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Archive for the ‘Brand Strategy’ Category

Is your copywriter keeping your content ‘on brand’?

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

One of the most important steps to business success, both online and in the ‘real’ world, is to create a recognisable brand that distinguishes you from the competition and manages to wriggle its way into the consciousness of consumers.

As any marketer will tell you, to create a strong brand that people will remember requires consistency across all your marketing efforts. You must focus on a particular set of brand messages and characteristics, and then continuously reinforce these in every marketing space you own or rent. And that includes your website.

Whatever the size and scale of your business, one of the worst things you can do is to treat your website as a separate entity with no connection to your real world advertising. This often happens, particularly with fledgling businesses, or those that are entering the online world for the first time, but it’s usually unintentional.  Sometimes it can be the result of a lack of communication between yourself and your copywriter.

A talented web copywriter can work wonders with your website content, but they can only work with the information they’re given. You need to communicate to them what it is that’s so special about your brand and the image you want to convey, so that they can then tell web users what you’re all about.

Is your web copywriter on board with your brand?

f you hire an SEO copywriter or agency to boost your position in the search engine rankings, they should know what your core brand message is and that the SEO content they create fits in with your brand. After all, what good is high page rank when your content is off-message?

The same goes for all of your blogs, tweets and other social media. All of these online activities should, when looked at side by side, each form a part of a coherent whole that paints a complete picture of your brand. But every individual piece of your brand jigsaw should also be capable of standing alone and telling your potential customers something positive about your business and its products.

A skilled web copywriter can paint an accurate and eye-catching picture of your brand for all to see, but only if you have communicated it to them clearly. To do this you must of course know yourself what makes your brand special. If you don’t know this, then it may be time to take a step back for a moment, try to view your business from an outside perspective, and find out for yourself what it’s really all about.

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The lost art of storytelling – Why every brand needs to tell a tale

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

What is a brand? Why do we all want one so badly?

Essentially, when we look at ‘brand’ we are looking at a set of consumer value judgments against a given product or service. Driven by both emotion and function, these value judgments create an overall impression of ‘brand’ in the consumer’s mind. As marketers we hope that the impression we create will generate more value than the sum of the parts.

In a nutshell, we all want ‘brand’ because it allows us to sell to our consumers in a more profitable and more sustainable way.

So where to begin on a journey in branding? Well, it’s always been about story-telling, creating emotional and functional differentiators that a consumer latches on to. Each time they come to purchase we hope the little story we have created about our product/service will replay in their minds.

In earlier times pre-advertising, the vehicle for story-telling was the packaging. Think about all those complex, multi-layered elements and messages on 19th Century packaging. They told the consumer the story of what they were buying, shouted out all the key things they should know:  awards, medals, royal approval, product differences etc. This was the very early form of brand marketing which then gravitated to poster advertising.

Over time, TV advertising became king and the art of the brand story was lost. It was simply too expensive to buy the amount of time required to give consumers any more than a quick fix, jolt in the arm ‘buzz’ about brands. Packaging became about super slick design. The functional disappeared and we were left with pure emotion and the well worn, now rather tired, FMCG model of securing widespread distribution combined with a big ad campaign, job done.

The media landscape is now changed; digital advertising expenditure has outstripped its small screen cousin. To the next generations the TV will soon sound as old-fashioned as the ‘wireless’ did to our own ears.

We have a major change in approach to contend with. The online space demands content. It feeds on words. Consumers are reading, texting, tweeting, blogging, exchanging opinions every day. In the second phase of the web the lost art of story-telling will be reborn.

You have time, you have space and you have new opportunity.

The challenge that lies ahead is to create or re-create a new brand story that supports and nurtures your product or service. It will be shared, discussed and debated. It will engage, and it will connect if written well.

The brand story was and still is the heart of the brand, carrying those emotional and functional differences that form the value judgements of consumers. The digital space will allow it to be heard once again.

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Why chips should be potatoes – The benefits of Intrinsic Communication

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I was recently stuck in London traffic and was given the opportunity to dwell upon a ‘96 sheet’ advertising board (the big ones) featuring an advert for McCain’s Chips. It featured a simple image composite of a potato in the earth transforming through various stages into a cooked chip under the slogan of ‘it’s all good’. At the next junction an advert for Stella Artois proudly proclaimed “Only four ingredients”.

What do these two campaigns have in common?

Well, they represent part of trend in the marketing world, which is termed “intrinsic communication”. It might seem odd but marketers of the past rarely (if at all) gave any information to consumers about their product in advertisements. They tried to play on your emotions and your feelings about the brand more than talking about the actual product you were supposed to be buying.

The world has moved on.

The zeitgeist has moved economies into recessive phases and we all now feel the ‘mood’ of the times. This leads us to question a brand’s worth. What does it deliver? What do I get for my money? Is it really any good?  Trust becomes a big issue. We search the internet for the truth about our purchases. Reviews and recommendations sway our judgement.

Step forth the intrinsic marketer.

The intrinsic marketer is tasked with telling the story of the brand from its creation to its consumption and has to package it in a way that a consumer can digest without falling over with boredom and/or confusion.

The material you need for intrinsic marketing exists already within your brand.

You will find it lying in the back of cupboards or in the minds of the production department or other stakeholders. It must be dusted off. Carefully assessed and judged.

Then it must be formed into a balanced, relevant composition. A story that celebrates all that is good and different in your brand told in a punchy, compelling way which drives your brand content.

And out of this the core features of the brand can emerge: a set of definitive product attributes that can be held up before the consumer to satisfy their demands, to reassure, and also to compel them to purchase.

The simple and obvious fact that the chips you eat were once potatoes in a field can make all the difference.

By Graeme S.

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