SHOCKING: You and Your Online Brand Consultants – Positioned Towards a Perfect Brand Bust

November 1st, 2009 § 1 comment § permalink

In my endeavor of establishing transparency and clarity in the, Ohh so amazing and new world of Social Media and Online Marketing, I am sure the series of posts I am doing now, will surely be an eye opener for clients.

Just sometime back, my strategy team did a search on the keywords, Social Media and India, and what we got were people who have sometime or the other in their professional lifetime, related to the Social Media industry. And since Social Media is not an age old concept, thus we started looking at the profiles of people who are currently into the profession.

To my UTTER AMAZE, the profiles, I was given were an absolute NO, if they were to handle my brand strategy not just on the internet but everywhere else. Interestingly, these people are recruited by not just the small Social Media ‘shops’ but the biggies in the business as well. Positioned highly, these guys are given fancy terms and well, the customer is sold!

Let me bring more clarity by looking at certain aspects of what my strategy team gave me, post the data analysis:

  • Education
    • Majority of these people have not done management (which I am not suggesting is necessary)
    • 80% of them, do not have the words, Branding Consultant, Marketing, Positioning, Product life cycle, etc in their summary/ profiles
  • Current
    • The current profiles are all Social Media Strategist, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Executive
  • Past
    • There are people from BPO, from Technology, Adventure Tourism, Operations who are handling your So called Social Media Branding and Online Branding and Brand Creation and what not
  • Experience
    • Most of these people are fresh (1-3 years) of experience and are running the show

In my personal view, I completely agree that innovative thinking, creativity are needed, but is it that you will hand over your brand in the hands of someone who does NOT even understand what Brand stands for?!

This revelation by the team, surely opened my eyes towards how is the New Media industry being structured and shaping up. We are playing on chances and one of running successes.

Re-branding and the corporate vision – A Branding perspective for the corporate

February 18th, 2009 § 3 comments § permalink

“Corporate branding is the practice of using a company’s name as a product brand name. It is an attempt to leverage corporate brand equity to create product brand recognition”, says the definition!

Brand marketing is probably one of the most crucial things for a company trying to establish a brand in the market and work towards increasing the brand recall value.

Like economies of scale, the brand today represents economies of scope for the corporate. Accurate positioning and planning of products and services under the right brand banners, makes for quite a lot of difference in the manner consumers ‘perceive’ the companies’ offering.

Branding is not limited to just an attractive name or a logo, it today is an inclusive activity, which involves the internal clients (employees) as well as the external partners to the business.

  • Name
  • Logo
  • Client Servicing
  • Packaging
  • Advertising

etc. are some of the factors that make a successful brand, if each is looked upon with equal importance.

So much for branding, but with the times moving faster than ever expected, customer’s expectations changing with the drop of a hat, corporate’ has to realize the importance and power of re-branding!

The vision of a company should be flexible

- Deep Kalra (Founder MakeMyTrip.com, 37th Fridays 2.0)

With emerging technologies as WEB 2.0 and the mobile, creating an ever evolving brand becomes an absolute necessity.

Innovating not only in the development of a product or pitching of a service is necessary, but so is the right brand value attached to it, which provides the product/service a recall with the consumers.

The Corporate should look at constantly re-branding their offerings by reflecting similar “brand related sentiments” in their brand image. (Ex: may be a change in the logo)With newer markets evolving, creating brands in the web 2.0 space is as easy as it is to override and forget them.

Innovative brand positioning (read Focus advertising) creates a huge opportunity for innovative players who look towards capturing the market with their USP’s being clearly displayed, which would make them stand apart of the competitive clutter.

Link to the post at the NASSCOM EMERGE Blog: http://blog.nasscom.in/emerge/2008/08/18/re-branding-and-the-corporate-vision/