Posts Filed Under ‘Branding’
Last Saturday (the day before Valentine’s Day), I decided to run out and buy a book for my valentine. We live close to two bookstores – the ubiquitous Barnes & Noble and the locally-owned Bound to be Read Books . As much as I knew B&N would have the book I’d was trying to find, I was compelled to first visit Bound to be Read Books, even though the book is new and they’re a mostly used bookstore. Aside from the obvious reason (they’re independently owned), why do you think I decided to visit Bound to be Read first? It’s because they always make their customers feel special and each visit is unique.
Here’s a list of what they did last Saturday to create a positive customer experience:
1) They were serving complimentary hot cocoa (my favorite) on a snowy Atlanta day.
2) They were offering $5 off any used book with a new book purchase. (I got “The Death of Artemio Cruz” by Carlos Fuentes for 95 cents.)
3) They were playing a fill-in-the-blank game on their chalk board – asking each buying customer to guess a letter of the book of the day.
4) They gave me a list of upcoming events and encouraged me to attend.
5) They said “Happy Valentine’s Day!”
Simple, cost-effective ways to keep customers coming back. Not only did they have the book I was looking for (“Just Kids” by Patti Smith), but they made the entire shopping experience delightful from beginning to end.
Their approach can be used by just about any organization. Give your customers an experience that sets you apart from your competitors and is true to your brand. You can’t always offer the most services or programs, the best amenities or the most sophisticated technology. But you can offer an experience that is authentic, memorable and joy-filled.
So, next time you’re in East Atlanta Village, stop by Bound to be Read Books and show them some love!
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Posted by Jenny Brower on February 17, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Filed under: Branding, Ramblings
Tags: Barnes & Noble, Bookstores, Bound to Be Read Books
Excepting those living in caves and, perhaps, the cryogenically frozen, everyone knows the following Web 2.0 facts:
● Social networking is changing the face of the Internet.
● No site has done more to bring about this change than Facebook.
Smart banks are embracing Facebook as another channel not just for branding, but also in order to transform mere customers into rabid brand advocates.
A recent article in ABA Bank Marketing (“Showing Your Face on Facebook,” September 2009) magazine spelled out how any financial institution can put a best face forward on Facebook.
For banks, a “business page” is the most common way to make a social media debut. Every day more than 8 million Facebook users become business page fans. (A small beverage concern here in our hometown – Coca-Cola – has more than 3.3 million “fans.”)
As with all branding strategies, it’s important to have a strategy:
● Establish content/messaging issues before you start.
● Determine who page administrators will be, and from there commit to freshening your page often, if not daily. (Only Wonder Bread gets stale more quickly than Facebook fan page content.)
Here’s the best part. All of these “become-a-fan” decisions are transmitted across any user’s network. If a new fan is a recent college graduate with more than 1,000 friends – which can be common – your bank achieves some major digital word of mouth.
And CFOs have little to quibble about. After all, this is a low (no?)-cost way to reach a targeted (if not younger) demographic.
What are you waiting for? Create your business page! (And while you’re at it, become a Mindpower fan! We’ve always got something fun to say to our friends …)
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Posted by Jack Stenger on October 28, 2009 at 10:27 am
Filed under: Brain Candy for Wealth, Branding
Tags: bank marketing, Facebook, social networking
This Philadelphia Inquirer headline caught my eye this week: “Putting a price on Wharton’s prestige.” The story concerns a man who sued the University of Pennsylvania. Why? His graduate program, a joint effort of Penn’s engineering school and its Wharton School, gave him a management degree from the engineering school and a “certificate of completion” from Wharton. He wanted – and thought he was earning – the degree from Wharton, one of the top business schools in the country. He cried foul, and last week, a federal court awarded him nearly half a million dollars.
According to the article, Frank Reynolds, the business exec at the center of this, “said simply attending classes at the Wharton School had quickly proved its worth.” So, he got the education he wanted, but not the brand name he thought would come with it.
It seems to be, for him, a case of the packaging not being as good as what it contains. This happens all the time – heck, helping institutions better communicate who they are (so that their outside matches their inside) is what we do here at Mindpower.
We talk quite a bit, with our clients and among ourselves, about a brand being a promise. You have to be clear about what you’re promising, and then deliver it. And that promise, that brand has a value. In our consumer-driven society, some brands are “better” than others – the name on the label matters.
Was Reynolds right to sue because the name on his label wasn’t Wharton?
Does the name on the diploma matter more than the sum of the experiences you had earning it – the things you learned, the people you learned with and from?
What do you think? Is this a case of label-consciousness taken to the extreme, or just wanting to receive what you think you’re paying for?
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Posted by Kelly Rusk on October 19, 2009 at 8:35 am
Filed under: Brain Candy for Wisdom, Branding
Tags: Penn, Wharton
Your marketing investment should do at least one of four things:
- Create awareness of your brand and its offering(s)
- Change perceptions of your brand in ways that will encourage someone to choose your brand
- Give incentives for someone to “buy” more of what you’re offering or choose your offering more frequently
- Make your brand more available and more accessible
So, how are you doing?
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Posted by Donna Bowling on October 6, 2009 at 9:14 am
Filed under: Brain Candy for Health, Brain Candy for Wealth, Brain Candy for Wisdom, Branding
Tags: marketing investment
We’ve all read umpteen articles and blog posts on how online education is transforming the college and university landscape. I was reading this very one today: Will online education kill the university?. Despite its scary title – it actually paints a positive picture. One where colleges and universities figure out how to use the power of the internet to their advantage – by accessing more students, delivering more reusable content online, and generating new revenue streams (yes, most schools will experience growing pains as they figure out how to do this).
Online programs are expanding at a rapid pace and we might be getting close to a tipping point – where more schools offer a wide array of online programs than don’t. Programs that don’t required ever stepping foot on campus.
This transformation means brand-building is more important than ever. If you haven’t nurtured your brand in a while, it’s high time to think about it. With a strong, thriving brand, combating the competition becomes easier. With the adoption of more and more online programs, the competitive field expands, and as it expands, the importance of brand reputation increases.
My two cents? Don’t start thinking about it after your competition does – be the leader and have them chasing you.
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Posted by Jenny Brower on September 21, 2009 at 9:30 am
Filed under: Brain Candy for Wisdom, Branding
Next week, September 21st thru September 25th is Advertising Week. Advertising Week is North America’s premier gathering of cutting edge communications leaders. The Week is a hybrid of thought leadership and special event programming, uniting clients, creatives, media and inspiring figures in the biz.
Can’t make the event? Well, you can still (sorta) participate. Visit here to vote for your favorite advertising icons and slogans. Each year, two slogans and two icons are voted-in.
Question. Last year’s winning slogans were “We Deliver For You” and “What Can Brown Do For You?” Without looking, can you let me know the organizations the taglines belong to? [Both are pretty darn easy.]
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Posted by Donna Bowling on September 17, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Filed under: Brain Candy for Health, Brain Candy for Wealth, Brain Candy for Wisdom, Branding
Tags: advertising, Advertising Week, icons, slogans, taglines
A long, long, long time ago there was a project called the “Book of the World” that sought to collect all the knowledge about everything and put it into one nice and neat collection. It was, more or less, the precursor to the modern day encyclopedia. The problem, however, was that there was just too much information to include and everyone eventually resigned to having an incomplete, impossible project. Then came the Internet. The ability to collect and manipulate vast quantities of data spawned a resurgence in the idea that we can collect all the knowledge in the world – hence Wikipedia.
There’s a striking similarity between how something like Wikipedia is set up and how normal college admissions sites are organized. The former supposes to be a complete list of facts about everything, give or take a couple entries. The latter is carefully organized to contain all the information that a prospective student would ever need to know about applying to your institution. Now, of course, collecting all the information you’d ever need on a site is impossible; the best you can get is pretty close. But, more important, it would be pretty boring if you knew everything about everything. Once you read all the information, you’d be set. Wikipedia can get away with this since it’s impossible to read all the content, but what about an admissions website? Sure, there are a lot of pages, but it’s pretty easy to comb through most admissions sites in an hour or so. The question here is: how does that affect prospective student engagement with your institution?
If prospective students have all the info they need about the feel of your institution from the website – or even think they have all the info they need – then they’re probably not going to reach out and contact your admissions office, they’re just going to send an application. Normally, this is seen as a good thing. That would mean that the branding succeeded, that the experience of the institution carried over through the design and copy on the website so that it connected with the student enough to send in an application. But, this also means that the “success” of a website is based on how completely it can stand in place of your institution – in other words, the more “successful” and complete your website, the less the prospective student actually interacts with the real, physical, living institution. A better approach would be to create strategic holes in the information provided online that would encourage prospects to either visit the campus for themselves or, better yet, contact admissions offices and counselors directly.
Now, this doesn’t mean that admissions websites should start taking the application off of their websites or taking out every third word in the marketing copy. It means that they should admit that certain aspects that are important to their brand cannot be transferred electronically and one of the most important of those is a human articulation of the institution.
You want to give enough information on your admissions site so that prospective students are intrigued and want to ask more. This action gets a dialogue going and creates a mental investment in your institution on the part of the prospective student that gives your brand life. Place contact information around the site as often as possible and encourage visitors to ask more about particular aspects of your school. Give as many different ways to get in touch with counselors and admissions officers as possible: IM, email, phone numbers. Even better, point out the holes in the information on your site and suggest questions for students to ask. The key to all of this, as Toby Keeping mentions, is to actually get back to the prospects with relevant, personalized information in a timely manner so as to actually build a rapport. This rapport is the key not just to getting more applications, but make sure that you’re at the top of the list when it comes time to decide on which school to enroll in.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on February 24, 2009 at 8:35 am
Filed under: Brain Candy for Wisdom, Branding
Tags: admissions, branding, descartes
It’s hard to deny that we get a lot of our information about a lot of different topics through searches and as a result, we end up tailoring our sites to perform well in searches. But too often, optimizing sites for search engines comes at the cost of actually developing an online presence.
For a lot of websites, a high search engine ranking is important. These sites, however, are mostly fact-based sites that don’t necessarily rely on creating an actual presence for their success. Wikipedia, for example, shows up first or near the top in a lot of searches, but that’s because they have the best (or at least most referenced) information on what the search term is. What happens when someone already knows what something is – higher ed marketing, for example – but wants to find out who is going to do the best job of putting it into practice?
My guess is that they’re not going to go to Google first. Most likely, if someone’s looking for a good marketing company for any field – be it health, wealth, or wisdom – they’re going to go to the list that they’ve gathered while doing research about marketing in their field. This may be a mental list or a physical list, but it’s going to have companies with name recognition and who have already proven themselves to be the authoritative sources in their field. Searching for “health marketing” is just a way to round out the list.
Getting this sort of name recognition comes from two things: creating new content and starting a dialogue with other content creators and consumers. Both of these tasks are deceptively simple. In the case of the latter, creating a dialogue doesn’t mean just linking to other blogs, it means writing articles that respond to articles on other sites, notifying the original author that you’re trying to start a dialogue through trackback links, and commenting on articles on other sites. For the former, new content is an important part of a good site, but it shouldn’t be the only content. It’s tough to add 100% new content several times a week, but it’s pretty easy to add all-original content once every week or two and supplement it with dialogue-creating links and commentary. The good, well-known sites not only create content, they make sure that everyone else knows they’re creating content and encourages others to respond. In turn, this not only boosts their Google PageRank (the algorithm that logs who’s linking to who and factors it into search result placement) but also their name recognition in the marketplace. To start moving beyond the search results, there are several things you should keep in mind:
• One of the first mistakes a lot of newer blogs and websites make is to offer up links without any reciprocation. Putting a site’s link anywhere on your site is gives another site free publicity. If you like a site and want to link to them, make sure they’re going to link back.
• Don’t just reach out to the big guys. Start talking to smaller blogs and marketing sites that are informative and legitimate. The best way to do this is to send a personal email asking to exchange links. Don’t just send a mass email out to a lot of blogs; that won’t impress anyone.
• Utilize trackback links to both your friends and your competitors. The good, well-rounded blogs don’t just link to static sites, but start up a dialogue with other blogs, commenting on posts and encouraging other bloggers to respond. That opens up potential for getting permanent cross-linking or responses via comments and future blog posts. It’s all about getting the communication going (and this communication can carry over to Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
Above all, the important thing to to worry less about search engine rankings and more about making an impression that causes people to immediately think of you when they think of an industry.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on February 19, 2009 at 8:32 am
Filed under: Branding
Tags: branding, name recognition, search
Nope. We’re not kidding!
This month, February 2009, we’re celebrating our fifteenth anniversary and we want to give back to a cause we love and believe in: higher education.
We plan to donate $250,000 of agency time and talent to a college or university interested in developing its
institutional brand. We’re prepared to offer one U.S. college or university up to 1,500 hours of “mindpower” for a brand development engagement.
How? We’re issuing a reverse RFP. Any college or university interested in participating should submit a response by March 20, 2009.
Proposal requirements are posted on our website.
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Posted by Donna Bowling on February 6, 2009 at 11:39 am
Filed under: Brain Candy for Wisdom, Branding
Tags: branding, higher education marketing, mindpower, pro bono
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