Archive for Mindshare
Twitter difficult channel to control
Posted by: | CommentsTwitter, despite a lot of media buzz, is a difficult tool to utilize successfully to increase brand awareness and mindshare. Twitter is a social network that is all about a conversational stream. Marketers want to be part of the conversational stream and people and companies are searching for ways to successfully implement Twitter into their marketing plans. However, it is proving difficult to control and is much more luck than anything else.
Using Twitter as a tool to increase brand awareness and mindshare is a challenge for several reasons. First people are naturally resistant to being marketed too. People have trained their minds to recognize and tune out advertising and marketing messages. So if people resist your messages and you continue to push them out you actually are counter-productive and creating negative brand associations in their minds.
Add to the challenge that Twitter monitors the communication streams and they are very sensitive to their network being used for marketing purposes. They don’t like it and they try to prevent it. For example Twitter recently intervened in the middle of a successful marketing campaign that was organized by Moonfruit, a U.K.-based company that offers website building tools. They orchestrated a Twitter sweepstakes, giving away 10 MacBook Pro computers to Twitter users that included the #moonfruit tag in their Tweets. The campaign was so successful that #moonfruit was Twitter’s top trending topic and represented 2.5% of all Twitter traffic. So where is the problem with such a successful campaign? Twitter didn’t like it and booted it off their top trends list for no reason effectively stopping the momentum the marketers had started.
The lesson in this is that marketers need to realize that the messages they are creating are considered invasive by some and media pollution by others. They need to be sympathetic to this view point and find creative ways to be noticed without creating negative feelings. Twitter should continue to be considered as a viable marketing channel but marketers need to realize it is very tricky and difficult to control. Additionally, marketers run the risk of actually creating negative reactions to the products and companies they are trying to promote.
For more information read: “Twitter Campaigns: A Cautionary Tale for Marketers” by Elena Malykhina at: http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/digital/e3i607dcf03868690e210321228d58f5709?imw=Y
Why brands matter to consumers
Posted by: | CommentsTo consumers, brands provide a convenient way of tracking companies and products that effectively meet their specific needs. Brands help consumers keep mental notes of who is producing the product or service and allows them a mechanism to assign responsibility in the market place. Consumers both subconsciously, and consciously, keep track of their past experiences with products and services. Ones that have met or exceeded their expectations are recalled positively. If brands perform well this will resonate and create a level of trust with consumers.
A brand can instill a level of trust that it will perform to a certain level or be of a certain quality. Consumer’s recognition of brands grows the more they have positive experiences with it. Positive experiences increase consumers recall and recognition of the brand. This recall helps consumers make purchase decisions quickly. Brands allow consumers to efficiently find and select products or services without having to conduct extensive searches for what will best meet their needs. Decisions can be quickly made based on past experiences and their knowledge about the brand, its quality, performance, characteristics, etc.
In essence a brand is a relationship between consumers and products. Consumers trust the brand and they reward that trust with brand preference and loyalty. Once a bond of trust has been established between a consumer and a brand it is difficult to break. Consumers are more likely to buy the brand they know and trust than the one they do not. For brands to keep this trust it is essential for the brand to continue to remain consistent to its brand promise. Breaking the brand promise will begin to impede consumers recall of positive experiences and the relationship will be broken.
A brand’s promise may not only be functional but it may also be symbolic. Brands allow consumers to project certain images. Brands find niches and become associated with these niches and are seen as being used by certain types of people. Consumers use these niche brands to project images to other people and to themselves. Brands function in this capacity like a club or team that people join for association purposes.
Brands become intertwined with consumers and they take on special associations. Consumers use branding to classify, recall positive experiences with products and services, and to associate with the image of the brand. The trust that consumers bestow upon products and services because of the psychological aspects of its brand will positively affect the consumer’s perception of it. Brands provide a convenient way to classify and retain information about products and services in a complicated world. The personal relationships that consumers develop with brands last a lifetime.
To achieve brand salience educate consumers about product category
Posted by: | CommentsTo successfully develop a strong brand identity, marketers must ask themselves who they are and where their product or service fits into the product category? Only when this is understood are marketers able to successfully build a brand, increase brand salience with consumers, and grow sales. Brand salience is the extent to which a brand stands out from its competitors and it should be the goal of all marketers to increase the brand salience of their product or service. When brands have salience they more easily stand out from competitors.
The more the brand stands out from competitors the easier it is for people to recognize and recall the brand and this translates into increased sales. Brand recognition is critical for products to stand out on busy retail shelves where they are surrounded by competing products. Visual cues are the most prominent elements of brand salience but other brand elements also contribute to customers’ abilities to recall and recognize the brand.
The brand name, logo, symbol, shape, and texture, are also contribute cues that aid consumers in recognizing the brand. Building brand awareness involves combining a series of brand elements that work together to properly represent the product or service. To be effective, these elements must not only communicate the brand essence but also must educate consumers about the product or service category in which the brand competes. When consumers fully understand the product or service category marketers can easily communicate the basic functions the brand provides and how it meets specific consumers needs. This differentiates the product or service from its competitors and increases its brand salience.
Want to build a brand choose brand elements wisely
Posted by: | CommentsTo build a brand the brand elements should be the foundation for all branding decisions. There are three key brand elements that brand managers need to consider to effectively building a brand; is it memorable, is it meaningful, and is it likable? These key branding elements will inherently determine a brands success.
For the brand to be memorable it needs to be easily recognized and easily recalled by consumers-customers. Brands should be designed to be intrinsically memorable by selecting attention grabbing names, symbols, logos, and slogans. To make these brand associations more memorable the goal should be to design them to be attention grabbing. The more attention these elements are able to generate the more recall power they will have with consumers-customers.
To make a brand meaningful it should be descriptive and persuasive regarding the product or service. Consumer-customers should be able to instinctively know what type of product the names, symbols, logos, and slogans are representing. Additionally, the brand elements should persuade consumer-customers that the product or service possesses key attributes or benefits that they place value on. To make a brand meaningful the brand communication should consistently present general information about the category of the brand and the attributes and benefits of the product or service.
Brands are much more successful if they are likable. To make brands likeable marketers should design branding materials that are aesthetically pleasing and visually interesting. The visual associations with brands should always be considered and be of very high quality. To make brands likeable they need to be associated with aesthetic sound, text, and imagery that will appeal to consumers-customers.
By developing memorable, meaningful, and likeable brand elements the product or service companies will enjoy many advantages. With the amount of noise in the world today the best strategy to build a successful brand is to build a foundation that is memorable, meaningful, and likeable. The consistency of these elements will increase the brand equity and allow for product or service recognition and recall. This is the goal of branding to increase the mindshare in consumers-customers.
Companies that serve customers in real time will enhance their brand relevance
Posted by: | CommentsKey to brand positioning lies in how it stands out against competitors…
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