Tag: advertising

Branding is most typically associated with marketing elements like names, trademarks and logos. But, a brand is actually defined by a combination of factors. Like an iceberg, only a small piece breaks the surface. Signs and symbols are indeed only part of the definition.

Purple Swarms”, a company that promotes group buying uses the word “swarms” in its brand name to indicate groups. Had the company used the word “groups” instead of swarms it would have failed to strike a chord with people simply because groups would be more run of the mill.

Brands have to engage with their audience when they want to be engaged, using a variety of communication tools, depending on their preferences. It used to be that companies would interrupt and mass email their consumers, but now consumers demand more. Using tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, entrepreneurs can connect in the moment and build a loyal fan base, as well as listen to feedback published in real-time by their audience. David Meerman Scott surveyed the Fortune 100 companies and found that only 30% had responded to him in real-time, and then concluded that companies that engage in real-time have higher stock prices.

Personal branding. The term was used so much last year that it’s almost become cliché, yet you can bet it’s only going to become more ubiquitous in 2011. But what does personal branding mean, exactly? And how can job seekers use it to their advantage? U.S. News spoke with Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Millennial Branding, a personal branding company, and author of Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future about steps job seekers can take to build a quality presence online. Excerpts:

It has not always been like this. The traditionally “natural governing party” once held sway in all but one of the provincial legislatures for most of the 1930s and 1940s. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, the Liberals formed government in five or six of Canada’s ten provinces.

Today, however, the Liberals sit as the Official Opposition in the House of Commons and form government in only four provinces: British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island. Only in PEI are the Liberals leading in the polls, and if current trends hold firm the Liberals will only have premiers in Quebec and Prince Edward Island at the end of next year.

VietNamNet Bridge – A miss is as good as a mile. Sabeco made a mistake and now it has to pay a heavy price for the carelessness. How can such a big enterprise misunderstand simple branding? Experts are called on to reconsider processes in state asset management.

As VietNamNet has reported, SABECO, a big Vietnamese brewery brand is now facing the risk of losing its brand to the hands of a foreign partner. A lot of businesses and experts have voiced their opinions about the case.

Tran Anh Tuan, the founding member of The Pathfinder, a brand consultancy firm:

Currently, many big enterprises still do not have a brand management division. I don’t know if Sabeco had its brand valuated, set conditions for choosing partners or applied any policies on intellectual property. Or it only took care of possible turnover when it assigned a foreign partner to cover so many (20) markets. It should have been allowed to only distribute products in Singapore or some neighboring markets. After only one or two years, if Sabeco has good business results, it could have allowed the foreign partner to cover other markets as well.

It is a shame that Sabeco has not paid appropriate attention to protecting its main asset – the brand, especially when this is not a kind of franchise but just an exporting contract for distribution.

Web Design Company Brands Up have given their website http://www.brands-up.com a new look as part of their overall expansion of business services. The site now features a homepage flash presentation as well as incorporating additional Web 2 elements into the range of services offered by the branding and web design Company. CEO Vincent Octaviouz believes the face-lift was necessary ’not only because the Company has developed, but because the more engagement your site provides, the less likely it is that people visiting the site will click away.’

With the emergence of Facebook and Youtube, branding has of course altered radically in the last 5 years. It is now no longer the Media who have exclusive control over what is published, because anybody with an opinion or a digital camera can significantly affect how a brand is perceived. In a recent interview, Vincent explained the new dynamics: “If someone has a bad experience at Cafe ZYX, and they video their experience and upload it to Youtube, and if it then goes viral, that can devastate a company’s brand. So now you see all the big companies like Nike and Adidas with Facebook Fanpages, because they have to engage with their customers, to be totally accountable and as approachable in as many ways as possible.

FOLLOWING THE RECENT rebranding of PricewaterhouseCoopers to ‘pwc’, I suspect, like me, many former employees of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand will be mourning the loss of these illustrious names from the world of accountancy. From now on, the firm will be known by the moniker ‘PwC’, although strangely its logo will consist of the initials ‘pwc’ in lower-case type.
At the time of the merger in 1998, many, including myself, saw the adoption of the cumbersome PricewaterhouseCoopers name as a compromise to appease both sides – a fairly common occurrence when professional services firms merge. So, more than a decade later it comes as no surprise that the firm has finally decided to ditch its legacy names and go for the shorter PwC – which, to be honest, was the name that most of us were already using. PricewaterhouseCoopers will, however, remain the name of the global organisation for legal purposes and it will still be the name used to sign company audits.

Air East Airways is the living definition of a family business. This aviation company was founded in 1982 by Mike Tarascio, who’s now Air East Airway’s president; his wife, Maureen, is operations manager. And then there are their four children: Anthony is the company’s chief IT officer, Greg is maintenance manager, Lauren acts as bookkeeper, and Nick is the CEO. “We’re of Italian extraction, and it’s a very close-rooted business in the classic Italian style,” says Nick, “even down to the fact that my dad still lives in the house he was born in, which is just half an hour away from Republic Airport in Farmingdale, New York, where the business is based.”

Today, Air East Airways is a solid $5 million-a-year company with 12 full-time staff. Its services include pilot training, aircraft rental, storage and maintenance – “everything aviation,” according to its website. It boasts a fleet of six planes and an AStar helicopter, and two luxurious Learjets are available for charter at its sister company Ventura Air.

The expansion of a small cookie factory on this city’s outskirts offers a glimpse of how Obamamania in Africa is developing from a fad into a lasting brand for local companies across the continent, even as the U.S. president’s popularity takes a hit at home.
Marc Skaf, a portly man of Lebanese-French stock, is the managing [...]