Tag: logo

Tapping the vast audience of the social Web is a low-cost way to catapult a small-business brand onto the global arena. Building your brand using social media allows you to develop new (and strengthen existing) relationships, which often leads to everything from brand awareness, loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing.

Whether it be the Haiti Presidential second round election (expected on Jan. 16); the Peruvian Parliamentary and Presidential ballots (in April); or the Argentinian presidential election (in October), the precise outcome of several key ballots in the Americas in 2011 is uncertain.

What is far more sure, however, is that foreign political consultants will be working behind the scenes in many (if not most) of these countries trying to steer candidates to success.

Indeed, it is estimated that U.S. political consultants, alone, have already worked in more than half of the countries in the world. In 2011, that tally will only grow as globe-trotting U.S. firms reach out to more and more uncharted international territory following their widespread employment in last November’s U.S. midterm congressional elections.

BC’s Matt Lauer did an extensive interview recently with former President George W. Bush, who was promoting both his new book and a perspective on his presidency.

During the interview, Lauer mentioned that despite the large number of deaths and injuries in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former President Bush had enjoyed a special and very warm relationship with the military.

Bush agreed and said that he treasured that relationship. He then recounted a visit and talk with the widow of a soldier who had been killed in Iraq. He expressed his sorrow to her and they talked for a while. In parting, the soldier’s widow told the president, “He did his job. Now you do yours.”

It was an emotional story that obviously touched Bush deeply. It was also a remarkably effective, powerful moment on television, one that could touch viewers. If you’ve ever spent any time with politicians or CEOs, you could almost hear them saying, “I want that. I want that kind of special relationship.”

I don’t know. I have an ambiguous relationship to the concept of branding. On the one hand, I know it’s real, and have talked about it as real. A network, especially an ad-supported cable network, has to deliver certain things that its viewers — and advertisers — expect. Especially the advertisers; the average viewer might not have expectations of a network, but an advertiser certainly does have expectations of the kind of viewers their commercials are going to reach. (HBO also has a “brand” but defines it more eclectically, in terms of shows that have the feel of being “stuff the other networks won’t do.” That’s because they’re selling their service to the viewers, rather than to advertisers.) That’s probably the biggest factor in creating the existence and importance of a brand, since the average viewer does not — and shouldn’t — care what channel something is on as long as it’s entertaining.

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.

Tobacco manufacturers have received support from a brand-focused lobby group after health secretary Andrew Lansley touted the idea of removing all branding from cigarette packets.
Andrew Lansley: favours plain cigarette packaging (photo: Pete Hill)
Andrew Lansley: favours plain cigarette packaging (photo: Pete Hill)

Lansley claimed at the weekend that “the evidence is clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers, so it makes sense to consider having less attractive packaging”.

The idea could be incorporated in a forthcoming White Paper on public health due to be produced by the Department of Health.

It has met with opposition from the British Brands Group (BBG), a non-profit organisation set up in 1994 to represent brand members on regulatory and commercial issues.

John Noble, director of BBG, claimed plain packaging was “bad news for consumers and markets”.

Your brand is what differentiates your business from the competition. Your brand is what you do and how you do it — and how you communicate that to the world. To use a cooking metaphor, too many cooks adding random ingredients to your brand can make for one crazy dish.

Make sure the brand you’ve built your reputation on stays strong as you expand your marketing outreach into new channels. Follow this five-step recipe for consistent branding across all media.

1. Use the same images, logos and writing style across all communication channels. Brand recognition is often thought of as the way you portray your business or organization visually, but it’s more than that. Your brand is the way you look and sound to others, so make sure you’re using similar elements across your communication channels.

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.

During Question Period in the Alberta Legislature yesterday afternoon, Wildrose Alliance MLA Heather Forsyth mocked the government’s propensity for pouring money into dubious projects. Among her examples, “your provincial branding … which no one can remember.”

She wasn’t kidding.

Do you remember that effort to re-brand Alberta as an environmentally friendly, happy and creative kind of place? You know, the one that got off to such a bumpy start in the spring of 2009 with outrage over its price tag and that goofy story about how the geniuses behind the advertising campaign used pictures of an English beach to boost Canada’s second most western province?

No? Well, as Ms. Forsyth pointed out, neither can anyone else!

In fact, according to the government of Alberta, 57 per cent of Albertans say they have “some level of recall of the brand.” Apparently the government thinks this is pretty good. They commissioned a public opinion survey, you see, and then they announced they were very pleased with this level of recall, thank you very much.

Whether you like it or not, and whether you intend to or not, you build a brand online with your first public post. Given the ubiquity of information available about people from a very young age today, I’d even argue that *not* posting anything about yourself suggests characteristics for your personal brand (i.e. you’re a technophobe or maybe just highly protective of your privacy).

Don’t allow inaction to define your brand. If you want to maximize your audience, your social impact and your economic value online, you should build your brand actively, and with intent.

So here’s your first question:

What is my brand name online?

What’s the name that you use (or will use) online, the one by which the most people are most likely to know you? (See Robert’s piece, linked above, for some great backstories on how a few online journalists came to their online brands.)

Your given name is an obvious choice, but it’s likely not unique. (I remain thankful to this day that I registered my daughter’s name as a dot-com domain before a bikini model of the same name could get to it.) Nor are given names always short and easy-to-recall. Which are you more likely to remember? “Markos Moulitsas”… or “Kos”?

Don’t worry too much about this question, though. If Internet users can come to regard “Amazon” as an online store instead of a river in South America, almost any word can be branded to almost any purpose.