Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Michael Ervin | Filed under: Marketing News, Marketing in a Recession, Soap Box
The wise marketer will take advantage of this critical moment in an economic cycle. If your company has been saving resources and restraining marketing spending, you can still position your company for favorable market share and future sales by increasing your presence now.
Despite stubborn unemployment and cautious consumers, the nation’s manufacturing grew for the fourth consecutive month in November, according to the Institute for Supply Management. While the overall U.S. economy has expanded for the seventh straight month, the recent stabilizing of the manufacturing sector suggests consumer demand should soon follow.
In the past several years, no moment has been more critical than this one for stepping up your media presence. Your email marketing will help bring in direct response leads, of course, but direct marketing response works best when your brand is highly visible in your target market’s media consumption pattern—particularly if your competitors are there.
Contrary to some of the chatter from the tech marketing blogosphere, branding still works. It always will as long as human beings have emotional responses. And at today’s point in the recession cycle, a well executed ad campaign is the smartest marketing move a company can make. So go ahead. Don’t worry, you won’t jinx the economic recovery.
Posted on October 1st, 2008 by Michael Ervin | Filed under: Soap Box
(By Michael Ervin, published in Orange County Business Journal)
Throughout the past decade, the focus on corporate branding has led to a heightened awareness of the critical role a branding campaign plays in the communications mix. We know that effective promotion of a brand helps customers, employees and shareholders better understand a company and its offerings. It enhances the confidence that stakeholders have in that business and its activities. It differentiates the company from its competition. And, we now see that all of these attributes can have a positive effect on a company’s fiscal health.
Unfortunately, the last decade also found those who believed that companies could “out brand” their competition simply by outspending them. Often, corporate branding campaigns offered high hopes at a hefty price. There were those who thought that the more money spent to “invent” a company’s brand, the more powerful it would become. But now, more than ever, we know that smart—not necessarily costly—branding is effective and essential. And smart branding is based on a company’s current, definable practices, activities, philosophies and personality.
- Branding Is Everything: A strong brand provides the power of premium pricing.
A truly effective marketing communications program will uncover the strongest brand identity for a company when it is based on reality. By showcasing a company’s greatest strengths—hopefully those that also differentiate it in the marketplace—a company can build valuable credibility that resonates with its customers, employees and shareholders. Since a corporate brand is a reflection of what is true about a company, no amount of money thrown at “inventing” a brand will be successful—the company must walk the talk of the brand image it promotes. A well-researched, efficiently crafted, reality-based branding communications effort, therefore, need not be a multi-million-dollar proposition.
Not only is branding based on facts essential for enhancing a company’s goodwill, it has also become a necessary business practice to fortify balance sheets. Recent studies show that a brand’s power accounts for a whopping five percent of those things that contribute to whether the stock price will go up or down. When you consider the fact that a company’s “financial strength” factored in at only six percent—a mere percentage point difference—you can see how much power a brand wields.
Of course, stock price or shareholder confidence is one thing. A strong brand can also impact a company’s bottom line by affecting its ability to retain employees, attract customers and, ultimately, reduce costs by building momentum on its marketing dollars.
Gone are the days when branding efforts were optional. In today’s competitive marketplace, building corporate brand identity is critical to gaining ground on competitors. And while it shouldn’t place a heavy financial burden on a company, branding is simply something we can’t afford not to do.
Tags: asset, brand, brand-asset, branding, corporate, corporate-identity, identity, Investor Relations, marketing
