Archive for the ‘Branding’ Category
Low-Cost Ways to Boost Cash Flow
Feeling the pinch? Looking for ways to keep your brand alive and healthy during a sick economy?
To fight the blight of a tight market, it’s time to pull out guerrilla marketing strategies. With guerrilla marketing, instead of the big-budget, splashy ad campaigns you might use when cash is flowing, use stealth marketing to motivate consumers without looking like advertising as usual.
Quite simply, guerrilla techniques are the unconventional, innovative and imaginative approach for reaching customers in ways and places that are Read more »
The Discount Dilemma
As the competition and search for customers deepens, along with economic bad news, it becomes tempting to use price to entice customers into a buying mood.
Especially when discount brands seem to be the ones enjoying growth.
WalMart, with their every day low prices, saw a 9% sales growth in 2008 . Generic and private label brands now have nearly a fourth of the market while consumer brand sales slump, despite millions in advertising.
If you think that price-cutting is the answer to slumping sales, and you’re tempted to slash and cut your way into revenue growth, there are a few Read more »
Micro Marketing to Boomers
We are no longer a nation of mass consumers. Although we consume massive amounts of products, goods and services, our connection to what we consume is increasingly at a very individualistic decision.
Where we once strived to keep up with the Joneses, now we don’t even want to be like the Joneses. We are celebrating our uniqueness. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Baby Boomers.
To lump them into one demographic group is of no value to businesses wanting to tap into the enormous amount of wealth and spending power that is settling into the hands and bank accounts of those born between 1946 and 1964.
The safest way to enter into a marketing relationship with boomers is Read more »
The Connection Between Marketing and Leadership
A few days ago I had lunch with a friend who recently returned from Europe and Asia where he has lived and worked for the past 3-1/2 years. In the course of our conversation we discussed which is the most important to running a successful business – marketing or leadership?
The conclusion is that both are equally important. But even more, there is an integration of how marketing and leadership are combined in order to succeed in business today. The writer Milan Kundera summed it up as “Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.”
In the airline industry Southwest Airlines with Herb Kelleher, and Virgin Airlines with Richard Branson, are examples of entrepreneurs whose success is due to strong Read more »
The Importance of Being Different
In the 1950s a man named Rosser Reeves, who was chairman of Ted Bates & Company, a New York ad agency, identified and introduced a concept he called the U.S.P. — the Unique Selling Proposition.
Reeves’ finding was that the U.S.P. is the single most important element in determining whether an ad campaign will be successful. He used his concept in many successful campaigns for clients such as Anacin, Colgate, and Viceroy Cigarettes. His ads were incredibly powerful and made Ted Bates & Company the fifth largest ad agency in the world by 1960.
He created what is considered the most successful U.S.P. ever in the history of advertising for Read more »
Creating Buzz
It happens to every business. Your product becomes mature. Consumers have heard about it for years. The marketplace has maxed out. Unless you do something to change your product you have nothing new and exciting to communicate.
Which, of course, is why venerable brands are constantly coming out with line extensions, new improved versions of the original, and products that now have something they didn’t offer before. Because when you have something new to talk about, you create fresh excitement for your brand.
A few weeks ago I suggested that business owners should watch the political advertising this season and look at how you can apply what works in political campaigns to your business. If you watched, you’ve seen one of the best Read more »
Stilettos, Image, and Building a Brand
Last week in Australia, 265 women raced for 100 yards wearing stiletto heels and made it into the Guinness book of world records. The fastest runner was awarded $5,000 (and some band aids.) Many of the women never actually completed the 100 yards due to falling in their 3″ spikes.
The loyalty women have to their stilettos is almost mystifying. They are painful to wear, difficult to walk in (let alone run), and legions of medical articles have been printed touting the long-term foot, ankle and leg problems they cause. Yet the style thrives in brands like Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik that sell easily for hundreds of dollars a pair because legs look much more shapely in a high heel.
When reduced to their essence, brands are Read more »
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