Mixed messages hurt your brand

Posted under Personal Branding Strategies by Linda Griffin

The Celebrity Branding Agency has a fantastic post about the dangers of being inconsistent with your brand image. Not only do you send mixed messages but you miss opportunities to engage your customers and strengthen your brand.

In their example, they talk about a Mercedes dealer who provides loaner cars to their best clients but the loaner cars are Hondas. The customer is left wondering why they didn’t receive a Mercedes loaner. If they have a good experience with the loaner, they may start thinking that it might be OK to consider another brand. None of us wants to be in a position where we are highlighting the value of our competitor’s product, but that’s exactly what this dealer is doing.

Just think about this. Their best customers are also repeat customers. They have bought from this dealer in the past. Due to the economic environment today, they may be thinking of postponing that next purchase decision. What a perfect opportunity to provide them with a later model Mercedes loaner and some information that would entice them to say: ” I gotta get one of these!”.

We each have the risk in our own businesses of falling into the trap that this car dealer did. We ignore opportunities to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes and come up with new ways to entice and amaze them. This week, look at all of the ways that you touch your customers and identify at least one area where you are missing an opportunity to extend your brand or where you are sending a mixed message and correct it. You’ll be rewarded with more loyal customers.

Technorati Tags: brand definition, branding strategies

Subtlety doesn’t work when branding yourself

Posted under Personal Branding Strategies by Linda Griffin

“Two Scoops!” Those are the words that woke me up when I was supposed to be watching TV last night but was dozing on the sofa instead. If I told you the commercial was for a breakfast cereal, you’d probably guess pretty quickly that it was Kellogg’s Raisin Bran. On their web site they write:

“With so many raisin bran choices, what does one smiling sun offer that generations have loved? Why, Two Scoops® of delicious raisins, of course!”

You know immediately what distinguishes them from their competition. They’ve chosen to call out a feature of their cereal that makes them unique from all the other cereal brands and is almost impossible to challenge. Notice they don’t say they are the best tasting. Maybe they are, but that claim can be easily attacked by their competitors.  They also don’t say that they’re the cheapest. They’re not interested in making a claim which could force them into a price war.

The other thing they do in these two simple sentences is to focus on the benefits of their brand to their customers. They’re letting customers know that they will provide not just a handful, but two big scoops and they reinforce that image right on the front of the box.

I challenge you to look at the marketing and advertising for your brand and see if they pass the tests of demonstrating an ‘obvious value’ to your customers and making it difficult for your competitors to challenge.

 

Technorati Tags: branding strategies

With 99 days left to brand yourself in 2009, what will you do?

Posted under Personal Branding Strategies by Linda Griffin

I was preparing for a call today previewing my upcoming Business Retreat in October and decided to check the Time and Date web site to see how many days we had left in the year. To my shock, we have less than 100 days before we ring in the year! Wow! As usual, time has flown by. I don’t know about you but some of the goals that I had set for my business didn’t come to fruition. Some of it was lack of focus on my part and some of it was due to the unpredictable things that happen during the course of a year.

Now I’m energized to cross a few more things off of my action list in the next 99 days. One of those things is to build up readership in this blog. My previous blog was very successful with lots of readers, but the title and content no longer matched perfectly with the direction that I want to take my business brand. So I’m starting at ground zero again both with content and readership.

What do you plan to do before year end to raise the visibility and profitability of your brand? Here are few questions to start your thought process:

• Do you have a mission statement for your business?
• If so, does it link back to your life mission statement and your personal brand?
• Do you use social networking to establish yourself as an expert and generate leads?
• Do you have a marketing plan and is it up to date?

These are some basic, but often overlooked areas that every business should have. Remember that the new year will happen regardless of whether we take action or not. When you look back at 2009, what will your assessment be of the progress you made in defining and enhancing your brand?

Technorati Tags: branding strategies