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Choosing the right branding agency can be a daunting task. The problem with the selection process is that every marketing, advertising and graphic design company says they are a branding company.

This of course is not the case. To be a true branding agency a company must focus on one thing. Branding. Branding is not about media buys, logo designs and direct mail. It is about developing your clients brand identity and positioning in the market place. Inherently that is where advertising agencies, marketing companies and graphic design firms fall flat on their face.

A branding agency should be about long term strategic thinking concerning their clients brand. Some of the strategies and tactics a branding firm should take is branding research, brand planning, brand marketing, brand image and internet branding.  Read more...

Brand marketing is the process of ascertaining, developing, and finally bringing a company’s image to the marketplace. It is important to know who will represent your target market. You want to know their age, gender, and location. You also want to know the potential consumer’s spending habits, and if your target market shows brand loyalty or if they can be swayed to another brand by a promotion or special offer.

How to Develop a Unique Brand

Always ask yourself what your brand can provide that no other brand can. Concentrate on your strengths. Remember to ask yourself what a potential consumer wants. Making a consumer believe that your brand is special or unique is an important part of brand marketing.

Why do Businesses Need Brand Marketing?  Read more...

Brand marketing is the process of ascertaining, developing, and finally bringing a company’s image to the marketplace. It is important to know who will represent your target market. You want to know their age, gender, and location. You also want to know the potential consumer’s spending habits, and if your target market shows brand loyalty or if they can be swayed to another brand by a promotion or special offer.

How to Develop a Unique Brand

Always ask yourself what your brand can provide that no other brand can. Concentrate on your strengths. Remember to ask yourself what a potential consumer wants. Making a consumer believe that your brand is special or unique is an important part of brand marketing.

Why do Businesses Need Brand Marketing?  Read more...

 

At CMG Partners, “brand” is not an academic term, but is rather a compelling customer proposition that generates significant bottom line returns for an organization. We work hand-in-hand with our clients to build new brands and revitalize existing ones to achieve strong and meaningful results in the following ways:

Brand Strategy

A clear and consistent brand strategy can make the difference between standing out from the pack and getting lost in the crowd. Grounded by market analysis, competitive assessment and customer research, we develop differentiated brand positioning for new and existing companies, while addressing the fundamental issues of brand and naming architecture, and key messaging. Our experience includes launching new brands in the marketplace as well as strategic review and implementation planning to revitalize existing brands across consumer, B2B, and merger and acquisition environments.

Operationalizing the Brand

Choosing the right branding company can be a daunting task. The problem with the selection process is that every word of mouth, advertising and graphic design company says they are a branding agency.

This of course is not the case. To be a true branding company they must focus on one thing. Branding. Branding is not about media buys, logo designs and direct mail. It is about developing your clients brand and positioning in the market place. Inherently that is where advertising agencies, and graphic design firms fall flat on their face.

A branding company should be about long term strategic thinking concerning their clients brand. Some of the strategies and tactics a branding firm should take is branding research, brand planning, brand branding, brand image and internet branding.  Read more...

Part of what continues to fascinate me about advertising is the rare opportunity to define a brand—to make tangible the intangible—using mere words and images in a “strategic” or “brand essence” film. It’s a slight honor to own the task. Typically, you get all the trappings of a TV shoot, but with less money, less time, more attention from the client and no category in which to enter the finished piece in an awards show. But it pays the bills, and really, the value’s in the learning and doing the thing itself; in other words, in the writing.
 
Before anything is filmed, before anything is edited, before the celebrity VO steps up to the microphone, before the audience of skeptical regional sales managers settles in to watch what you’ve created—there is nothing. There is the blank screen.
 
Lucky you. There’s a story about Hollywood that says the reason everyone hates the writer is because the writer gets to see the film before anyone else; same goes for defining brands. If you’re writing (doesn’t matter if you’re a copywriter, art director or a designer), you’re privy to the idea way ahead of everyone else.
 
My memory is foggy. I think the first strategic film script I wrote was at Heater|Easdon, back in 1995 or 1996. We did a lot of new product development for Anheuser-Busch. They’d send us a case of unlabeled bottles filled with…something. We’d get a briefing from a brewmaster over the phone, then come up with a name, logo, label, tap handle, neon sign and some kind of script for a video about the new beer.
 
We were creating brands from almost nothing. Oftentimes, our success seemed to have more to do with luck or synchronicity or personality. And maybe skill had something to do with it. Reminds me of the brand-making process seen in Mad Men. There’s a heroic appeal to being The One Who Figures It Out. But the truth is, you probably owe a thousand people equal credit for helping get your head, your heart and your hands in the right place at the right time.
 
The strategic films we created for Volkswagen during the “Drivers wanted” era were rarely made from nothing. More often than not, we had too much information. Skill had as much to do with reading, researching and editing as the writing. For example, you might sense a connection between Juliet Schor’s The Overspent American and interviews the planners made while researching Jetta rejecters. You’d sense there’s a headline or a sequence in there, somewhere. Then you just kept writing until they appeared.
 
The other distinction about any strategic film I made back then and those I do now is the Internet. Well, not really the Internet per se, but the significant changes in media, business models, measurement, access to data, consumer empowerment and all those other factors that have come to define the business and advertising worlds post-Internet.
 
In my experience, strategic or brand essence films made to define a brand pre-Internet were done so with a very important, but tacit understanding: The brand is in charge, the brand is primarily communicated via words and images, and the brand has something very important to tell its customers. This understanding very much affected how you put down the words.
 
As plenty of other pundits and authors (including myself) have pointed out, we’re not in Kansas anymore. That old point of view is probably one you want to avoid. Today the brand likely isn’t in charge, there’s a lot more to the story than mere words and images can tell, and the brand’s customers might actually have something more important to say about the state of affairs than the brand itself.
 
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write the script. Defining brands is still incredibly important and film is still a wonderful and very effective device for communicating what a brand is all about. You might not end up creating just a film, however.
 
What’s changed now is the scope of the writer’s assignment. It’s not strictly about communicating what the brand means metaphorically anymore. Creating a brand film can be an opportunity to affect how the brand operates in the real world. In many ways, the writer’s task when defining a brand now is in setting down principles for manufacturing, customer service, distribution policy, pricing as well as communications. It can be a conduit for improving relationships between a brand and its customers.
 
We live in an age of such transparency that to create a brand’s strategic film that glosses over how products are made and transported, or how service is delivered is to invite investigation and potential ridicule. To try and define a brand without involving its evangelists in the process is risky. To ignore the opportunity to try and define, fix, alter or improve the company itself in the process of creating its brand is to abdicate responsibility for that brand.
 
In many ways, the process of writing brand films today can and should be a broader act.
 Read more...

Brand Components

Nike, Apple, Coke. Each company is instantly recognizable, all because of one thing: their brand. These large companies, and others like them, have spent uncountable dollars to make this happen. But powerful brand recognition isn’t something reserved for mega-corporations, and in many ways is more important for the small business looking to make its mark. A company like Coke can expect a certain amount of sales based on the fact that it is Coke and in many ways is the de facto choice. Small companies on the other hand do not have this luxury.

When a company talks about shaping their brand, what they are really talking about is shaping the perception of their company in the eyes of the consumer. They do this in a variety of ways:

Consumers are getting more and more educated and can gather information or interact with a brand from many different angles. One common feature within luxury industry is the importance of their history and values (which is summarized in the buzz word DNA) as a legitimacy driver and a point of differentiation.
As a consequence, their ability to develop a momentum out of their DNA became a major source of development.
It is easy to identify the codes of communication within a defined category, but it is interesting to look at how very different brands with a genuine and authentic history have capitalized on their DNA to become a reference in their respective product category.

Let’s take 3 brands:

Ruinart is the oldest (1729) Maison de Champagne still operating and evolves in the high-end of the category. It is one of the Moet-Henessy’s brands (LVMH).  Read more...

Have you ever felt that the people you are marketing to don’t “get you” or understand you?

Or, maybe you know you’re not communicating the “right” message to your target audience, but you’re not sure how to change your message, or what it should be.

The problem in both above instances could be your’re not harnessing and using the power of ancient archetypes in your personal branding strategy.

To help explain the concept of ancient archetypes…

Have you ever noticed certain brands, advertisements, movies, or celebrity personalities seem to instantly connect with you? Without you even realizing it, these brands are communciating a story and meaning to your soul it is already deeply familiar with.

Research in the marketing field indicates that the most powerful brands consistently embody the persona of ancient archetypes. Which ancient archetype you embody is the first thing you must do before you begin developing a personal brand identity.  Read more...

Generic names and Trade Marks  

In the offline world a generic name is never a good brand name. Such names have limited potential as trade marks even if you manage to register them (which we may manage to do for you in combination with a logo). Nevertheless people choose generic names because the name immediately communicates the type of goods or services the business provides.

Is it any different online? Would brands like  Books4Less and PersonalInjuryLawyer be good ones?  Read more...