I live in New Delhi, India, in of the best suburbs with posh markets just a couple of minutes away and all at access, I was driving down one of the lanes yesterday, when something caught my eye.
I have been seeing design and how it affects the consumer perception
Well, I saw an entire stretch of road, almost a kilometer long, with amazing looking installations. (Will share the pictures soon). Now these are metallic poles of about 8 feet in height and have a tranparent glass installation at the top, with in built LED’s for lighting. Though there was nothing inside the glass installations, (no advertisements), the design captured the eye!
The message catches even if you are zipping past
Simple and elegant! Uncluttered and a well defined shape. Nothing very new that would make you think, but good enough that would make the advertisement inside the installation, catch the eye of anyone, zipping past the installation while driving as well.
Glass gives the whole look and feel a very elegant look and its simple, its something that we see everyday!
Brand Recall!
Well, these installations are there after every few steps, thus elegant lights in the dark, when youa re strolling past the market, catch your eye and you are tempted to see the message!
But there is a potential flaw which I feel the designers have overlooked
The installations have not been placed at the right spots in the market. Even during the night time, there is ample light and so many glaring lights and big billboards glaring at you (being one of the hottest markets in Delhi). Thus being unique, this installation could catch the eye for once, but I think will merge into the whole environment so quickly that it will lose its appeal!
The design seems intelligent but positioning is NOT! Its the same problem which many of the clients come upto me with, when they say, that we have a good brand, the recall is good as well, but there is something that is not working. Our message is not reaching out. I tell them the fault may not be in the message but how you position it.
Meena Vaidyanathan (Head, External Communications) HCL presents on how HCL created a highly successful campaign, branding the company in the corporate space, by leveraging the power of Social Media.
According to Meena, there existed a big potential clientele in these markets for HCL, but the problem statement was without spending zillions of dollars in advertising budgets, how to effectively reach to these potential markets and still be as effective, by investing smartly?!
And HCL came out with an innovative solution!
The solution was Social Media Marketing! (I am happy) doing this post because as OMLogic, this is what we do, I am a Social Media Marketing Evangelist, and at OMLogic, we work closely with clients in creating Social Media success stories!
If you don’t have a defined objective for Social Media, you are wasting resources for your company says Meena, well, Meena I couldn’t agree less on this:)
Chosing the right Social Media tool/channel
We decided on Slideshare as a tool, we discussed with senior professors from established universities and after intense discussions and brainstorming we decided upon Slideshare which was the perfect tool for us to realize the full potential from Social Media for the campaign that we were looking for.
Employee First, Customer Second
The campaign as Meena remarked has been highly successful. Selected as one of the best campaigns to be discussed at Davos and other major case studies to be taught at Harvard. Meena speaks about how the entire campaign was positioned to create the outreach and shared how they strategically created the content for the presentation which she terms as generic in nature.
Meena shared a few statistics with the audience which simply said that one of the major aims of getting people to a microsite especially created for the campaign was superbly achieved. More than 50,000 hits on the microsite is what we achieved in almost a months time. Our focused leads have increased from 40 to 60 leads a month, which we are satisfied with.
We created business, bagged a few major deals
Nokia and another big client is what we bagged from the campaign, though not specifically only from slideshare, but the entire campaign which has been on for quite sometime, but took the viral route once we decided on Social Media as a medium!
it is never a one man show and never a one stop game
We have a community page on Facebook and have a focused campaign at Linkedin, which is in line with the overall focus of the campaign.
Meena ends the interactive session with a high recommendation for Social Media Marketing, especially for startups and emerging companies who are looking to create tangible value and business results with a realistic budget and cost.
“Corporate branding is the practice of using a company’s name as a product brand name. It is an attempt to leverage corporatebrand 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!
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.
The “Paritosh Sharma” Show – IDEAS . THAT . INSPIRE
The Paritosh Sharma Show is an action packed arena where some of the best Personal Brands would be featured and topics realted to how youc an build you Personal Brand and how the Corporate can really be effective in taking their Brands to the “relevant community of consumers” would be discussed.
"We thought we understood social media marketing and seo optimization fairly ok but after our one on one session realized many of the fundamental mistakes we were making plus learnt many new tools. Overall an investment I would recommend every entreprenuer to make"
- Nidhi, Founder CEO, Pinnacle Works
