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Effective Advertising
How do you know when your advertising dollars are being well spent?
Effective Advertising How do you know when your advertising dollars are being well spent? First, let�s expose two of the most common fallacies about advertising. Number one is...
The 5 W's of World Class Customer Service Training
The preamble to the United States Constitution begins, ��we, the people.�� I feel strongly that we, the people, are what make the difference in life, both personally and professionally.
The interaction anyone has at any level with your...
The Arrival of the Founder of Modern Day Advertising
Copyright 2005 Presslink Publishing
This is the second in a series of articles about the history of
advertising from it's early modern beginnings to present day.
Why is it important?
Because today there are no new ideas, just...
The Relationship Between Colour & Sales
Make no mistake that emotions are the driving force behind sales, and customers making buying decisions can be influenced through visual elements towards a particular behaviour or emotion that will encourage more sales. Not convinced? Have you...
Using Seminars to Bump Up Sales
Many of my clients are turning to speaking at chambers and other networking organizations to generate business. This is a wonderful method of building credibility and gaining free advertising, especially when you are in a creative business that...
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Importance of Branding: What's in a Name?
Branding is perhaps the most important facet of any business--beyond product, distribution, pricing, or location. A company's brand is its definition in the world, the name that identifies it to itself and the marketplace. A model may be beautiful, but without a name, she's just "that girl in that picture." Where would Norma Jean be without Marilyn Monroe, or who would imagine Coca-Cola as just a soft-drink manufacturer? A brand provides a concrete descriptor to customers and competitors alike, a name for a product or service to distinguish it from anything else. Bob may run a hobby shop, but trying to advertise as "The hobby shop a guy named Bob runs down the street a ways" is financial suicide. Each customer will have to describe the shop, who Bob is, and what the shop does every time someone asks about it. This makes the process of recommending a good hobby shop too much work for the average customer, and far too much work for a user looking for hobby shops on the Internet. A customer looking up Bob's hobby shop will have an easier time of it if he or she knows to refer to it as "Bob's House of Hobbies," and the customer can then refer others to Bob's hobby shop by name, increasing the potential advertising exponentially.
Developing a brand involves more than just picking a catchy name and placing an ad in the newspaper--a brand is more than a unique string of letters denoting a particular product; a successful brand is a mnemonic trigger that makes a consumer feel a certain way when the brand is thought of. For those who drink cola-flavored soft drinks, which is more appealing on a hot day: a cold cola soda, or an ice-cold Coke? Coca-Cola has spent 100 years developing their particular brand of cola-flavored soda as a refreshing beverage and a seminal representation of a market segment. Coca-Cola has used a combination of direct marketing, give-away techniques, and multi-product cross-branding to achieve maximum brand recognition and visibility in not only its immediately competitive market, but in
markets as diverse as Coca-Cola branded race cars and housewares.
Brand loyalty is an integral part of building a brand, as consumers usually have a choice of products in the same market segment, and so a successful company will come up with a way to keep consumers re-buying their product or coming back to their location rather than going to a competitor. These brand loyalty-building efforts may come in the form of coupons, incentives such as many grocery chains' technique of "grocery discount cards" or "loss leaders," meant to draw consumers into the store, where they will hopefully buy products along with the discounted fare at a higher profit ratio. In exchange for these discounts and grocery cards, many companies collect information about buying habits and average spending amounts, the better to tailor advertisements and better-focus future promotional efforts. Once a consumer is hooked, brand loyalty tends to result in higher sales volume, as well as loyal customers being less sensitive to price changes of their favorite brands (within reason, of course), as well as less sensitive to competitors' incentives. Studies have shown that it takes 5 times as much money to gain a customer as it does to retain one. That's 5 times as much money as could have been spent on other things.
A brand is who your company is, and what it is selling--it is as important as naming a baby, and should require the same amount of effort to develop it, but if done well, can mature into a successful and profitable adult.
� 2005, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.
About the Author
William King is the director of All Wholesale UK, Wholesale Pages and Wholesale-Canada. He has 18 years of experience in the marketing and trading industries and has
been helping retailers and startups with their product sourcing,
promotion, marketing and supply chain requirements.
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| Brand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| The brand, and "branding" and brand equity have become increasingly important ... From the perspective of brand owners, branded products or services also ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
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| Branding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| Livestock branding, the marking of animals to indicate ownership; Human branding, ... Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branding" ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
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| AllAboutBranding.com : Home |
| Provides resources and opinions on branding. Includes brand development, management and communications. |
| www.allaboutbranding.com |
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| brandchannel.com | branding resource produced by Interbrand | brands |
| An international online exchange and resource about brand marketing and branding. |
| www.brandchannel.com |
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| Branding Company Corporate Branding Internet Brand Identity ... |
| Brand Identity Guru Inc. creates, develops and promotes powerful brands. Our clients enjoy an array of innovative, creative and powerful branding solutions ... |
| www.brandidentityguru.com |
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| Branding Blog |
| Branding and positioning news and opinion. |
| www.brandingblog.com |
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| Branding Asia |
| Free articles, news and columns on branding in Asia. Market research and Asian marketing. |
| www.brandingasia.com |
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| Pages tagged with "branding" on del.icio.us |
| All items tagged branding ??? view popular ... industrie./design and branding consultant specialists./ · save this. by kittim to design branding graphic ... |
| del.icio.us |
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| The Brand Called You |
| Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. Here's what it takes to be the CEO of ... |
| www.fastcompany.com |
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| Branding: See what people are saying right now on Technorati |
| See all blog posts tagged with branding on Technorati. |
| www.technorati.com |
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| Mozilla Branding |
| The purpose of this document is to describe mozilla.org's branding strategy during and after the release of what has generally been called Mozilla 1.4. ... |
| www.mozilla.org |
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| What Brand Are You? A branding viral by The Design Conspiracy |
| What Brand Are You? has since been picked out as Site Of The Day by the likes of the Financial Times, Yahoo, USA Today and BBC News, and has received more ... |
| www.whatbrandareyou.com |
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| Julie & Company: Affordable branding, web design, graphic design ... |
| Julie & Company creates stellar branding, integrated marketing, advertising, web design, web development, Flash, trade show booths - all at affordable ... |
| www.julieandcompany.com |
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| Forty Media - Web Design, Web Development, Branding, Great Websites |
| a professional web design agency based in Phoenix, Arizona. |
| www.fortymedia.com |
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| Branding - Yahoo! Small Business |
| Find information to help grow your online business with business plans, Thomas Register, news articles and more. |
| smallbusiness.yahoo.com |
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| Lexicon |
| Lexicon Branding appears on KTVU News; Lexicon Branding creates Ridgeline for Honda, Viiv for Intel, and GameTap for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. ... |
| www.lexicon-branding.com |
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| Branding and Usability |
| We're finding that a site's usability can dramatically affect branding. ... There are two basic techniques for branding: direct experience and indirect ... |
| www.uie.com |
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| iMedia Connection: Research & Metrics - Branding |
| Majority of marketers feel branding opportunities -- online and offline -- aren't ... IAB case studies prove real-world power of online in branding mix. ... |
| www.imediaconnection.com |
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| Small Business Marketing And Branding |
| Small business marketing and branding advice and how-to guides for small business owners. Learn how to start and grow your own successful business. |
| smallbusinessbranding.com |
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| Beyond Branding |
| Beyond Branding, published in hardcover in 2003 and paperback in 2005, presents innovative business models for the survival of 21st century organizations. |
| www.beyond-branding.com |
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