Brands need to be authentic and put the customer at the heart of the story

For more than a century, Sacramento was defined by its history as a Gold Rush town. The mystique of rugged, enterprising gold miners drew tourists from around the country hoping to catch a glimpse of the Wild West. This was great for tourism, but it didn’t hold much appeal for locals. They certainly weren’t ashamed of their city’s past, but they had heard the same stories of rags turned riches so many times that they could repeat them in their sleep. Grizzled prospectors mining for gold isn’t the sexiest or most exciting imagery in today’s tech-focused world. When Visit Sacramento CMO Sonya Bradley and her team were tasked with updating the city’s branding, they built their messaging around a different kind of Sacramento gold: its thriving culinary scene. Her team highlighted the history of Sacramento’s vineyards — many…

Ensure the names you create for your podcasts, ebooks, products…and just about anything else don’t impede your marketing success

Savvy Digital Marketers know that names (business names, blog names, podcast names, online group names) have concrete marketing consequences. The marginal effect of a bad name across key marketing goals like attracting eyeballs, encouraging buzz, facilitating word-of-mouth, and increasing top of mind awareness (TOMA) is real. If you don’t think that an awesome name that’s easy to say, spell, and remember can increase your referral rate by 3-5%, then you don’t really understand the human mind. Check out these five insights on picking the right name for your website, online brand, mobile app, e-book or anything else shared by the team at naming platform Squadhelp.com:

1. Evocative names are most highly regarded

Online naming resources recommend catchy, unique, short and appealing names. Great advice - yet after helping nearly 8000 individuals find winning names, experts…

An ineffective brand strategy is likely blocking your success in digital marketing, here's 3 factors for success

We take it for granted that digital channel management is a core marketing activity now, and yet our own recent survey highlighted that a digital strategy isn’t a ubiquitous component of everyone’s marketing plan, as much as we might think it ought to be. But, let’s say that it is, that we’ve all got a solid digital strategy, that we’re using frameworks like RACE - are we done? I’d suggest far from it - and that there is a bigger issue at hand blocking your digital success, which is often surprisingly "missing-in-action"  and that’s a coherent brand strategy. In fact, brand strategy is an obvious yet secret ingredient for modern digital marketing which most companies that I meet or work with simply don’t have an eye on, there’s no solution in place…

The term digital branding is often used, but what actually is ‘digital branding’?

As a strategist and brand planner, I find the use of the term 'digital branding' curious. Do we use the term ‘TV branding’ or ‘radio branding’? Digital marketing has emerged as a specialism over the last decade with its origins rooted in direct marketing. The increase in the number of personal devices and their use means brand marketers have many more ways of communicating directly and interactively with their target consumers or customers. Given this, it's no surprise that branding concepts should be applied to digital media and technology to develop brands through interactions with consumers on their digital devices.  We'll look at some of the leading FMCG examples at the end of this article.

Digital branding definition: So, how do I see it? Here's my perspective on "Digital Branding":

"Digital channels and assets are used to communicate a…

Why you need a plan to defend and improve your online reputation

In an online world of viral news articles and social media, your brand’s image is something that can quickly be affected by even the slightest misstep. That’s why protecting your brand’s reputation is more important than you’ll ever realize.

The Significance of Your Online Image

It’s easy for us to forget that the internet is still a relatively new business channel. When we look back on the history of the internet in 25 or 30 years, 2017 will still look very much like the Wild West. Rules are still being developed, concepts are just now being understood, and what works isn’t always clear. But when you cut through all of the unknowns, it doesn’t take an advanced degree to recognize the importance of maintaining a strong online image. Information spreads fast online and you have to keep up. The internet gives everyone a…

Thinking like Sun Tzu to improve your strategic position

This is the second part to last week's interpretation of how Sun Tzu's Art of War can be applied to digital marketing. Here I'll cover three ways in which applying Sun Tzu's Art of War can help develop your marketing or digital marketing strategy, starting with the 5 elements...

The 5 Elements to defining your strategic position

Sun Tzu defines five key elements to help understand your position that make total sense when applied to marketing too. Your strategic position is never strong or weak... it is only strong or weak in relation to something or someone else. Mission or the way: This is what unites all of the people in the Army (organisation) and the customer. It helps everybody to share the same goals and objectives, it allows everyone to 'get real', to feel that what has been…

Focusing your efforts on redesigning your brand identity is crucial for your startup’s success. Here are some tips that’ll help you head in the right direction.

With new businesses appearing almost out of thin air everywhere around us, there is no doubt that in order for your startup to reach your target audience and make a difference it has to stand out. While your startup’s product or service may be the one thing this world has been missing if no one ever hears about it, did it make a sound? This is exactly why your brand identity is so important. A business’ brand identity refers to the ways in which your company is represented, what its values, purpose, passions and goals are. There are many advantages to creating a strong brand identity. These include your being able to develop a competitive advantage in the…

Trump defied every expert and still won. The implications for brands are huge.

Yesterday, I prepared a piece about the anticipated Clinton win as President of America. What a difference nine hours makes… Despite all the sophisticated big data … the huge political advertising budgets from the Clinton camp… the faceless pollsters who number-crunched rather than listened to the unspoken authentic voice of the people… in the end Trump won. …So why, from a branding perspective did a reported sexist, racist and narcissistic defy all predictions? Perhaps the regular American saw what a mess the world has become – despite all the propaganda suggesting the contrary. Looking for example to the UK, they got the impression that its identity had been decimated by an open-door policy leading to the country’s spiritual, commercial, social and political foundations becoming at best ‘in transition’ and at worst, tatters. They saw Europe down, despondent and divided. They looked at how former hard-working…

Key lessons for brands emerge from the most anticipated ad of the holiday season

On initial viewing the John Lewis’ £7m Xmas 2016 commercial  tells a quaint story of a girl whose trampoline becomes popular with the local wildlife community.

Set against a backing track of Randy Crawford’s ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away’. The commercial features a Boxer dog in a typical Middle-England home. The dog enviously stares out of a living room window as it watches two wild foxes, a badger, a squirrel and a hedgehog liberally jumping on a trampoline built by the household’s father for his daughter. 

Come Christmas morning Buster (the Boxer dog) pushes aside a surprised Bridget (the daughter) to merrily jump on trampoline all for itself.

Given a tumultuous political year, John Lewis’s customer director Craig Inglis said:  

“You could say 2016 has certainly been quite a year.  We…

There are major obstacles to using brand awareness as a marketing objective

Over the past decade marketers have relied on quantity based measurements as a proxy for campaign performance. The volume of impressions, clicks and likes indicates that people see the ads and find them relevant and compelling. But with the increase of ad blocking and bot frauds, as well as demand for more data transparency, evidence suggest that traditional metrics do a poor job is measuring sales, engagement and, ultimately, ROI. A study from the IAB and Ernst & Young confirmed this trend, estimating that $8.2 Billion are lost as a result of traffic frauds, bots frauds, ad block and other threats. Specifically, the IAB found the following major reasons (the full report is in PDF form here): $4.2 billion is lost due to “non-human traffic” $1.1 billion is lost due to “malvertising-related activities” $2.4 billion is lost due to…