How has the definition of branding evolved to reflect the modern business context?
If you type ‘what is branding’ into a search engine, you’ll be presented with two choices:
“making a mark with a branding iron”
Or, “creating a distinctive design to promote a product or service”
Branding in today’s world is not just about standing out, but about creating a truly consistent omnichannel experience across all customer touchpoints.
To achieve this, it means fully integrating brand strategy across every customer interaction, not just about creating aesthetically stable collateral. To outpace competitors in the current business climate, branding requires a data-driven, customer-focused approach to marketing.
Our marketing tools and templates help you build a winning marketing strategy that supports your business objectives and boost revenue.
What's more, all our marketing strategy resources are integrated across the RACE framework to drive the results you need to reach your goals.
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19 May, 2021
Updating approaches to your online branding for the digital world
Brand is No.1
I want to start with a bold statement. The online brand is the single most important element to a business or organization. If you think about what online branding actually is; a position that has been carefully established, and a set of customer promises and overall experiences based on communication and service, then not delivering on these promises and what a brand stands for will lead to failure.
In today's digital landscape, strong online branding will allow you a closer connection with your prospective customers, leading to conversion and retention.
Without a strong online brand, a business will experience reduced competitiveness, inaccessible products and services, customer confusion, and dissatisfaction. As your online brand shows its form in all your customer touchpoints, then to say it is everything is really not an overstatement.
What is online branding?
Website(s), search marketing, mobile content, social media,…
Branding means fully integrating your customers' experiences of your brand. We'll recommend marketing tools and training to show you how, as well as taking an in-depth look into the definition of branding
What's the definition of branding? Across numerous terms and definitions, one thing that rings true for pretty much all of them is a heightened focus on your customers' experiences of your branded goods or services, compared to your competitors. But what is meant by brand definition today? And what can brand marketers learn from this?
We've all seen that, to succeed in today's competitive omnichannel environment, it's more important than ever that brands champion their key customers (both potential buyers and those with existing lifetime value) in all of their marketing activities. You need a data-driven, customer-focused approach to marketing to outpace your competitors.
As a result, we guarantee that all our marketing training is integrated across our tried and tested…
If you're planning to optimize your branding or rebranding, we have tools to support your brand development at every stage
Have you ever wondered how brands grow as large and as well known as they do? From companies like Google to Starbucks, their names are known, customers know exactly what services and products they provide, and satisfied customers keep coming back for more. Brand development is how this happens, and it is no small feat. It takes time to cultivate a brand, to the point that a company has universal recognition like Gillette and Coca-Cola.
What does brand development involve?
Now that you recognize the importance of branding, what do you need to create a good brand? In a nutshell, brand development means:
Finding your brand’s voice and communicating your value proposition
Implementing your voice and style consistently throughout…
Personalized marketing, as we know from our experiences as brand-lovers and as marketers, is the make or break of any e-commerce marketing strategy in a competitive environment
Personalized marketing is all about offering improved user experience (UX) by serving relevant content, or targeting key messages in the funnel, based on your customer’s e-commerce activities and behaviour. Personalized marketing unlocks tactics for retailers to form personal relationships with their customers during their online experience (CX), to nurture leads and drive more sales from digital marketing.
According to SmarterHQ, 72% of consumers say they now only engage with marketing messages that are personalized and tailored to their interests. And with competition at an all-time high, value added by personalized marketing is exactly the tactic your retail/e-commerce marketing strategy needs.
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Despite this, customer security and privacy concerns are at their peak. A McKinsey 2020 consumer-data report…
A vital step towards marketing digital transformation
In the current climate, digital interactions between brands and their B2B and B2C partners have become a major feature in their customers' buying journey.
Given the complexity of customer interactions via different touchpoints and channels across the modern customer lifecycle as shown in the visual, planning frameworks can help simplify the analysis and prioritization of digital marketing activities.
It is sometimes difficult to orchestrate marketing activities in order to ensure that the right digital tactics are used at the right time and in the right place in that journey, to nurture a customer lead. However, in the partner world it’s a lot more complex, because before you embark on the development of any marketing campaign with or through a partner, an imperative step is to market to that partner to raise awareness of your brand and educate…
Examples of how website designs must be optimized to support the way we hold and interact with smartphones
Our compilation of statistics showing the growth in smartphone usage highlights the well-known need to create effective mobile experiences. With mobile minutes accounting for more than two-thirds of online interactions in many countries, there is an obvious need to optimize designs so they are consistent with consumer behaviour as they use their phones. This need is also suggested by statistics showing lower conversion rates on smartphone (they’re typically between one half and one third of those on desktop).
Consumer behaviour of mobile interaction
I was recently running a training course looking at improving mobile customer journeys and experiences where our focus was on Millennial and Gen Z personas. I discovered this great new-to-me research on mobile interaction based on how a phone is held and interactions occur with a mobile handset using fingers…
Consumer brand marketing made creative by Honda
We look back to 2003 and Honda were struggling to make a sustainable impact in the European markets so turned to brand marketing . They had seen a decline in sales since 1998 and their 2nd position to Toyota had been lost to Nissan. Japanese car placement in the European market was essential, and Honda needed to make a bigger splash with a smaller pebble.
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The Play
In 2001 that Wieden+Kennedy proposed to Honda a new advertising strategy based on the company's Japanese motto, "Yume No Chikara" ("Power of Dreams"). The stated goal of the campaign was to increase Honda's share of the UK market to five percent within three years and to change…
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07 Sep, 2018
The brand marketing campaign that defined Nike
Nike has done it again. They've turned heads, they've shown their brand mentality and they have got people talking about them. This week they celebrated the 30 year anniversary of their "Just Do it." slogan.
They had bags of content that they could've used for it, not to mention sports stars. Nike for the first time have stepped into the social arena of current events and made Colin Kaepernick, the outed NFL Quaterback who knelt during the national anthem, the face of the campaign.
This is an amazingly bold move from Nike as even President Trump stood against it along with Kaepernick's team and the NFL themselves. It came to light that Nike had not dropped him from their books and in fact went into talks to make him the face of the anniversary. They even aired the advert at half time in the first game…
Absolut vodka and their marketing campaign have stood the test of time
Sometimes a simple marketing campaign can far outshine a complicated and expensive one. This is the same for more than just marketing campaigns and usually is true across a lot of things in life in general. Simple and effective is more often than not the way to go. Let us see how Absolut vodka did that.
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The history
Absolut as a company was founded in 1879 by Lars Olsson Smith and is produced in Åhus, Sweden. He challenged, and beat, the city of Stockholm's liquor marketing monopoly with his vodka. He sold it just outside the city border at a lower price than the monopoly's product. Smith even offered free boat rides to the distillery and "Rent Brännvin"…
