles you wrote that helped them work through a specific problem they were struggling with?

If brand memorization is your goal, what are you doing to keep your message constantly in front of current and prospective buyers?

If brand preference is your goal, what do you think is more powerful: all the marketing communications you can aim at them over the course of two years, or one actual and very positive experience of what it's like working with you?

Of course, it's the latter in each of the above that makes the strongest and most lasting brand impressions. Instead of focusing on your logo and your brochure, then, focus on improving the ability of your professional staff to provide value, both with their clients and in the marketing and selling process.

The most powerful branding of all are the impressions your professionals can make one-by-one on individual clients and prospects. The client interactions they lead, the work product they deliver, the presentations they give, the articles they write, and the value they provide in every contact with the world outside the firm is more important from a branding perspective than any marketing-based initiative you can implement.

So focus on the people at your firm as the secret weapon for your branding. Help them be better across-the-board tomorrow than they are today. Give them more opportunities to connect with the marketplace. Improve your firm's client satisfaction and loyalty by improving the value you provide to your clients. Develop the passion, enthusiasm, and motivation of the professionals at your firm to create a vibrant culture of client satisfaction.

Strive to make even the smallest, most incremental gains in the overall excellence of your firm. Then communicate that excellence to the market in ways that create actual value for clients and prospects. For when the market sees, not your logo and snappy tagline, but your passion, excellence, and dedication to their success, you'll be executing the most powerful branding of all.

 

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How To Create Your Own Unique Brand

Millions of people are starting online businesses in hopes of creating additional
income for themselves and their families. With many men and women sharing the
same names how do you get your name to stand out?

The only solution is to create a Unique Personal Brand.

What is a personal brand?

A unique personal brand is a word or phrase that describes you. It is what sets
you apart from every other internet business owner.

Some people have been fortunate enough to create a following for their own name,
while others are associated with a website, line of business, or marketing strategy.

What it represents is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) on a more personal
level.

How do I create a unique personal brand?

Creating a personal brand does not need to be difficult, but it does require a lot of
thought. You will want to create something that will be attached to you for years to come
so choose carefully.

Start out by writing down all your best qualities. Then write down all the things you
like to do. Eliminate all the things that you would not want associated with a
business person.

Next ask a selection of your family and friends what they think your best qualities
are. If they could use only one sentence how would they describe you, as a
business person, to others? You are looking for positive suggestions.

Take everything you have gathered and start thumbing through the dictionary looking
for a better way, more unique way, to describe yourself. Write down all the words
that sound good to you.

Start creating short phrases with the words. You want your unique brand to be as
short as possible while still providing a good description of you. Create a lot of
these short phrases.

Give your mind a rest for a few days then come back and go over the phrases
again.

Start eliminating all the ones that you do not like, would not apply after a few years,
or do not represent the direction you wish to take in your life.

Once you get to the end you should have a unique brand that you can use on its
own, or attach to your name.

Start using this brand in your signature files, on your website, and in advertising
that you send.

Written by Shelly Leroux .

 

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Creating Brand Awareness through Effective Brand Names & Symbols

There is no disagreement that effective branding through ‘use of a name, term, symbol or design, or a combination of these’ (Quester et al, 2001) can create brand awareness and recognition in the quickest manner. Companies use different kinds of ‘Brand Name’, that is, a word, letter or a group of words such as AOL, Intel Pentium III etc to project their companies. Sometimes such words, symbols or marks are legally registered and copy righted to a single company known as trademarks ( for product oriented companies) and service marks ( for service offering companies) (Perreault & McCarthy, 2000).

However in any form, branding can be used to create brand familiarity among consumers in terms of brand recognition and brand preference (Papers4you.com, 2006). The advantage of using branding effectively is both for consumers as well as marketers. For instance it becomes easy for a customer to choose preferred brand among 1000s of other items just because of famous well recognized symbol, word or trade mark that can not be possible with out effective branding (Quester et al, 2001). For instance imagine you are driving down the road with hunger and suddenly you see a symbol ‘M’ on a sign board with red background and yellow font. It is not difficult to realize that McDonalds is waiting for you, easily manifest effective projection of McDonalds’ through brand symbol ‘M’. Similarly imagine buying a computer accessory and among thousands of unknown brands, suddenly you observe ‘Intel ®’ sign. A quick reminder will prompt that it’s a well known brand symbol that you observe common everywhere in media and at your own computer.

Now keeping these examples in mind, it is obvious that marketers can cash in such advantages as well (Papers4you.com, 2006). One best way to use word and symbols is while launching new products under same brand names (Quester et al, 2001). For instance, as every one is aware of ‘Coca Cola ™’ , any new soft drink introduced under this brand name has highly probable chance to achieve awareness and attention of coca cola lovers. Similarly it is quite often that no matter ‘ IBM’ entered in so many IT related services after initially famous for IBM computers but whenever you observe its trade mark of ‘IBM’ written in horizontal lines, consumer is not bothered about checking the background of the company. So as a result it also saves huge promotion costs that a company with less famous brand names and symbols needs to incur.

To conclude discussion, the outcome of effective branding can be seen in terms of ‘brand equity’ that is the value of a brand in terms of its perceived brand awareness, recognition, loyalty and associations from customers. To give the advantage of effective branding, the brand equity of the Coca Cola brand is valued $ 43 Billion, IBM brand at $ 18 billion and Kodak’s at $ 12 billion (Kotler & Armstrong, 1999).

 

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Branding and Marketing


So, you know what a brand is. You know what makes up a brand and which parts of your company you might be able to exploit … I mean use, to define and manipulate your brand and the way you are perceived by the public. But, well, how?

The combination of a successfully developed brand and the implementation of a great marketing campaign will do wonders for your business. Think of the TV advertisements that stick in your mind - what makes it so? What have they done differently? If you make a list, you'll notice that each and every one of them has taken advantage of creative and innovative ideas. It is not enough to only have a great logo, or great radio ads. The entire marketing package, when done properly, is your key to building your business into a wonderful success.

There are a great number of business tools that are widely accepted as forms of advertising. The key here is to put your brand on everything. That might not even mean to put your logo on everything (although in most cases it is advisable), but just to make sure that all of your business material fits in with the business image that you’ve already determined. For instance, if you have a particular corporate colour that’s fairly unique (that is, it’s not black), you can use that to your advantage by putting all of your correspondence in colour coded envelopes. If your brand is a particular scent or perfume, make sure you’re always wearing it when you meet with your potential suppliers or customers. Brand everything.

You should have two main ports of call, depending on your industry: your business card and your website. These are the first places your customers will look for your information. If your brand isn’t apparent through these two mediums, you’re probably in a bit of marketing trouble. Stop reading, find a brand developer (I know one you could use! ho ho) and have them redone. Right now. No excuses.

You should use your logo, or some manifestation of it, on your business card. Your business card is your little personal identity that people can carry about with them. A piece of you is written in to your business card. Work on it and work on it until it’s exactly right, or you’ll regret it as soon as it comes back from the printers. You should be proud to hand your business card over – it’s even better if people go “oooh” when they see it. Aim for “oooh”.

With regards to your website, above all else it should be nice looking and easy to navigate. It really need not be flashy, but chances are that people will be keener to take an interest in it if it’s not ugly. So if you have an ugly website, you’ll want to fix that too. It doesn’t need to be beautiful, but it needs to be inoffensive. If you want to do it yourself, there are tens of thousands of tutorials out there on web design that you might find useful. Otherwise, employing a web designer or developer to create an effective site for you is your best bet. Just make sure you check out their previous work, to make sure they can actually provide what you need. Web designers seem to be a dime a dozen these days, and it can make it difficult to choose one that is actually skilled!

Now go away and come back when you’ve got your business cards and web site sorted out. I’ll wait here.

Once you have your initial points of contact sorted out, you can look at everything else. There are so many options for marketing your product or service, I couldn’t possibly cover them all, even if I wrote a book about it. So let’s talk options and examples. I’ll use myself as an example, then I can disguise brainstorming as writing an article, and feel accomplished afterwards.

The most obvious form of marketing seems to be print advertising. Print advertising is available through different mediums: magazines, newspapers, letterbox drops, flyers, brochures, annoying bits of paper under people’s windscreen wipers. There are benefits to all of these, depending on who your target audience is and how much you want to spend. For instance, a quarter page colour ad in a magazine might cost you $1500, but it might also give you more opportunity to target your specific audience (if, for example, you were a brand developer, you could advertise in a start-up company magazine). Obviously the benefit here versus in a newspaper is the specific audience reading the magazine. But the newspaper might only cost you a couple of hundred dollars, so there is benefit in that.

Letterbox drops are fairly inexpensive to develop (especially if you do the photocopying and dropping yourself), but you might find that the majority of people just throw your flyer out. And then the people who do actually read your flyer might not be interested, which can make it a big waste of time. On the other hand, if you have a low-sales, high-profit sort of business with big mark-ups, even a few sales from your drop may make it profitable, so it could well be worth the time and money you put into it.

Brochures allow you to display your full range of products, but they’re expensive to produce and like letterbox drops, a lot of people just throw them in the bin – at $4 a pop, that’s nothing to laugh at. If you stick your flyer up at your local supermarket, it will probably only cost you 20 cents for the photocopy, but it may be detrimental to your professionalism. Annoying bits of paper under the windscreen wipers are, well, annoying, and should probably be reserved for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It’s not just about advertising though, of course. As I’ve discussed previously, your brand is made up of so many more components than just advertising material. Get creative with your marketing – when you sell a product, add your own personal flair to it. Make sure your packaging material has your logo on it. When you’re out and about, wear a t-shirt or earrings in the colour of your company. If you do these sorts of things often enough, people will start to take notice. Every minute of the day is an opportunity to have your brand recognised.

Do you feel more positively about companies that are active in the community, or with charities? How would involvement in a campaign such as donating a percentage of your profits to a non-profit organisation reflect on your brand? Consider that if you sell children’s clothing, for example, donating part of each sale to SIDS & Kids may well encourage parents to think of your business as being concerned about children and involved in the community. And of course, you get a good feeling from it, and SIDS & Kids will benefit as well. Everyone wins.

Take advantage of free marketing opportunities. I recently purchased a book called Marketing Without Money (it’s not a bad book, worth a read!), and for irony’s sake put my business stickers on the front and back of it, with a little blurb about what I do. When people on the bus take an interest in what I am reading, they’ll also see an advertisement for my firm. Take your business cards everywhere and give them out at every opportunity, even if you don’t give them out during business-related conversations.

Make sure you’re well presented as often as you can be. I know we all have those days when our nose is a bit stuffy and we just want to roll out of bed and to the supermarket in our trackies to buy chocolate, but if you can give an air of sophistication and “I took the time to be presentable, because I care about my business image”, that will have a profound effect on anyone you happen to speak to. You can never be certain of when a business opportunity might arise – give yourself the best chance of making a good impression when it does.

Consider sign writing for your car, which is fairly inexpensive and can be very effective. People might not pull you over to talk about your company, but if you do a fair bit of driving in your local community and you have a well-developed logo, you will generate a sense of familiarity. Then complement your car campaign with a well designed logo in the Yellow Pages or in your local community directory. When your potential clients go in search of a provider, you will be able to trigger their memories and invoke that same sense of familiarity in them – they will choose you, not someone they’re completely in the dark about.

The key marketing features you should be conscious of, then, are:

* Consistency: consistency is absolutely the most important feature of well developed brand marketing. You want your customers to be able to recognise your brand in everything you put out there.

* Uniqueness: developing a campaign that brings something new will encourage people to investigate your company and find out what you do that makes you different. Obviously this isn’t always possible, but think outside the box whenever you can. Humour is great too.

* Overkill: definitely use overkill with your brand! The chances are that you will affect different groups of people with your different mediums, so use as many as you like. Make people become familiar with your company.

* Make it memorable: you want repeat consumers, and you want them to develop a relationship with your brand. Make sure your logo and other branding material has been well developed, with a key theme in mind, and can be reproduced easily. Some of the world’s most recognisable brands are also the most simple (like Nike).

* Think creatively: don’t limit yourself to the “usual suspects” when it comes to marketing your company. There is no reason why you can’t screen print a t-shirt with your logo on it and just wear it everywhere. Have some temporary tattoos made of it and plaster them on your children. Even when you’re sending very boring, impersonal letters to places like banks, include your logo on the envelope, or use colour-coded envelopes. You never know when the mail clerks might need to use your product.

* Marketing your brand need not be incredibly expensive or difficult. If you can understand that your brand is in everything you put forth to the public, you’ll become more and more in tune with the ways you can alter their perception of your business, or at least let them become aware that it exists.

By : annaclements.

 

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Brand Your Business

You may have heard something about ‘branding’ in regards to marketing, but perhaps you’ve wondered what that means exactly.

Sometimes it is better to explain something in relation to something else. That’s what I am going to do – so first I will start with ‘positioning’. You also may have heard that term, but also did not really know what it meant. ‘Positioning’ is a marketing term that means to take a product or service and “position” it in the mind of your prospects/clients by comparing it with or against something already familiar in their minds. Al Reis and Howard Geltzer first published a book about it in the 1970’s.

To give you an idea of positioning, take Avis. Hertz car rental already had first place in the market. By being first place, they preempted that position. Everyone knew that they were #1. So, Avis, to get any recognition at all, had to position themselves with Hertz, but actually couldn’t take their spot. Do you recall what they did? You got it – “Avis. We try harder.” By positioning themselves as the best second runner up, they were able to capitalize on a larger portion of that market.

Some people think branding is like positioning, but it is different. The main difference is that positioning is a fluid concept. In other words, you can position yourself at different times in different markets as different things. Branding is more set in stone- it’s a hard-core recognition factor.

To give you a better idea, the other day one of my subordinates saw a cup of mine with red circles on it. He said it looked like a ‘Target’ cup. That is branding. That red target logo is branded in that person’s mind. He saw it and immediately thought of the chain store.

However, Target is positioned differently – it’s discount chain with good style. Some people even refer to it as ‘Targé’ – that is positioning. It positions the store with some hoity-toity posh boutique but everyone knows it’s right there with Walmart price wise. Good position.

Branding is more about the following of rules because if you don’t follow those rules, things don’t look the same and people won’t remember you. What if you changed your body periodically – I mean really changed your body. “Oh, today, I think I’ll be Asian – straight black hair, slanted eyes” – but yesterday you were Caucasian; how do you expect anyone to remember who you are when they see you on the street? It is kind of the same. When you put out your marketing pieces, you want to create a similar look and feel so that people remember you. And you want that similar look and feel on every thing you put out.

The good thing is that you get to make the rules…colors the same, style of lettering the same, logo etc. And there is some flexibility as long as you follow the rules. You can’t go too far out of bounds, but you can change some things within the frame of what others can still recognize.

There was an actual study done by GE (General Electric). They found out that it only takes 22% of their logo for people to recognize. Only 20% of their logo needs to be seen before people recognize it.

So, it sort of is like the Western concept of branding your cattle – making sure people recognize what is yours.

Remember I said ‘the same look and feel’? Well, the other side of branding is what it makes you feel about it. Chevrolet used to say it was America’s vehicle – baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. Now it is “like a rock”. That makes you feel a certain way about it. It still is in line with the old idea about Chevrolet. Americanism = loyalty = dependable = Chevrolet. That song that comes on is their brand. Being America’s vehicle is their position. Both give you a certain feel.

Branding in your marketing has to make you feel something. A technology company can’t have an old style font – you might not think they were very far advanced.

Take PostcardMania. Our colors, bold style font and humorous quips give you the feeling that we are happy and lively. We make sure that our prospects and customers get that same feeling every time they see our mail, emails, packages, logo, etc.. Therefore it is important to look the same every time.

Take a dry cleaner for example. His postcards, packaging, hangers, etc. need to have his logo, colors and font all the time all the same - on everything. That way when people receive his postcards in the mail, they look for what specials that he has because they already like him and have him identified in their mind as something they are familiar with. If he is constantly changing what he looks like, when they get his postcard they don’t know whether they are looking at his specials or what some dry cleaner in general is offering. If they are already familiar with him, they are most likely going to pause and look at what he has to say.

Branding is just like the old coat of arms that families used to have connected with their name. It would instill respect, fear, and wealth - whatever. Likewise, a country’s flag gets people to feel a certain way about their country. Heck, Stalin even used branding! He used the same picture to portray who he was to his people - I am this, I am this, I am this – he wanted them to think a certain thing. It’s really not a new idea – I’m trying to get you to see it has been around for quite some time.

At PostcardMania, we want people to recognize that we know how to get their attention – bright colors, loud type – shows that we know what we’re talking about in terms of marketing. But ‘Postcard Marketing Experts’ is our positioning. Does that make sense? You can see how the two tie in together. One is our position and one is our brand. We’re hoping to create a feeling of being expert, the best in the business, etc., but also friendly and easy to confront.

Think about what message you want to portray. What do you want recipients of your promotion to think about you? What image of your company do you want to put out there? That is your brand. When people see you continually as one thing, they begin to expect the same from you and they get used to you.

Remember when Pepsi came out with clear Pepsi? People freaked out. They didn’t want to drink it. It was a flop. It wasn’t what they were used to – so it didn’t even taste the same to them.

Branding in marketing is recognition – color, font and logo – keep it the same.

If you can get them to remember what it is you are selling, the more likely they will come in and get it…if not, you are depending on drive by traffic and are wasting your money in marketing. And don’t forget this very important marketing truth – if you’re only planning to promote merely one time then branding is not going to help you. Branding is only for marketers that already understand the concept of repetition.

By : Joe Niewierski.