Brand 🍎

Experience it!

Branding - consistency

Keep things consistent.

As a former Google contractor, we were very focused on using "Google Voice"- a neat, informal, informational way of speaking.

We never got a lecture on what it meant, but got the feel for it from the other Google related material - "say it simply."

Get it out there - distribution

One of the most common things you'll see is wasting time on getting it "just so."

One of the most important brand elements is making it evolve.

As your tools, and you, get better, you can slowly edge your brand into different forms.

It becomes a "conversation" between you and your "tribe"(I don't like tribe, but it's closer than customer).

Color, Design and Font.

Pick colors that represent, designs that give an insight on what you do with a consistent font. The harder part is sticking to it across mixed media.

Images - powerful visuals

Images are important. The static image still carries more "weight" across more channels than text or video.

Video guys will say video "kills," but think of video as multiple images with sound and factor in the time and equipment it takes to do good video.

Not saying it's not all that, just that "time" is an important metric. "An interesting image is worth a 1000 hashtags"- oldie, but relevant in the context.

"I'm not a businessman...I'm a business, man."

Recently I was working with a start up software company where the lead developer wouldn't pick up the phone to answer his first (and to date, only) paying customer.

You may say that "user experience" is not branding. You can be sure the "brand identity," "mission statement" or "company values" got back to the client, loud and clear.

With new media your unhappy customer is going to be all over your Facebook page dumping spite on your product, processes and people.

When people search, what comes up first? The latest comments on social media. This is the dynamic you must control or at least, understand.

https://gistbrands.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Brand-Spectrum-Infographic_social.pdf

https://gistbrands.net/basic-guide-to-branding/

Brand Identity

We all have an idea what branding is...but how does it work?

If someone pays 140 dollars for Nike, when a similar thing from another Chinese sweatshop with a different name on it costs 20 dollars, with no 7x performance improvement for the user, then something else is being purchased - identifying yourself with the attributes of the product - even if you've never played basketball.

But what are the attributes - an attribute is something conferred upon rather than intrinsic to something (external). An attribute is not quite a property "of" something. The locus of evaluation is external. What I mean here is that the sneakers didn't make Michael Jordan, "Jordan." When you wear Air Jordans, you "re-present."

Note: In the UK "Jordan" is someone else entirely; less basket, more balls (equally well branded).

I'm not so sure the people who buy these sneakers make logical distinctions, so I'm not going to either...which means the "purchase decision" is not entirely logical. Branding is a heuristic - a mental shortcut or shorthand. You should look at why.

Lets say I buy an i phone. Is it really a better phone? The people who shell out 700 dollars for one, swear blind it is! Camera, internet, phone - all debatable whether the overall quality validates the purchase price. Maybe they're buying into something?

"It used to be a better meal. Now its a better life!" Jerry Maguire (1996)

I would call this "crowdthink," - accepting external group values, sublimating one's choices to the will of a consensus that comes from outside. A similar term "groupthink" (Janis 1972) refers to how members of a group tend to rationally conform to the group norm. Crowdthink dispenses with initial rationality.

We go a step further here, my crowdthinker will justify values that have an external locus (perspective) as his or her own, first emoting and then rationalizing a supporting argument.

You're getting the drift here; McDonalds, Coke, all the rest - "the household names," market themselves as "being of a consistent quality, *whether that be bad or good in comparison with competition is not the point. I'm not saying that company advertising is accepted carte blanche, but that "perception" meets customer "expectation." Expectation is malleable. Advertising shapes it.

*Ryanair had the customer service of warm doggie doo do for many years, until some bright-spark at the company decided, there was no cost/benefit in shrieking at people like cattle - very catholic Ireland though. The point here is customers accepted ground-staff going batshit at "extra baggage" as a "cost" of the cheap airfare, and often both sides justified it as such. You pay more for better service. Think about it.

Key point...

In a world of unlimited choices - decisions are often made in advance of thinking.

Branding is a tool you use to deliver the kind of consistent experience your customer expects. You build the "expectation" through advertising "consistent quality."

You've developed your brand, mission and vision...you have? Your website is up and running, connected to your analytics and potentially the phone.

Next Step...

First step into the marketplace. Lets look at it in order. Facebook owns Instagram. Google owns pretty much everything else - and you've already got a gmail account, so first stop is Facebook, then Twitter.

The trick is to be able to move website information across your social (and print) channels with the mimimum of fuss. I make the association with "Russian Dolls" (Matroshka). The same brand image and feel dominant across web, print and mixed media.

"Russian Dolls"

Documents ...

www.AD360.eu

This is our Facebook business page

Facebook

Twitter.

From there its about filling your pages with relevant content.

At the beginning there will be the "what will I put here" dilemma. This issue inverts after a few months, when you begin to develop a surplus of information, available on your topic, from multiple sources. We will discuss later the different (often free) tools to flesh out your content.

This will clarify itself once you refer back to your initial market research (Customer persona), your USP and marketing strategy (competition and environment).

This gives you three vectors (triangulation) - what are the competition doing, what are we doing (better) and what steps do we make to get to market.

Another nice trick is to reuse content on different platforms.

Remember most people stick to one key platform, rather than buzzing around from written to static image, onto moving media platforms.

As a digital marketer, your job is to spread your message to "your audience," wherever they may be. That does not mean you need - all the platforms - just the ones with most return for your time investment.

Powerpoint is a great tool for this purpose. With powerpoint you are forced to develop punchy content and rich visual imagery - ideally less than three lines with a strong illustrative graphic. Once you throw in slide animations, you've got a video...and hey presto, enough good material to cover word, image and video sites.