Making Marketing Happen Blog
Tips, Tools and Techniques for Making Marketing Happen
Posts Tagged ‘Brand’Promote Your Company Vision – Part II
“Promote Your Company Vision – Part I” provided tips for how to market your company vision as a means of promoting your brand, attracting and retaining customers and differentiating your business. Here are two more marketing tips:
Bring It to Life The saying “a pictures is worth a thousand words” conveys the notion that complex ideas can be conveyed more easily with images. That adage definitely applies to company visions. Video is a fantastic tool to use for this purpose. Videos are less expensive to produce than they use to be. They are easily to distribute via YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing platforms and they go viral faster than most any other medium. Why not create a company video that captures your company’s vision for the future? Interviews are one approach to take. You can film executives sharing how the company vision guides their business decisions. You can also feature employees discussing how they are personally inspired by the vision. Some corporations have the financial ability to produce high-end films that portray a world in which the companies’ visions have become a reality. Here are two superb examples of company visions brought to life via videos.
The first is by Corning, the world leader in specialty glass and ceramics. It is called “A Day Made of Glass.” The second video campaign is by Honda. It consists of a series of short documentaries titled “Dream the Impossible.” This dream-based thematic complements Honda’s current vision-inspired tagline, “Powered by Dreams.” Talk About It Your company has a vision for a better future that it wants to help shape. Get out and tell the world about it! Does your business have an evangelist or executive on staff whose job it is to share this message? Have him/her blog and tweet in support of the vision. Create a speaker series and arrange for executives or evangelists to give lectures or participate on panels about relevant topics. Are there other experts in the market whose research or interests support your company’s vision? Hold a series of webcasts or in-person events featuring these subject matter experts. Record the talks and then package them as podcasts. Put the podcasts on your website and market them to existing and prospective customers. Actively promoting your business’ vision will give the public greater insight into the essence of your company. People who find your company vision compelling will have another reason to believe in your brand and become loyal customers.
Posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 in Branding, Marketing, Marketing Tip | | Permalink
Tags: Acquire, Attract, Best Practices, Brand, Online Marketing, Web Marketing Promote Your Company Vision – Part I
The vision is also a foundational component of a company’s brand. The most compelling ones inspire employees and endure as a business grows. Yet, many businesses don’t actively communicate their visions. Companies that don’t promote their visions are missing a marketing opportunity. Why do it? A business that actively promotes its vision is positioning itself as a thought leader and innovator in its market. Touting its vision is also a great way for a business to differentiate itself from it competition. If a company doesn’t have one, it should write a vision statement. Once that is done, it is time to share it with the world. The following are suggestions of ways that a company can market its corporate vision. Unbury It Many businesses have their company vision statements listed on their websites. But the statements are usually buried somewhere deep in the site’s “About” or “Company” sections. Liberate your vision statement! Highlight it in appropriately-placed callout boxes. Or go for the gusto and place the vision on the home page so that every visitor can easily grasp the business’ reason for being. Does your company produce an annual report? Incorporate the vision into the CEO’s letter to shareholders. Have executives discuss it at the annual shareholder meeting. If your company publishes a newsletter, include mention of the vision in it. As progress is made, write articles and updates about it. Incorporate It into Your Tagline A tagline is a means of communicating a brand-based message. It should be changed over time as a business evolves. Taglines are another way to promote a company’s vision. This strategy is especially appropriate if a company’s marketing objective is to establish itself as the thought leader in its category. Some examples of past and present vision-inspired taglines are: “Think Different” (Apple), “Imagination at Work” (General Electric), “The World’s Networking Company” (AT&T), “The Power of Dreams,” (Honda) “The Next Stage” (Wells Fargo) and “The Power of Human Energy” (Chevron). Can you think of others? The next post will provide additional ways for companies to promote their unique visions.
Posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 in Branding, Marketing, Marketing Tip | | Permalink
Tags: Acquire, Attract, Best Practices, Brand, Online Marketing, Small Business, Web Marketing Mind the Gap Logo – Part I
The posts on Gap’s Facebook page make it clear that people did not like the “updated” interpretation of the Gap logo. A classic, international icon had been desecrated and the public let management know it. What happened next? Close to end of business today, the Gap did an about face and announced that it is keeping its 20+ year old iconic brand, as is. The customer spoke loudly and the company listened. Bravo to the Gap for being responsive to its customers. Some people accused Gap of engineering a publicity stunt. We’re assuming that what transpired was a gaffe and not ploy. So, what could have been done to avoid this episode, which is all too reminiscent of the New Coke debacle? This post is not about whether the new, but soon-to-be-history, logo was brilliantly designed, or whether it was something that any of us could create in PowerPoint using Helvetica font in less than five minutes. Instead, it’s about the realities of brand management today and how Gap’s team could have made the logo project a positive experience for the company and its customers.
This episode confirms that brands matter to people. Brands are intangibles that live in customers’ minds. Consumers are very passionate about brands whose promises they believe in and they can feel a sense of ownership for those brands. Gap’s actions show that their team hadn’t fully realized that brand management today is about consumer engagement and participation. The days of one way communication are over for established brands. By changing the Gap logo and then unveiling it to the public, Gap’s one way communication path ran straight into a brick wall. Then the internet amplified the negative response into a loud roar. The brand was tarnished and the company was scrambling. Gap should have incorporated its customer network into the company’s internal logo discussion. It missed an opportunity to gain more evangelists by publicly soliciting customer input about the Gap’s updated logo concepts early on. At last count, the Gap has 722,402 people liking it on Facebook and 35,618 following it on Twitter. The company should have used social media platforms to dialogue with its customers openly about its logo plans, and gained their feedback long before it was launched. Had they done so, Gap management would have had a better gauge of the public’s response and could have redirected, or aborted, the logo update process. Brands are defined by how well a company responds to moments of truth. Gap just lived one of those moments. Consumers and their cash will determine how well Gap’s management handled this marketing mess.
Posted on Monday, October 11th, 2010 in Branding, Marketing, Marketing Technique, Social Media | | Permalink
Tags: Attract, Brand, Market Research, Online Marketing, Small Business, Social Media, Web Marketing Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Legitimate organizations that don’t follow these rules risk seriously tarnishing perception of their brands. I should know. I experienced an opt-out mini-saga with the US’s leading marketing association and it definitely changed my view of that group. I went through the marketing organization’s email unsubscribe process THREE times and each time the confirmation page said that I had been unsubscribed successfully! Still, the promotional emails kept coming! It was only after I sent multiple emails directly to the support department that I was finally removed from the email list. This association exists solely to educate marketers. But, what do you know? It turns out that they neither follow the law, nor practice what they preach to their students. This “do as I say, not as I do” episode has forever damaged my affinity for this brand. I won’t be signing up for any of their marketing courses, ever! The takeaway? Companies need to regularly check that their email opt-out processes are working properly. Is the opt-out server integrated with the list server? Does a script run automatically that removes names from the master list or re-tags them properly? Companies that manage the opt-out process manually should access the removal list and pull the addresses from the master distribution lists at least twice a week and more often if they are frequent emailers. People who keep receiving unwanted emails get annoyed. The last thing a company wants is for these recipients to mark their emails as “spam”. That can lead to the company being blacklisted by ISPs, an outcome that gets complicated and ugly. So, follow the rules and you will make marketing happen!
Posted on Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 in Branding, Email Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Technique | | Permalink
Tags: Acquire, Attract, Brand, CAN-SPAM Could You Please Pass the Salt?
Briefly, the episode’s plot has a woman who has just been caught cheating on her husband return to her house to reconcile with him and try to get him to confess to killing her lover. The police have put a wire on her and tell her to yell the word “salt” if the husband starts hurting her. The woman keeps repeating the word “salt” before entering the home. Then, when her husband attacks her, she yells the word “salt” again and again. Why am I making a big deal out the use of a word that is uttered daily by billions? Because the episode aired right before the movie “Salt,” starring Angelina Jolie, was about to open in theaters. And in an earlier scene that took place on a street in LA, a bus drove by in the background with an advertisement on it for the movie. Coincidence? I think not. By now we are all used to seeing product placements in movies and on TV shows. (In my opinion, no company is better at it than Apple). Many of us have become desensitized to movie dialogues that include company taglines and jingles. “Baby back ribs” being sung about in Austin Powers 2 comes to mind. The promo in The Closer is different from so many others because there is no product for the viewer to see and no overt reference to the movie is made. I suspect that the movie’s promoters think that repeated use of the most basic of words, “salt,” in The Closer will lead to it being more top-of-mind for TV viewers. That way, when these TV watchers decide to go to the movies, they presumably will have a higher recall for the word and be more likely to go see the film. Might we call this an example of “pseudo-subliminal advertising?” It’s an interesting marketing technique, but I question whether it worked. What do you think?
Posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 in Advertising, Branding, Marketing, Marketing Technique | | Permalink
Tags: Attract, Brand |
|
Subscribe via 
