Tag: youtube

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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”.

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.

Over the last 40 years, Wong Fong Engineering has built a reputation as a market leader in the design, manufacture and servicing of load- and waste-handling systems for a wide spectrum of industries. Having achieved success in Singapore, the next step for Wong Fong was expansion overseas.

For that, the company needed a sound strategy, so it turned to BrandPact. “We wanted to both strengthen our brand at home and take the brand overseas,” said Mr Kok Kee Sun, financial controller and deputy management representative.

Brand reviews and market surveys to understand how customers made their purchase decisions soon revealed Wong Fong’s strengths and weaknesses. The company realised that it needed to build its own brand equity so that it would be less dependent on the brands it represented.

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 [...]