Posts in Branding
Logo Design Tips – What Does An Image Say About You?
Whether it’s a golden arch, a half eaten apple or pink jagged numbers, a logo is the visual embodiment of a brand’s identity. It has the power to inspire trust, admiration or even disdain, so you need to think carefully about how it’s designed.
Creating a logo isn’t simply a case of doodling for a few hours and picking out your favourite sketch. You have to find the magic combination of shapes, images and colours that will reflect your brand’s ethos and appeal to your target market.
Designing a logo which also remains relevant for years to come is far from simple, but here are a few tips to get you started: More...
Banks will disappear soon - centuries of tradition to be replaced by Internet systems
That's a problem for traditional business which is geared around promoting brands. Indeed, it's still the way that much business is generated online. But the world is changing fast. More...
To get real attention for your web site - build a brand
This is, of course, no surprise - but it does show us something interesting. People are using search engines to find brands, such as Facebook or PayPal, when all they need to do is type the brand name into the address bar to be automatically taken to the brand without conducting a search. More...
Should Marketers Make People Feel Unhappy or Special? Part Two
Consumers are never happy unless you give them what they really want
In another recent post, Seth Godin commented on how consumers are never happy, but are constantly demanding freebies, updates and product improvements from businesses.
Seth suggests you can continue feeding the demands of unhappy customers, as though trying to buy a spoilt child’s affection, or you can give them what they really want: a sense of connection, to feel appreciated and loved.
Generic mass marketing cannot make people feel special or loved. Email blasting the same message to every customer is like sending a bulk message to your entire address book at Christmas, when what they really want is a personal message in an individually addressed card. More...
Should Marketers Make People Feel Unhappy or Special? Part One
In a culture jaded from decades of interruption style advertising, people praise their digibox, for enabling them to skip the ‘annoying’ ad break, and ruthlessly bin emails which have the merest whiff of spam. Some think that advertisers and marketers are out to trick them, to make them feel unhappy or inadequate so they can then sell them products to heal their pain.
When you add the credit crisis to the equation, it’s unsurprising why some believe/hope we’re on the verge of a cultural shift away from consumerism and towards (supposedly) a bright new utopia in which people find meaning in other ways than the pursuit of ‘things’. More...
What Brands Can Learn From Barack Obama
Announcing the winners of The Cool Factor challenge
Last week, in partnership with Del Breckenfeld, author of The Cool Factor: Building Your Brands Image through Partnership Marketing, I announced a challenge on my blog: Define "cool" in two sentences or less. Many thanks to all of you who entered. There were some great entries.
The winner receives an amazing Fender® Classic 72 Telecaster® Deluxe guitar that was used in a concert in front of 40,000 fans and is signed by Billy F. Gibbons.
Congratulations to the winner, Bryan Bliss. You can read Bryan's blog or check out his Twitter page. Brian’s entry was:
"Cool is knowing exactly which rules and conventions to bend, having the confidence to try your own way and the strength to succeed. More...
In the Social Web, We Are All Brand Managers
Source
Effectively organizing, curating, showcasing, and managing a strategically crafted online personal, professional, and corporate brand is critical to how our peers, those we already know and the others we have yet to meet, perceive us in the real world.
Everything we share online, the comments we leave, the posts we publish, the pictures and videos we upload, the updates we tweet, the statuses we broadcast in social networks and lifestreams, contribute to disparate digital recreations of how people perceive us - as an individual, representative of a company, or the corporate brand we manage.
Why you should read Antony Mayfield’s e-book Brands In Networks
First, my thanks to Mr Stephen Waddington for flagging Antony Mayfield’s e-book, Brands In Networks.
As Wadds says “publishers, journalists, PRs and marketing professionals that are looking for a pragmatic analysis of the fragmentation of the media industry should download the 50-page eBook immediately.”
I agree. The book covers a huge amount of ground - and I have to admire the time and effort that Antony has put into writing it. Given one of the key themes of the book is around the subject of attention markets, he has succeeded brilliantly in gaining much of mine this morning. More...
Review: Brands in Networks
It will be some time before a definitive guide to marketing within a network can be written. In the meantime iCrossing’s Antony Mayfield has firmly planted a marker in the ground with his ebook Brands in Networks.
Publishers, journalists, PRs and marketing professionals that are looking for a pragmatic analysis of the fragmentation of the media industry should download the 50-page eBook immediately. Antony’s thesis is that the so-called Gutenberg era of channel media is firmly behind us and that it has serious implications for anyone seeking to promote an organisation.
“We ignore the reality that people don’t fire up their web browsers and spend time on MSN or The Guardian accessing content.More...