Branding strategy options
How do they differ? There is a spectrum of opinions here, but in my view, marketing is actively promoting a product or service. Branding should both precede and underlie any marketing effort. Branding is not push, but pull. Branding is the expression of the essential truth or value of an organization, product, or service. It is communication of characteristics, values, and attributes that clarify what this particular brand is and is not. This is why I exist. If you agree, if you like me, you can buy me, support me, and recommend me to your friends. Marketing may contribute to a brand, but the brand is bigger than any particular marketing effort. The brand is what remains after the marketing has swept through the room. The brand is ultimately what determines if you will become a loyal customer or not. The brand is built from many things. Very important among these things is the lived experience of the brand. Did that car deliver on its brand promise of reliability? Did the maker continue to uphold the quality standards that made them what they are? Did the sales guy or the service center mechanic know what they were talking about? This works the same way for all types of businesses and organizations. All organizations must sell including nonprofits. How they sell may differ, and everyone in an organization is, with their every action, either constructing or deconstructing the brand. Every thought, every action, every policy, every ad, every marketing promotion has the effect of either inspiring or deterring brand loyalty in whomever is exposed to it. All of this affects sales. Back to our financial expert. Is marketing a cost center? Poorly researched and executed marketing activities can certainly be a cost center, but well-researched and well-executed marketing is an investment that pays for itself in sales and brand reinforcement. Is branding a cost center? On the surface, yes, but the return is loyalty. The return is sales people whose jobs are easier and more effective, employees who stay longer and work harder, customers who become ambassadors and advocates for the organization. It is the essential foundation for a successful operation. They are cost centers, but what is REALLY costly is not to have them, or to have substandard ones. Because we know that not everyone needs or can afford our full processwe created a guided tutorial for our foundational brand strategy tool: Watch the video for a preview. For more information on this branding tutorial video series visit here where you will find a fuller explanation and links to a free download of the first video. Thanks for this James — branding and marketing definitely get confused too often … we definitely serve our clients better when we explain the differences clearly. Well, just to challenge the standard view a bit: But marketing has been developed also as a strategic tool, which is itself at the very core of the entire business strategy. How can branding suddenly take its place? As I started to develop city marketing in the s, when branding was not developed at all in this particular area, I seem to have developed a different view than those who see marketing as just a tool for branding. Thus, it is still an integral part of strategic marketing. Does this make any sense? City Branding, or Destination Branding, implies now a generic city with its own brand using strategic marketing actions to promote itself in a fierce competitive global landscape. Sometimes I think this argument might be no more than a kind of childish fight: One might also say that strategic marketing is just as strategic as strategy branding, so my statement IS an oversimplification, but its intent was clarification for those confused about how the two different processes operate, which I hope is a useful larger point. Marketing operates primarily through tactical means, and branding, while manifest in all things including every tactical action, is to my view, really about what people hold in their minds, and this is significantly more about strategic positioning than tactical action. In the 15 months since I wrote this post, I have, it turns out, spent more time talking about marketing than I have about branding, and this could be a reflection of my own awakening to just how much strategic ground marketing could be made to cover. Branding though still remains, for me, fundamental. To take your example, when it comes to marketing a city, is it more important to look inward and create a brand that is true to the experience of those living or visiting that place, or is it more important to think about what the city has to offer in terms on the needs of those who use it? For me this difference in approach is a key difference between branding and marketing. Each approach to the problem of what to do yields a slightly different outcome. Each implies differing tactical actions, and I now believe each approach benefits from the insights brought by the other. In our own Branding and Marketing Discovery process, we now do both things—we try to get at the truth of the brand from the perspective of those who know it well, and then we also try to understand the brand offer in terms of the needs of those who do and might potentially consume it. Is this what really happens? In any event, thanks for helping me think about it. I will continue to do so as I want to always be learning. Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I am luckily out of the whole marketing game. And I am glad you have a rather pragmatic view of it, too. But about the original question, I probably have a simply old-fashioned view of it, as I was like sleeping for some twenty years — I had nothing to do with marketing after the latter half of the s — and when I returned to the topic recently, it seemed that the discourse was more about branding than marketing, and it sure attracted my attention. If I try to explain what I meant in the previous reply, I simply see that the product dimension of marketing grew out from its original place in 4Ps and became a kind of spearhead dimension through the interplay of business options, product development, and the symbolic aspect of communication, which for understandable reasons started to change the traditional idea of the marketing mix. This, together with fundamental changes in the economy of which you know more than I do and what Lash and Urry, for example, refer to as economies of signs and spaceand a general emphasis on the increased symbolic nature of economic life incl. This is why I see that the DNA of branding is in the interplay within the product-communication axis. Hence the brand is now at the core of the new discourse. As to your question about city branding, I guess I am not completely wrong if I translate the dilemma into the relationship of brand identity and the brand promise branding the city. And if you ask me, you do exactly the right thing: Yet, there are two extremely important things to take into account. First, a city is a reflexive entity. Thus, when we brand a city, we are also reworking the identity of the city, because there is no longer the same identity that there was before we started our endeavour. Of course, this requires that our actions are influential and meaningful to the community. With this exaggeration I am just trying to point out the very evolutionary nature of brand identity in the case of city branding. Branding is meant to point out weak points, gaps, cleavages, and tensions that require not only narrowly defined branding designed for external audiences but also profound changes in the self-perception, conditions, and policies of the urban community in question. This is a well-known story in many post-industrial cities which really needed a large-scale restructuring in order provide decent working and living conditions for their citizens. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but in such cases there is no other way than just to try. Glasgow, Bilbao, Pittsburgh etc. This message is getting too long, but let me just summarise. Yes, sometimes you must ask the city to reform itself in order to be able to attract desired values from the space of flows. Thank you for taking the time to thoughtfully answer my question. I see you are publishing what looks to be a fascinating book on this subject: The Political Economy of City Branding. We are beginning to brush up against these very issues as we work on strategy and marketing projects involving keynote public institutions—like museums—in smaller cities. Their fate and identity is deeply intertwined with that of the city itself. So the questions we face sometimes grow larger as we get deeper into the real issues at play, until we are inevitably talking about the brand of the city itself, and how that will change or force changes on the institutions we are seeking to help and vice versa. I must options disagree with your position. Everything else is a cost. Your view of marketing as a tactic is much too narrow and simple. Marketing is everything that an organization does to get and keep a customer. Sorry for the lateness of my reply. I was off grid practicing what I preach in How Not to Vacation. I do not disagree with you at the level of the most general definition of marketing. You might also notice that I touch on the question of the ongoing debate over whose concept is bigger in my discussion above with Professor Anttiroiko. I do not want to add fire to that. If you want marketing to be the first principal, fine, but the marketing approach and the branding approach remain distinct and complementary aspects of the what should be a synthetic and comprehensive process. I maintain that understanding their distinctive roles and contributions to this process makes for better marketing your definition. I certainly do NOT disagree with Peter Drucker or his statement about the essential role of marketing for all businesses. On this point, please see my post: Marketing is Not Optional. Logo and Brand Design says. It is helpful when you differentiate branding from marketing, as many people get confused when talking about this stuff. It was a pleasure reading your post. Graphic Design Company in Philadelphia says. Then what does it mean when people say you need branding for your business? I mean, if branding is what we are then why do we have to do it? Thanks for the question. Your brand IS what you are, but more importantly it is what you are in the MINDS of your brand consumers. So, the truth and effectiveness of your brand expression matters a great deal. This requires expert and persistent articulation and supporting expression across all the constituent elements of your options, at least those over which you exercise direct and indirect control. This includes, but is not limited to, your employee training, your vision statement, your physical spaces if you have them, all of your deployed brand assets such as photographyvideoslogos, graphics, colors, how you use language, and of course, your marketing communications expressed through websitesprinted materials and all manner of advertising. Your brand is a living, breathing thing that is simultaneously within your organization and spread across all those who ever have and will ever encounter you. In my opinion, Branding and Marketing, and Sales, are more intimately connected than we think… And they should be treated as one function. If yes, can you give me an example? So I guess that this ID is built up by marketing tactics, which cost money. Please clarify it for me: It can and should also be more than that. Crucially, it has to have external manifestations through whatever means including marketing. Your brand exists, I think, in the interplay between what you are and what you do including your marketing tactics on one side, and the idea your consumers retain about you on the other. So I see marketing and branding as two essential aspects of the ongoing relationship organizations have with the world. Marketing, as I describe it, is also there looking at the issue from its vantage point in the mind of the consumer. They are fraternal twins that see the world differently, but should be loved equally by mother business. Organizations do not HAVE to spend money on branding, but many do and rightly so. They spend money on branding when they need assistance with what should be natural and easy, but actually is not—finding clarity. Organizations also often have to spend money on branding, when they or their marketplace is evolving or changing, or when they are having trouble expressing themselves effectively across all communication pathways. We actually have two rubrics for strategy: Together these two can serve as a strategic guide for effective communications. Neither is truly fixed. Perhaps this is just the consequence of a basic reality: It does often take an outside guide to help an organization back or forward to the right meaning most effective actions. In the end, brand communications natural or supported should serve to foster a more positive and constructive influence over your brand as it exists and evolves in the mind of your brand consumers. I think it worth mentioning that for a company to succeed, it needs both branding and marketing. Marketing for short term cash flow, and Branding for building the loyalty or equity. Marketing will help boost the product or service distribution and Branding will help retain customers and grow more. Your brand will develop a reputation, initially by marketing tactics, but ultimately by consumer experience. It can be bad, or it can be good. And marketing will match graphic elements to reflect the positive qualities of the product by using colors, photographs, a logo and even fonts. For example, Superman is associated trustworthiness and dependability in a time of need. He has a good reputation. His colors are mainly blue and red with a touch of yellow, and he has a cape that is unique to him. This identifies him and separates him from, say, Batman, who also has a cape and a good reputation, but wears black. Branding needs to clarify a unique personality. Superman gets publicity for his good deeds. News stories and headlines are the PR that communicates to the public the good deeds he is associated with, and helps spread this knowledge. This helps enhance his word-of-mouth reputation. Marketing strategies establish the graphics, the colors and the logo to match the personality to a visual identity. And these will be used leveraging his perceived positive qualities to sell Superman products like movies and toys…. I have a bit of a different view on this. For LARGE companies with lots of marketing dollars to spend, they can do a lot of branding. Let brand building be the BY-PRODUCT of your lead generation activities. Not a strategy onto itself. Far too many small businesses are VICTIMS of brand building. Flushing their limited marketing dollars down the drain. Ken, thank you for your comment and insight. I agree with you that there is a danger in spending lots of money on what some people think of as branding. And I agree that some small companies are victims of this. For me though, one of the essential functions of branding is to sort out how you are going to communicate your value so that those outside your company or organization or your own head can understand it. Not doing this can also be very costly. Casting many lines may seem like the logical first step, but it is infinitely wiser to cast them strategically—knowledge of precisely where to cast those lines who to talk to can only be gleaned once the hard internal work, which involves getting clear on your brand and offer, is done. Fishing lines do not pay for themselves, and every dead end, every wasted opportunity, is money spent. Branding should not be about spending a lot of money to make your logo look pretty, but it should be about making sure your energies are focused strategically on those things that will yield the results you want out in the world. Maybe another way to put this is … beware of branding companies who will give you a brand without first helping you establish a strategic foundation for its operation within your tactical activities such as lead generation, or your website, or whatever marketing activation you have taken on. Is brand also more likely to be affected by unpaid publicity e. Kerrie, as you predict, yes. Hi James, this is a wonderful article…I just stumbled upon it today and have enjoyed reading both it and the ensuing comments. I do wonder, as an aspiring brand manager I see a lot of variation in how companies approach the topic of brand and more specifically rebranding. I have a hard time articulating the importance of digging deeper beyond these elements when working with a team considering a rebrand. Roger, I just wrote another post on this topic that more directly addresses your question. Roger, one of our core brand strategy tools is our version of the Brand Pyramid which you can read about and download here at the bottom of Your Brand Idea: Who but Horton can hear it? We also have marketing strategy tools that start with research into the mind of the consumer and the true drivers of their behavior, because it is important for marketers to distinguish between what people say they will do and what they actually do. See Brain Science and Marketing: What made the point about cost centers especially poignant is that Sony is eliminating the office in San Francisco where my team and I workwhich was established to build the new responsive global web site. Because it was perceived as a cost center. And yes, Sony is hurting, no doubt—but if Sony is to regain its status as a leading global brand, the company needs to invest in things like a world-class web site. In my opinion marketing is what Tim said: It means that your says everything about your organisation, how you work. It means marketing is also researching what the market wants and then acting upon strategy. Promotion is just one of them. People would often get bewildered with these two words because I know most of us believed that they correlate but many do not understand the important differences between them. Sometimes, it is misunderstood when it comes to business. Branding is identifying your target audience and what they want. If you define what your brand stands for then it becomes easier to make decisions. While on the other hand, marketing is the process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. The marketing should also be based on your branding. In essence, marketing is what you do to get your message or promise to customers, while your brand is how you keep the promise made through delivery to customers. Thank you, this is a great clarification. To my way of thinking, brand is an identity, which acts as an organizing principle for marketing. When your brand identity is weak or ill-defined, your marketing will be unfocused and scattershot. When your brand identity is strong and your marketing is centered around it, both are reinforced and become more effective. Marketing is an extensive field. It has been terribly restricted to only promotion in this post. Marketing also includes sales and after sales service. Tarun, I like the expansiveness of your definition of marketing. You postulate that marketing is to branding as engineering is to computer engineering. In other words branding is wholly contained within the marketing endeavor. I have my own very expansive definition of marketing: This fits well, I think, with your definition as I read it. Marketing cannot and should options dictate or adjudicate operational behavior within an organization. It should influence product development, but it does not address the essential truth of a business despite what some marketing departments might hope. Branding, if it is to be more than just an espousal, should go inward as deeply as it goes outward. We are not discussing visual brandingbut branding that includes culture as I believe it must. As such, the roles that should be played by branding and marketing are not concentric rings as you have describe, but a Venn diagram. This is not necessarily clear from the article above, and it does, as written, lead to a debate about whose definition is bigger, when it should be giving clarity to the differing and complementary roles of these two essential aspects of organizational being and behavior. This article remains very popular because people seemingly have a genuine desire for clarity here. Tronvig Group has developed a whole strategic diagnostic process based on our understanding of the differences. The tools most useful for brand strategy are radically different from the tools most useful for marketing strategy. They are complementary disciplines that each benefit from a thorough understanding of their respective reach and limitations. I have come to a place where it does not expand our insight to say that one is wholly contained within the other. The takeaway for me is this: Often times we start with marketing and down the road think about branding, especially in small start-ups where immediate, short term gains are given more importance than long term brand building. This disturbs me to see so many business owners thinking that way. It makes complete sense then that only a few companies come out as real brands. What you say about branding vs. Branding and marketing are not synonyms. Marketing is that elephant. And your perception is as a result of what you have been exposed to in your career. The brand is both a strategic and holistic process that requires companies and organizations self examine and articulate a promise to their audiences, customers and constituents as to who they are, what they stand for and how they intend add value or do business. There are so many theories…variations…. And…at the end of the day…I just might not be right. I appreciate your perspective and agree that Branding is an overriding strategy upon which our marketing efforts lie. Thomas Christy Louis says. I can see from the comments this article has been very popular. Thank you so much for posting this. I appreciate the line between these is not obviously clear and there is a lot of contradictory discussion around this. This is how I come down to understand the difference between branding and marketing. Two possible ways to look at it: On your contention that I am wrong in saying that branding is strategic and marketing is tactical: Let me explain my thinking. I see branding as the process of making sure your business organizational or product strategy is supported by operational truth, and so the strength of your brand depends on your ability to deliver on a brand promise in the context of a strategically differentiated market position. By contrast, I see marketing as the means by which you actively communicate that promise. Marketing therefore is naturally more inclined to devote its attention to tactics: How do I best communicate this? To whom do I direct this communication? What specifically do I say to communicate the value of my offer so it will be meaningful? Strategy is certainly an essential aspect of marketing as much as it is for branding, but for me branding is NOT a tactic of marketing. Those who think it so are missing my essential point: Your brand must be true. It is not something you fabricate to meet a market need. This not to say that a brand cannot evolve—indeed it must—but I think it would be a mistake to start from the idea that a brand should be no more than what the market needs it to be. Marketing strategy must discern the most powerful intersection between the truth of the brand and the needs of the market. If a brand is no longer compatible with the market, then the brand must evolve, but this process has to be accompanied by congruent changes in operational practice and the migration of the truth of the brand into its new state—a state more suited to market need. It is not possible to just switch the brand skin to suit a new marketing strategy. This is why we have found it necessary to supplement our traditional branding work with the hard follow-up work of organizational alignment and sometimes organizational change. We are no longer in a world where it is enough to strategy say you stand for something. You must make good on your promise. If your brand is forced to function as a subset of marketing it is made vulnerable to a descent into becoming an espousal unsupported by operational truth. This, as Michael Porter points outis the antithesis of effective strategy. For marketers, we can argue amongst each other about the 4Ps, what is marketing as a whole etc, but for start-ups who have limited resources and have to focus on getting sales immediately, they just want to know why they need to know branding. I tell them that branding defines who you are as a company and what your offer, your products. Branding is simply defining your values, characteristics and what you want to be known as in the mind of consumers. Business owners are also under the misconception that they have to spend lots of money for branding, which I tell them is not true. You can do that simply by the language you use when defining who you are on your company website, your product descriptions, your sales pitch. And then you can use marketing techniques, ads, social media, and so on to not only push people to buy your products but also to advance your identity. Thanks branding a great conversation thread. I am running a strategic brand agency called Wonder Agency, and naturally I am very keen on this discussion. There are lots of good arguments in the thread, however I think some confusion is created where people get the basic definitions mixed and of course, you might challenge me on this point. I would go back to the core definitions here. A brand is simply the perceptions a person holds about a product, service or company in the context of business. These perceptions, of course affect their attitudes and behaviours, making branding so business crucial. In order to affect the perceptions of people, you can choose to engage in activities called branding. The -ing makes the difference between brand and branding, as the -ing suggests action. So the brand is the result of branding cause vs. In some comments above people refer to branding as an internal strategy-firmulating activity, whereas other talk about visual identity elements, and so forth. These are all branding activities, however they are not to be confused with what the word branding actually means. The tactics of branding is different that the idea of branding, is what I mean. To create a strong brand, a company will have to engage in lots of different activities, some of which could be classified as marketing whether you subscribe to the broader, Druckerian definition, or the more narrow one in the article above. My stand is that branding definitely is broader than marketing, because, as per this definition the function of business strategy, innovation, culture and operations are all extremely important in the causal chain that creates a brand in the minds of consumers. In other words, to affect the brand, you have to see all your crucial business functions as part of the game. The brand should be the face of business strategy externally, and the heart of business strategy internally. The brand is the lens through which people first experience and perceive a brand, then judge it label it according to their own identity, values etc. And that is one crucial part of business strategy which at the core asks Where do we play? So branding starts with business strategy and naturally with the ideal customers in mind and should cascade into all aspects of business. Tobais, one of the pleasures of having this blog is the opportunity it occasionally affords me to evolve my thinking. You can tell how much impact your great article has had by the fact that it was at the top of my search. Keep up the good writing work. I really enjoyed this article and the discussion. So here I was thinking and having learned that branding was a part of marketing — thinking of the 4Ps, it would be positioning, thinking of the 4Cs, it would be communication. But your article really got me thinking and I branding following down the path of the brand — identity — character and so on. So if I try to compare the whole question to myself as a human being, the brand would basically be my character — and marketing would be everything I did that reflected on my character. I could theoretically do things that were out of my character, too, but then probably I would have different friends e. I think a character, or brand, cannot be described separately from the actions that are based on branding — and thus, branding cannot be viewed separately from marketing, while at the same time it would probably not be entirely right to describe branding as a part of marketing or as the basis for marketing. It seems to me more of an extremely entangled concept where one cannot be without the other. Your explanation of branding is options but you missed what marketing really is. In fact, you are mixing up advertising with marketing. Marketing includes everything from the Product the product benefits, packaging and brandingits Pricing, to its distribution Place: Your explanation of marketing is also being confused with the selling concept. The marketing concept identifies a need or even helps potential users to see a need they might be blind to, and producing a product to sincerely meet that need. How the product is presented and what perceptions should be created about the product is the branding strategy. This is not marketing! Branding is the visual, mental and verbal presentation of the product and its attributes which, if done well, will create the best and accurate brand association—often known as brand positioning—that makes it distinguishable from similar products. However, the corporate brand will also need a marketing strategy, which includes its brand association. When I read things like this article and these comments the image that comes to my mind is cowboys putting a hot iron onto the side of a cow and burning the brand onto the cow. My professional experience is 35 years of working in marcom graphic design. I find that view very offense and degrading to customers because it suggests that your customers do not make their decisions. It seems to me that customers purchase products or branding, use them and they make their own judgements and decisions about those products, services, and the company. Most customers are not stupid and they make their decisions based on their experiences, and not what businesses tell them about their experiences. For me a brand is when people interact and then in conversation the name of the product or business comes up—how do the those people think and feel about the product or business and how do they ACT on those thoughts and feelings, But even before that part of the conversation, are individuals motivated to bring up the product or business into the conversation. Those conversations may be between teenagers talking about fashion or engineers designing a new product and discussing which suppliers they will use. Your brand is not about what you do to the customer but the decisions your CUSTOMER MAKES about your products, services and business, based on their experiences. You build your brand by making the appropriate quality of product or service for your market and when your customers use it they judge and decide your brand for themselves. Thanks for sharing this post. I was actually confused about branding and marketing as both are reciprocal to each other, but the way you describe the difference is quite interesting. I have read all the comments as well. They are also very helpful. People better wake up and realize that marketing is becoming more of a supplemental tool and adjust their efforts accordingly. Great article and thanks for being so specific. How 10 experts define it […]. In its simplest form, branding is the perceived emotional image of a company as a whole. Therefore, you should have a coherent and […]. But is there even anything behind the words? As expert James Strategy eloquently puts it, your marketing is a method of pushing your message out, while your branding is […]. Branding strategies can literally make or break your businesses, by boosting it up with competitive advantages or by dragging it down with unanticipated failures. So having an effective brand strategy is no longer a good thing to have, but have grown to become a necessity. The model conveys the persona, traits, values and qualities imbued in a […]. Marketing promotes a product or service, while branding gives meaning to why a business exists and communicates its core values. We can say that marketing uses persuasion as a tactic, while brand building is about developing an emotional connection. Branding your company will make it stand out from its competitors and allow your customers to connect with […]. The difference between marketing and branding. In the startup I am currently involved in, we are about to make our branding strategy for the product we are developing, which is similar to the organizational branding strategy we just did on our websites. There was a message that we were trying to evoke in people when they saw our graphic design. This is true with what I am about to start working on at work. By our product design, leave behinds, and website we want to leave customers with some type of emotion. It is communication of characteristics, values, and attributes that clarify what this particular brand is and is not- http: Understanding the difference is essential before we get into these recent branding examples and why they […]. Your email address will not be published. MENU Home About Us Our Services Tronvig Group Careers Blog Contact Home About Us Our Services Blog Careers Contact Social Icons. Finding creative ways to help our clients make the world better. Categories Architecture Arts B2B B2C Education Lifestyle Museums Non-Profits Small Business Topics Advertising Branding Games Marketing News Social Media Short Essays Websites Subscribe. The Difference Between Marketing and Branding by James Heaton What is the difference between marketing and branding? This is not branding. Marketing unearths and activates buyers. Branding makes loyal customers, advocates, even evangelists, out of those who buy. Branding is as vital to the success of a business or nonprofit as having financial coherence, having a vision for the future, or having quality employees. Illustration above for Tronvig Group by Sage Einarsen. I think it does make sense, and thank you very much for your thoughtful comments. Hello James, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. The story is much longer and nuanced, but I tried to keep it short. Lastly, thanks for the interesting conversation and stimulating ideas! Thanks for the comment and for bringing up Peter Drucker. This is a very relevant and articulate article. Marinela, what an interesting thought. First of all Mr. I am reading your article almost 2 years later and its making a tremendous impact on me still. Thanks for such a wonderful piece. Push or Pull system simplified. Irute and others above, thank you for your thoughtful comments! Thank you so much for your article. They are greatly appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to articulate your position. Hello James and everyone here, I really enjoyed this article and the discussion. Branding is part of Marketing. Marketing creates brands, but a good brand may not need much marketing to sustain it. Trackbacks What is Branding? And Should Small Businesses Care? What IS marketing, anyway? 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El branding, comunicant valors de marca Weekly Interlude says: Properly Brand Your Business - Online Business Essentials - Stella North Media says: Branding Versus Marketing — My Art Resources says: Exploring the world of Olfaction says: Global National Brands — Brand Ego says: X Lessons to Learn from 's Smartest Brands says: Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Here are other popular branding and marketing related posts from James Heaton: Brand Fatigue by James Heaton. My concern with brand fatigue is not that people become tired of a brand, but rather that businesses and nonprofits become prematurely tired of their own brand presentation and, as a result, push to change it before it has had the opportunity to fulfill its mission or even fully register and build power in the minds of their brand consumers. What Sally Can Show You by James Heaton. A persona is a kind of mental model—an imaginary person with a name, history and story who has a way of doing things. A persona should have enough psychological detail to allow you to conveniently step over to the persona's view, and see your products and services from her perspective. Strategy Primer by James Heaton. Strategy is a very misused word. Marketing strategies are—if you look at how the word is used—any marketing activity that might possibly work. People talk about "strategies" such as "posting to Facebook more. The Difference Between Sales and Marketing by James Heaton. Sales has the power to change conditions, to transform a situation through the skills of the sales person. Marketing however, generally does not possess such transformative power. Marketing needs to work with conditions as they are. If you satisfy your customers you fail. If you satisfy your customers you fail, because in order to succeed you must deeply satisfy the customer for whom your product is most naturally suited. What is marketing strategy? Marketing strategy allows you to use pathways and footholds that apply your limited marketing budget more effectively everyone's marketing budget is limited. Marketing strategy facilitates your ability to apply marketing money to the correct half of the Wanamaker equation—the half you are not wasting on audiences who do not value your message. The Marketing Targets Diagram presents a strategic hypotheses that clarifies which of your marketing targets should have marketing resources applied toward them, which of them should be addressed by other means, and which are not likely to yield sufficient return on investment in economic or brand terms. What business are you in? I have found this question poses a challenge in almost every engagement, surprising participants. It wakes people up as they realize that they cannot answer or cannot agree on the answer. The Ideal Client by James Heaton. We want to make the world better, and for us the way we can do that most effectively is through our clients. So it is important that we choose our clients well. These are the ten questions we currently ask ourselves when we consider if a potential client is likely to be the ideal client for us. What can our strategy workshops do for you? Get answers to these and other key questions: What is a brand? And how strong is yours? Brands are often thought about in very limited terms but in reality, they exercise tremendous power in every kind of business or organization. What is the difference between marketing and branding? In a recent conversation with a very senior person at a financial institution my colleague was told, "I think private wealth managers will have a hard time seeing the value of branding—they see marketing as a cost center, not a driver of sales. How did we go from branding to marketing in one sentence like that? What is the difference between a visual brand and a true brand? How do you get your organization to think beyond just the visual brand? If your Brand Idea is succinct, meaningful and consistently and coherently expressed, it will be able to break free. It will be hearable outside of your brand bubble, outside of Whoville. Brand Strategy Basics by James Heaton. Brand strategy gives McDonald's a 27 billion dollar advantage over Burger King. It's important that you understand how this happened, and how it applies to your organization. The Beef Brand by James Heaton. Beef has come to be interpreted not just as meat from a cow but rather as the more generic and simplified meat; "If he does not eat beef, he must be a vegetarian. Where does your brand fall on this scheme? Nailing Jell-O to the Wall by James Heaton. The better you understand how the brand of your PLACE operates in the minds of your target audiences, the more effective you can be at engaging with them. Your Name is Your Biggest Brand Asset by James Heaton. Is it better to have a unique name like Kinko's or a more descriptive one like Staples? Is it better to have a name that's actually a person's name like Lowe's or something that really clues you in to the core business promise is such as Home Depot? International Business Machines or just a feel good symbol like Apple? There is danger and reward everywhere. Radiation, Disaster and Hubris by James Heaton. What impresses me most about nuclear materials is the inhuman scale of their behavior. For example, what does it mean that some radioactive materials, like Plutoniumhave a half life of 80 million years? This "half-life" is 8, times longer than all of recorded human history. This has to make you wonder, at least a little, if we are out of our league when we mess with this kind of stuff. Award for Museum Exhibition Advertising Design by James Heaton. Along with our client, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, we are proud to have won a first prize in the American Alliance of Museums' Museum Publications Design Competition. Call me trim tab. So what do you call this thing that does NOT take massive effort, but has the potential for great positive effect far beyond its seeming capacity? I think one very good answer to this question was was provided in by Buckminster Fuller when he said the following in an interview Hiring a big and flashy agency may seem "safe. You may find that you're actually sacrificing the responsiveness, energy and focus on quality of smaller firms for the false sense of security that comes from going big. Zoo Brands, Conservation and the Future of Zoos by James Heaton. I asked my year-old son if he thought zoos were good or bad. His answer was immediate and unequivocal: When FedEx Slew the Giant: Sell Value Not Price by James Heaton. When you think overnight courier, what comes to mind? I'm guessing FedEx is probably at the top of the list. This was not always the case. Let me take you back to the moment when a budding company called Federal Express slew the Goliath of its industry—Emery. Let's take a look at what happened and what you should learn from Emery's horrible death.
Dangerous Waters: A Biography of the Man Who Became Mark Twain.
Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked.
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This thesis gives us more detail, telling us not just the topic (advantages and disadvantages of cars) and the method of organisation (advantages first, disadvantages second).
This course provides tools necessary for you to take ownership of your career and give you the competitive advantage critical to achieve your career goals.