I come with the complete spectrum of marketing disciplines focusing on innovative and compelling online digital marketing and social media – creating a community of dedicated, interested, loyal, brand followers and eulogists. Sales success and winning new business lie at the heart of a world class digital strategy to engage and encourage trial, brand loyalty, customer retention and a gold standard reputation. As your marketing gatekeeper I will help build a community of unstoppable influencers.

Introduction

Building a brand is an on going challenge that requires The Company to emphasise it’s differences over so called competition. These differences are its brand values and they include amongst others product quality, product variety. sophistication, exclusivity etc. Emphasis of these KEY/CORE brand values gives The Company its personality and it is this personality that existing customers are reminded of and reassured by and that prospective customers are intrigued by, find association and comfort with. Association and comfort breed and engender strong relationships. These relationships are manifested in acceptance and purchase. With continues brand support purchase is naturally followed by repeat purchase and so on.

1. Identification

Your company’s brand values need to be identified. Without identification the process of relationship building can not begin. Your company’s brand values must be emphasised through advertising, not just key-moment tactical advertising but year round strategic advertising.

2. Selection

Once identified from ‘so called’ competitors your company’s brand can be readily selected by the consumer as an option easily understood. Free from competitive “NOISE” your company and all it represents will be clearly visible.

3. Communication

Once selection has taken place your company’s brand can begin to communicate, now to a captive audience, everything from product/service detail, to the most important – the features and benefits of a positively engineered relationship.

4. Differentiation

This clear communication leads to your company’s brand being differentiated from all others. Once differentiation has been established your brand’s personality becomes clear and relationships are both formed and strengthened.

ABOVE ALL – THE CYCLE IS SELF PERPETUATING

Getting Noticed

Brand Projection, as the name implies, projects the brand and sees that it always remains positive, predictable and as planned. Without development in this way, a brand will remain just a name and is unlikely to assume a character or trigger the warmth and trust which will initiate feelings that will end in positive actions.

How can Brand Projection best be achieved ?

• By identifying the brand antennae and ensuring that they are clearly positive.
• By ensuring the brand in all it’s manifestations displays these Antennae clearly and consistently.
• By exploiting all media opportunities and focusing on the Brand Antennae and their requirements.
• By underlining that the BRAND and the PRODUCT/SERVICE are one and the same and that by projecting one the other is projected too. A properly handled brand has the power to create a progressively strengthening relationship by conveying R,F,P.

Reassurance Friendship Promise

Your Corporate Identity is a living thing, growing as The Company grows, identifying and differentiating with visual messages of ethos, quality and origin.

To be alive, to be in human scale it needs to reveal a degree of human involvement. This makes it accessible, warm and friendly, suggesting constancy reliability and dependability like a good friend, always there when needed.

Whatever the degree of naturalism or abstraction, it should be instantly understandable, immediately identifable and easily memorable with key features that are proprietary and relevant.

I do not believe in one single rendering style because it may be necessary to suggest attributes anywhere from serious to light hearted. That is why your brand should not automatically be identified with any fad or fashion. It is vital that your brand and its contribution to life is seen as worthwhile and timeless.

Your identity = a friendly face

Keeping It Appropriate

It is very easy for brands to lose direction. Successive managers inherit brands with their protective structures. Inevitably, these new managers create new situations as they face new challenges and the temptation for short term solutions is hard to resist, especially if these structures are not formalised. Keeping the Brand Antennae sharp and sensitive is the task of Brand Protection.

Devaluation of the brand occurs by erosion and ultimately serious damage is done. Eventually the carefully engineered and interconnecting web of triggers does not work in unison and worst of all a different message is broadcast.

To guard against this very real possibility, it is necessary to prepare a written document with illustrations, which clearly establishes the functions of the Brand Antennae and provide guidelines which demonstrate what can and can not be done.

Naturally as time goes on, it will need to be revised in the light of changing needs. However, changes must never be made in isolation and without an overview of the ramifcations of such change. In such cases it is probably the original set of objectives that require change in order to meet the new challenges.

Creeping change is the most dangerous of all

It arrives by stealth and when the cumulative effect is reviewed the result is often devastating. A system of Brand Protection avoids ‘nasty surprises’. Changes are planned within a greater strategy and a greater result is finally achieved in the end … permanently.

Delivering Promise

The power of a brand or symbol is manifested only through the mind. This is the Brand Aura. Its value is built up progressively through,

• Confidence
• Kinship
• Experience
• Knowledge
• Trust
• Hearsay
• Association

These are the key ‘Brand Antennae’

Ultimately the sum total of these experiences delivers PROMISE and it is the quality of this promise that gives a positive or negative spin to the relationship between brand and ‘buyer’ (whether it is a tangible product or intangible service).

Without a positive spin to the promise a ‘brand’ becomes a ‘non-brand’ or even a brand to be avoided. All products and services that we consume and engage with need branding so that a positively engineered relationship will be triggered by a total or even partial recall. This cause and effect can be summed up by the phrase. “Think of a brand and feel good”.

An unhappy encounter with any of these brand antennae will damage the promise and very quickly “feel good” becomes “feel bad”, sometimes even in a single experience.

It follows that this fragile web of feelers with their direct connection to the very heart of the brand must be treated with the utmost respect and care, they must be nurtured to help the brand grow strong, to help it withstand the assaults of competitive offerings.