It has and it hasn’t. The core of branding, which is building a memorable look and feel as well as a product personality, has a decades long track record. By nature, target audiences are uncomfortable with unfamiliar, comfortable with familiar. Branding creates familiarity.

The conduits through which you promote your brand look and personality have changed and newer ideas on how to market it have popped up as a result.

I find the biggest challenge is keeping clients on track with their brand in every aspect– educating them that it works but it’s not always an immediate cause and effect. Some people are just very literal.

For example, some send out direct mail and expect to sell something from it pronto. I paid x amount of dollars and should get xx amount back. I went to a chamber event and it’s worthless because no one hired me right then. That kind of thinking will limit your growth.

It’s not always like that and building a brand takes time–something impatient Americans don’t always understand. If you are in a relationship marketing service field, you simply want to elevate your brand to top-of-mind awareness.

That way when you follow up after they’ve been exposed through many media channels, you will have created familiarity and people become more comfortable with you. They’ve “heard” of you so to speak. So if they hear of you (your brand) through sponsorship, social media, direct mail, enewsletters and networking they have an idea about you and are educated in what you have to offer. So it’s the synergy of all your efforts at branding that creates a brand success story.

Watch Out for ATM Thefts. They are on the rise.

This is a very creative way to get your bank card and your PIN. I would suggest reading this pdf to find out how criminals can get your card, PIN and your money!

Prevent ATM Thefts .pdf

Google widgets

These widgets can offer your clients or customers directions directly on your website, show a small event calendar or even add a desktop chat.

I wouldn’t start throwing them on your site for ‘cool’ purposes only, though. You should choose those that are marketing smart and not gratuitous toys. Unless, of course, your target audience is totally captivated by gratuitous toys.  I’ve used the mp3 player for radio commercials and the google maps widget. The mp3 player works for almost everyone and no one has to download a plugin that works with their operating system.

The widget I HATE the most would be the spider, though. Put that on your web page and I promise to never visit your site. I confess that I am downright horrible at google pacman but at least it’s free.

I added the currency converter so you can take it for a test drive. It took 5 seconds to install.

If you are using Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6, you are WAY behind. Sites no longer design to suit these browsers and you’re going to get some odd looking sites. IE 6 was the worst and doubles spacing so things are often bumped way down the page. Besides that, having a browser that old can cause a security risk.

If you don’t know what you have, click ‘Help’ at the top of the page, left hand side. Scroll down to ‘About Internet Explorer’. That should tell you the version you have. Better yet, try firefox or chrome. These update more easily. But windows users do need to have IE so they can download microsoft programs that refuse to be downloaded by anything else. But keep in mind that IE is the #1 targeted browser for malicious downloads because it’s widely used.

To download the latest, which of today is IE8, just google Internet Explorer 8 download and follow the directions. You have to activate it. If you migrate to firefox, updates are much easier to install as it does so automatically saving you a lot of hassle.

What was so remarkable about the 2008 presidential campaign is how progressive the marketing was. Obama was ‘branded’ complete with a logo and aggressive internet marketing campaign that spoke to the people. The timing was perfect and the target audience was ready for it. They soaked up the message like a sponge.

No longer did people feel they weren’t being heard. And as a result those who had previously felt their vote did not count, stood up to be counted. He has a brand personality that says he’s there for the citizens of the U.S. and so it comes as no surprise that he fills out NCAA brackets and shows up on our Late Night TV shows. We expect that now of him because he has established this as part of his brand personality. He’s carved a unique market share that will be hard to shake no matter how many on the other side of the aisle want him out.

No other political candidate has leveraged the mass media and the internet, including the social media,  better than the O’bama campaign. Not being very political, I surprised myself by being riveted to the campaign simply because it was so beautifully choreagraphed and so viral.

Bill Clinton seemed to start things off by playing the sax on the David Letterman Show. That opened the door. And the Bush campaign basically sold the Iraq war the same way you’d sell a 12-pack of Sprite. That whole approach was a marketing plan complete with a tag line, ‘weapons of mass destruction’ repeated at the right intervals like you would in a radio commercial. Bush never deviated from the tag line, repeating certain phrases word for word and sticking to the marketing plan. So there were small precedents and Obama took it to the next level. Branding works. Marketing works. Consistency works. The proof is in the president who sits in office now.

I often see generic phrases used on websites and in advertising that has no hope in Hades of hitting a consumer nerve. So I thought I’d offer a quick lesson on how you can tranlate certain phrases that mean something to your target.

Painting:

Instead of:  We’re focused on customer service
Say: If you are unhappy with the paint job, we’ll paint until you are.

Insurance:

Instead of: We offer insurance from 15 carriers.
Say: We will find the best coverage you can get for your money.

Hearing Aids:

Instead of: We do hearing tests.
Say: We evaluate your hearing and offer a solution that works for your lifestyle and your hearing problem.

IT Services:

Instead of: Welcome to my website
Say: Get your network working right.  Don’t suffer from lost dollars due to downtime

Do you see what I’m getting at. Everyone says “we offer great customer service”. But what does that mean in your business? Does it mean efficiency, an improved look, better production or what?

If you’re a prosthodontist your goal is to offer patients a killer smile. If you’re a knee surgeon, you need to tell people you’re going to fix it to improve their quality of life or that you are going to get them back on the field performing better and in less time. Whatever your differentiating factor, it needs to be incorporated into every sentence you utter or write about your business. But it needs to be phrased in terms of what it will do for those you are trying to reach. Consumers don’t care how great you are unless you translate that into something they will benefit from.

So skip the generic phrases, quit focusing solely on yourself and interpret what it is you offer in terms the target audience can appreciate. So think about what customer service MEANS in your business in terms of what you offer that is important to your target market. Then you can write a sentence that means customer service without even saying “customer service”. Define it for them. Don’t make your target do all the work.

Testimonials work. Unfortunately, I’ve seen more than one client become the victim of a scathing review, often the result of an unethical competitor, someone who was never a customer or client in the first place or simply a hot-headed customer. What have they been able to do about it? Nothing. Even when it’s a hothead, it would be nice to be able to post a response.

So along comes this iVouch site that takes an entirely different approach. Fairness. How about that? It’s more than a lame directory with the capability of adding stars for a review. You can actually use it as a business tool. That is if you happen to be as customer focused as you claim to be. It has accountability and people appreciate that.

Integrate business-friendly iVouch in your marketing mix to serve up customer testimonials and reviews.

The beauty of this site is multi faceted but I like that people can land on a third party site or find testimonials on my site as well. When customer reviews and testimonials are on a third party site in the customer’s own typed words, such as the case with a review site called iVouch.com, it is marketing gold. It creates priceless buzz for your business. How? Because endorsement is hands-down the best advertising there is. Period.

[Read more →]

Fake blood, costumes, bogus hair, bizarre hats and mustaches. Boom mikes, video editing, tables moved randomly about and dents in the wall. Having 8 teenagers in the house at any given time eating you out of house and home while ‘on the set’ also known as my house, is quite the adventure. I often watch the finished footage and have to stalk my creative-minded director of a son and tell him he should not waltz out on the roof, jump on the roof of the car or play with my good knives. My bad knives? Sure, have at it.

The good Part.

They aren’t doing drugs or dealing drugs. They’re just eating a ton of doritos and downing a boatload of sprite. They aren’t drinking alcohol although they are ingesting an alarming amount of fake blood. But they do spit it out. And not always on my carpet.

They are working together. My son writes a script, coordinates the cast, shoots the film and they come together to make the video. He’s brutal with the editing, often spending days at making it perfect.

Some of it’s more young man teen humor that I don’t get. Some is locker humor and there has been the video or two that has had to come down.

This latest one is pretty darn funny. It’s about an open heart surgery. And from the looks of the raw footage, called dailies, it did not go at all well for the patient. I am not ever going to see Dr. OOPS.

I wonder if colleges will see this as a coordinated event that came together. Or pure, unadulterated silliness that wasn’t part of any formal program. But it is leadership, even if it’s not so in the traditional sense.

And just the other day, someone asked my son, the budding George Lucas, for his autograph. Yet another teen emailed  a friend of my son’s and requested that this friend get my son’s autograph.  Surely there is a way to monetize this.