Expert marketers agree on the Importance of Branding:
Branding is a must no matter what you are selling.
Branding Iron - What's Your Brand?
Branding makes you recognizable and stand out from a crowd. For example, there are numerous colas out there that look and taste like Pepsi and Coca Cola. Hey, but you immediately recognize them. You know and expect what they taste like. You, in fact trust them for what they offer even when health experts advise against drinking them!
Sometimes it takes decades for even large multi-billion dollar manufacturers to realize that fact.
Take a look at this factual story below.
“Acura, Honda’s premium brand, still hasn’t figured out what it wants to be when it grows up, even after a quarter century.”
Acura has been jumping from one design theme to another with a hodge-podge of inconsistencies, with many models just plain and unrecognizable. Missing a consistent design language has been a readily recognizable development of styling cues that are unmistakably “Acura.” What we’ve had from Acura has been a design free-for-all based on their bread and butter Honda cars.
This is no small matter. Good, distinctive design is always important but it is critical if you want to sell expensive cars to rich people.
Keen Edge Designs for Acura
Acura’s designers think they’ve got the distinctive part solved now that they have their own space instead of having to work together as part of the Honda brand’s offshoot image. The new Acura design philosophy is called “keen edge.” You saw the first hints of it with the Advanced Sports Car Concept — a swoopy, angular adaptation of the NSX supercar shown at the Detroit auto show in 2007.
The new Acura identity brief is intended to embrace technology, to be emotional, with powerful lines and machine-like surfacing. The signature element is the grille, formally called a “power plenum”. A complete design of this look with Acura’s ZDX hatchback conceived from start to finish in the new studio.
Perhaps Acura will finally get it right this time and have moneyed people waiting in line to buy their vehicles instead of being outdone by just about every premium brand on the market today.
Branding You
What about you? Did you get the idea that branding might be worthwhile? Honda finally admitted to allowing Acura be a totally separate brand and follow all the other premium brands’ directions.
Now, consider what you are selling. Is it a Service, Product, You or in Combination.
Here’s what you should do to make your brand:
* Prepare a good quality website about your Service, Product, You or a Combination.
* Explain the virtues…the benefits…the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) about the product or service.
* About YOU! Why should anyone follow you? Why can the buyer trust you?
* Write lots of articles and provide great information your prospects can use immediately…but don’t give away the store!
* Set up social media accounts and profiles…e.g. use Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
* A reliable hosting service for your website…avoid those downtimes, getting shut down by your hosting provider and not know why.
* An auto-responder system…As a means to communicate with your opt-in audience.
* Provide good, helpful information your audience/opt-ins can use immediately.
* Get a program or a service that can create the codes for embedding your very own informational videos…get one that can offer private-for-your-audience video messages only.
* A video conferencing system to engage your audience or prospects…far more convenient, better efficiency and way cheaper than coffee shop, lunch and hotel meetings.
* Watch your budget! Get value for money. What’s your cost versus your income?
* Rinse and repeat!!!
More Online Secrets
BTW, the resources like the social media sites outlined above are either free to use but will cost you some time. So be productive.
- Your personal business (money making) site/s must never be from those free ones like Blogger or Wordpress.com which offer free but limited use websites which can become restrictive when you need to market or promote or monetize heavily.
- Do not use free hosting services or indeed some hosts which tie you into contracts that leave you totally frustrated and demanding their non-existent but heavily advertised services. You often get only lip service or very expensive add-on services. Oh, and they’ll leave you sending endless trouble tickets and hanging on the phone for hours at a time without any progress.
- Auto-responders are great for keeping in close touch with your clients and to keep your mail list engaged. But again, there are some very good ones out there but there are those that have become extremely unreliable and have very bad and unethical billing practices…one in particular operates from far outside the USA but markets itself heavily there – never trust this one.
- Video producing software…YouTube and other systems are great free resources but they only allow embedding of their codes on publicly viewable videos. Some or many of your very own videos will need to be made private for your special audience/clients.
- Video Conferencing is a fantastic way to engage your clients like never before. This is like a meeting one on one or as a group in a hotel from the comfort of your home. Just imagine the effectiveness, efficiency and cost savings achieved here.
- Currently, there is only one all in one service resource that I know of that offers all the paid services in an all in one package along with great service. This is not to be missed if you’re serious about being the go-to guy using the internet to boost your business…find out more.
