Tag: product marketing rebranding

7 Costly Mistakes That Can Be Avoided By Brand Research

Branding strategies can make or break an organization. There’s a lot that goes into developing a successful brand, and the best companies around the world put substantial time and effort into brand development and image. Creating a successful brand requires time and research commitment and is an ongoing strategy that can yield amazing results.

However, small businesses at the start of their inception can potentially create crucial branding mistakes during their initial stages of development that costs them a lot of customers, money, and time. Even major brands make big branding mistakes, like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy and Amazon’s Fire Phone.

Brand research services for positioning strategies, brand mapping, and perceptual mapping can help you, whether you’re a small business or a long-time market player, to avoid pitfalls and the costly mistakes of failed brand positioning.

Common Branding Mistakes by New Businesses and Entrepreneurs

Do you remember Nintendo’s Virtual Boy in 1995? You might not because it’s one of Nintendo’s biggest failures in the history of the company. It didn’t offer what it promised, a true VR experience, resulting in incredibly low sales and quick removal from the market. What about Amazon’s Fire Phone in 2014? It only lasted one year because of its limited availability and features that didn’t resonate with audiences. Even major companies like Nintendo and Amazon have to be careful about product or service branding that can tarnish their reputation and result in massive profit loss.

Even small branding mistakes can cost a company. Not only will your efforts and time spent towards planning to be lost, but you will have cost your business a lot of money and even potentially tarnish your reputation permanently, which can be completely devastating for the longevity of a brand.

Below are seven mistakes that you can avoid when it comes to brand positioning so that you learn more about them and avoid them altogether:

  1. Lack of Competitor Research
    You have to learn about your competitors if you want to be successful. How do they position their brand? What types of products and services do they offer? How are they perceived in their respective industry? How are they succeeding? Do you have a potential opportunity in the market where they do not? You don’t want to identically replicate your competitor’s strategies. But you do have to learn everything there is to know about the successes and failures of your competitors so that you know how to uniquely position yourself in the market.
  2. Brand Messaging Doesn’t Suit Target Audience If you can’t develop a brand message that fits with your target audience, nobody is going to buy from you. You have to learn everything about your target audience like demographics, what they like to buy, where they shop, what times of the day or times of the year do they make purchases related to your offerings, what colors motivate and drive them to make purchases, what parts of the world are they located, how does culture affect purchasing, and many more.
  3. Failed Market Study
    Effective market research needs to be obtained about how people are reacting to your brand, products, or services. Survey analysis can be obtained to further your market research and understanding, or a complex study of social media research and analysis can help you to understand how people review or perceive you in the market. If you don’t analyze feedback from your customer base, you will be making a costly mistake in your brand research initiatives.
  4. Association or Dissociation with Events and Motives Just because you want to create a product or service or build your brand around a particular design or niche space in the market, doesn’t mean it will be successful. You can’t just build and sell tablets just because iPad’s are popular, create a bottled water company because you feel people will always need to drink water, or design makeup and cosmetics because there is a popular trend in that space this year. You have to delve deeply into your brand research strategy to truly understand the reasoning behind purchasing decisions and product and service popularity.
  5. Inconsistent Corporate Identity Everything about your brand identity has to make sense, from the colors that you choose to represent your company, to the logo and fonts that you use throughout your campaigns, to the style of writing, tone and messaging that you implement to speak to and reach audiences. Everything has to remain consistent so that people understand your brand values and what you are offering them. If you fail, you could spend a lot of time rebranding and causing confusion to your audience and miss a lot of opportunities.
  6. Poor Product Packaging

    Product packaging is the first thing people see when looking at your brand, whether they are online or physically in store locations. Everything from materials, graphics, size, shape, and color all are important elements of packaging designs. You could spend a lot of money rebranding your packaging if your product performs poorly. On the other hand, you might spend money rebranding your packaging when it isn’t even necessary and have to revert back to the way it was. Effective brand research is going to help you understand the best elements and packaging designs that will help your company thrive.
  7. Making the Wrong Impression If you are selling premium services, you don’t want to use commodity branding. You will deter audiences from your brand. There is a reason why so many fast food restaurant chains use the colors red and yellow, like Burger King, MacDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Carl’s Jr., and software companies use blue and black like Intel, IBM, Apple, or Google. People associate certain attributes to particular products and designs. People won’t understand what you are offering them if you make the wrong impression. Pay particular attention to detail and use the right research and analysis to make a lasting impression that makes sense with audiences.

How Brand Research Can Help

Brand marketing research is integral to the success of organizations in the modern world. In fact, no business out there that is successful in today’s market leaves home without brand research.

Brand research improves your competitiveness, visibility, and messaging and can help your business take a strategic position in the market using proven data from effective research and analysis services. Here are some of the major benefits of effective brand research:

  • Integrated Metrics: You can see the impacts of your project decisions and forecasts with measurable and tangible results.
  • Allocate Market Spend: Understand how to make investments that will lead to successful outcomes.
  • Identify Competition: You can not only find out who your competition is, but you can find out how and why they are successful in the market, or even discover how to position your brand in areas where your competition is lacking.
  • Develop Accurate Strategies: Create informed decisions built on a foundation of research and analytics with a better understanding of market developments, pricing, and positioning.
  • Capture Target Audience: Better understand consumer behavior and create effective marketing and advertising strategies.
  • Brand Perception: Truly understand how audiences feel and react to your brand, products and services.

Effective Brand Research for Organizations Across Industries

Research Optimus (ROP) has top research and analyst specialists who are tenured in market research, business research, customer analysis, and brand research services that provide the required insights to take the appropriate steps towards building effective and long lasting business brand awareness, brand marketing, and positioning strategies. Apart from services like market research, product research, and risk analysis, contact our team today to jump start or further advance your journey into brand research and obtain the targeted insights you need to avoid branding mistakes.

By: https://www.researchoptimus.com/

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Decision Analyst

An introduction to brand strategy, and the tangible and intangible elements that make up a brand. And a brief discussion of the questions of to ask in order to focus and improve your brand strategy. Learn More: https://www.decisionanalyst.com/servi…

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How Global Brands Can Build a Successful Local Brand Experience

One of the most noteworthy consumer trends to come out of Covid has been the shift in focus to community-based shopping. Of course, e-commerce has experienced a major surge, but many consumers are now searching online for shops and services in the local area to find what they need, especially as daily commutes are no longer the norm and people are avoiding unnecessary travel.

In addition to convenience, consumers want to support local businesses, as well as the communities in which they live. Shopping local isn’t just about frequenting small businesses, though. Big brands such as Marks & Spencer, Halfords, and Currys PC World are also thriving at the local level because they have a neighbourhood presence and are well-known, trusted brands that have, at least historically, conducted business predominantly offline.

But in the race to win the attention, and business, of these bricks-and-mortar shoppers, businesses must ensure their ‘Near Me’ Brand Experience (NMBX) – consisting of all the touchpoints along the customer journey from online ‘Near Me’ search to offline purchase – is meaningful and positive across multiple channels. Not only that, for global brands and multi-location businesses, this also means engaging with consumers at all levels, whether country, regional, or local.

While many companies manage these communications well at the global level, they often fall down when it comes to building positive relationships with customers at the local level.

Current research shows that around half of Google searches have a local intent, with consumers searching for products and services ‘Near Me’.  But consumers aren’t just searching for local store options. They are turning online to plan their journeys, evaluate local store reviews, and engage with brands directly through social media.

It appears that global brands have started to become aware of the ‘Near Me’ Brand Experience (NMBX) and its importance in their brand strategies, with Gartner’s recent 2020 Spend Survey of CMOs revealing that the most important brand metric for 2020 is brand health – namely, what consumers know and think about a brand.

The challenge for brands has always been that the bigger the brand – and the more locations there are to manage – the more difficult it is to maintain the quality and consistency of the customer experience. To create a memorable NMBX, brands must implement the right multilateral communications strategy that ensures the online to offline customer experience is uniform at the global, regional and local levels.

Create an outstanding NMBX

Global brands tend to have their business information and reputation management under control at the global, and sometimes even at the regional level, but this is often not the case at the local level.

This can be the result of organisational silos, where different levels of the organisation don’t share plans, goals, and processes with each other, or due to a simple lack of strategy and resources applied to actively manage the brand experience from top to tail.

The first step for brands to create a successful NMBX is to identify key stakeholders at the global and regional levels to lead the initiative. This project can then be owned at the global level by a single senior marketing lead – CMO or Head of Digital. Limiting key participants tends to generate better outcomes and more efficient project implementation, while still allowing for cross-departmental cooperation.

Develop brand trust through data accuracy

One of the most overlooked, yet vital, aspects of brand trust comes from consistent data quality. Especially now, consumers are searching online for the most accurate and up-to-date information on location, opening hours, and more.However, as local information is constantly changing depending on an outlet’s location, brands need to be able to manage all changes promptly and centrally. This means updating local level data directly via a master data system, or single source of truth, so it can be kept up-to-date across a brand’s entire directory ecosystem. If done right, this will increase visibility in search engines, increase trust and positively impact customer reviews.

When it comes to data accuracy, brands are facing a particularly difficult challenge, as operating restrictions during Covid vary not only country to country, but between regions and even neighbouring cities. Just like the UK, changing government guidelines meant McDonald’s Germany needed to update their opening hours on an almost daily basis. Because local store managers are always the first to know when key business information changes, they empowered them to log in to their in-house master data management system, powered by Uberall, and update the information quickly. This meant that McDonald’s could quickly and efficiently manage data for their almost 1,500 locations in Germany. As everybody was working from a centralized data management system, they were able to stay agile and consistently provide online store information that customers could trust.

For global organizations, ensuring data accuracy across each and every location is no easy feat. But doing so is essential to build and maintain global brand trust amongst local consumers and drive foot traffic.

Strengthen brand health through reputation management and social media

Another key aspect of brand experience is consumer engagement via online reviews and social media. Managing local reviews and engaging on social media effectively can pose unique challenges, as it can be difficult to know who should be engaging with local customers and how to do so at scale, whilst still maintaining brand ethos and identity.

However, online reviews and social media are golden opportunities for brands to interact with consumers the most directly, and, if well-executed, are a crucial way to turn those interested consumers into customers and advocates.

Depending on their aims and goals, brands can manage brand reputation and social media entirely at the global level, or choose to empower local owners/operators with more independent control. Regardless of the strategy, given the breadth and sheer volume of online reviews and social media interactions, a manual approach simply isn’t feasible.

Instead, brands can use digital solutions to manage and shape their online reputation and customer engagement, allowing corporate control but providing local teams with access to online interactions as needed. By utilising a platform that makes it easy and simple to respond, backed by clear guidance and communication about core messaging, brands can make certain that their brand experience is consistent and compelling from global to local.

Conclusion

Today’s commercial landscape calls for a modernised approach to brand experience. Brands that are able to utilise the right technology tools, processes and feedback loops will be able to achieve an outstanding NMBX for consumers at hundreds, and even thousands, of locations.

While global brand reputation will always be important, when it comes to fostering growth, brands must also focus on improving the brand experience at the individual store level. After all, no matter how good a brand is at creating an image of quality, consistency, and trust, if a customer’s experience doesn’t match that promise, they won’t be a customer for long.

By Paul O’Donoghue

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Brand Master Academy

Learn what brand experience is to design a journey that leads to the successful outcome your brand offers. —————-FREE BRAND STRATEGY RESOURCES——————– // PRO BRAND STRATEGY BLUEPRINT Download your FREE Pro Brand Strategy Blueprint here: https://brandmasteracademy.com/brand-… Step-by-step brand strategy development process // BECOME A BRAND STRATEGIST Take a FREE look inside our flagship training Brand Master Secrets – All you need to level up to brand strategy and become a brand strategist. https://brandmasteracademy.com/brand-… Our flagship training “Brand Master Secrets” has everything you need to become an in-demand brand strategist, raise your expert profile, and grow your branding revenue and business. // BRAND MASTER ACADEMY Brand Master Academy is where brand builders go-to for actionable tips and techniques to, Learn Brand Strategy, Help Their Clients On A Higher Level, Raise Their Expert Profile & Branding Revenue. —————- LEARN BRAND STRATEGY IN THE COMMUNITIES ——————– // BRAND MASTER ACADEMY ON SOCIAL Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/brandmaster… Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/pg/brandmast… Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-h… Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBFW… Twitter – https://twitter.com/BrandMasterAcad // JOIN THE FACEBOOK COMMUNITY https://www.facebook.com/groups/brand… Join in the conversation with other experienced and budding brand strategists to enhance your brand building systems. // EXCLUSIVE TIPS & TECHNIQUES https://brandmasteracademy.com/subscr… Get on the list for exclusive brand strategy tips and techniques —————- LISTEN TO THE BRAND MASTER PODCAST ——————– The Brand Master Podcast is a show specialized in helping professional brand builders and entrepreneurs to build brands using strategy, psychology, and creative thinking. [Two Shows Per Week] https://brandmasteracademy.com/brand-… About This Video: By the end of this video, you’ll understand what brand experience is, the role it plays in raising brand awareness, and converting prospects into clients. First, we’ll look at some of the terms that are often confused with brand experience and how they differ including experiential branding and brand activation. Next, you’ll discover what brand experience is and the ecosystem of touchpoints that contribute to it. Then we’ll uncover the misconceptions of what brand experience is not and understand why brand experience is so important in building modern brands. Finally, we’ll dive into what brand experience design is and take a look at a brand experience example in the form of Nespresso. 0:00 What Is Brand Experience? 1:21 What Is Brand Experience 2:24 What Is Brand Experience Is Not? 2:53 Why Is Brand Experience So Important? 4:30 WHat Is Brand Experience Design? 5:42 Example Of Brand Experience – Nespresso

What Product Managers Do And How To Become One

User focus rather than technical skills matter most for great product managers

Product management is becoming increasingly popular as a profession. Not only is this a career path at Big Tech companies, it is also an important part of traditional businesses that choose to embrace technology. If a business has an app or a website, then there is probably somebody doing the product manager’s job.

Product management in its current form is a fairly new profession, which is why there is a lot of confusion about what it really is. While many product managers start with a technical background and have computer science degrees, this is not at all necessary to succeed.

Focus on the user’s problem

Rags Vadali, who currently works as Product Manager at Facebook, says “product management is sometimes art and sometimes science of building products.” According to Vadali, the product does not have to be an app or a website, and in fact he argues that this it the wrong focus.

“A product is a clearly identified solution to a people problem.” That solution could take many forms, but the main focus is always the user and the problem that they need to solve.

Diverse teams

Product managers work with a diverse set of professionals including engineers, designers, user researchers and data scientists. This list expands depending on the type of product they are building.

For example, product managers working on Facebook’s Instagram adverts will also work with marketers and business development teams. Product managers who help create apps for newspapers work with journalists.

All carrot and no stick

Product managers do not have the expertise to tell their colleagues how to design an app or write code, but nevertheless have to make sure that a great product is created. This potentially puts them into a very tricky position of ultimate responsibility and zero control.

Unlike a typical boss, product managers cannot mix the carrot and stick approach of incentives and admonition. Instead, they have to be collaborative and persuasive, because all they have is the carrot.

How to get started

The best way to get started in product management is to build a product. This is why startup founders often go on to roles in product management after they leave their business.

Another way to get relevant experience it to help a startup in your spare time. While you would not be driving the product, you will be seeing how it is made and taking part in building it.

You could also get involved in your existing employer’s product. I recently met a product manager at a major U.K. newspaper who began her career as a journalist. While working as a reporter, she often shared her ideas with the product team on how to improve the interface journalists use. As she got more and more involved, she made the transition from reporting the news to creating a product to help reporters. This example shows that understanding the user’s problems is far more important than having technical skills.

Vadali says he looks for user focus when interviewing candidates. He asks candidates what their favorite products are and why. If they only talk about app features without saying how they help solve a problem or create a positive fun experience, then they do not have the right mindset.

The skills product managers learn can be helpful for careers in senior leadership or investing. In fact, this is how Marissa Mayer former CEO of Yahoo, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent Alphabet and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz all started their careers. This is also why product management is becoming one of the most sought after careers for MBAs, displacing consulting and banking.

Good product managers understand the target user and have the influence skills to bring the best out of their colleagues. None of this requires technical knowledge, which means that it is one of the best options for non-technical professionals to join the tech boom.

Are you a product manager? How did you transition into this career? Tweet your thoughts to me @sophiamatveeva

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Sophia Matveeva

I’m an entrepreneur and advisor. I run Enty, a retail tech platform, and Tech For Non-Techies, a training community. This journey has taken me through top accelerators, exposed me to investors, taught me how to build a product, lead a team and grow revenues. On Forbes, I write about the entrepreneurial journey as it really is, rather than as I wish it would be. Find me on http://www.sophiamatveeva.com

Source: What Product Managers Do And How To Become One

Rebrands Can Be Tricky and Expensive. Here’s How to Get It Right the First Time

About a year after its 2016 launch, Pencil realized its name was bad for business. Co-founder Sydney Liu would talk about the online storytelling platform to enthusiastic listeners at events–but would-be users, thwarted by a second-rate domain name (usepencil.com) and a barrage of unrelated search results, couldn’t find its website.

So, in 2017, the company, based in Menlo Park, California, decided to redo its logo, site design, and color scheme before ultimately relaunching as Commaful. The overhaul worked almost immediately. “Within a week, we were number one on Google for our name,” Liu says, and organic sign-ups began to increase.

Rebrands are fairly common for startups and small businesses that don’t spend the time (or money) in the early stages to get their messaging, logos, or even monikers just right, says Douglas Spencer, president and chief brand strategist at marketing consultancy Spencer Brenneman. Besides discoverability issues, “they can run into legal challenges,” he says, or “find themselves with a logo that just looks amateur.”

But change is expensive: Most small companies (with less than $30 million in annual revenue) can expect to invest $90,000 to $180,000 on a rebrand, according to marketing agency Ignyte.

Fortunately, there are ways to cut down on costs–and make sure your investment pays off.

1. Do your homework.

Serial entrepreneur Dan Demsky once had to throw away thousands of dollars of packaging because of trademark infringement issues, so when it came time to brand his latest venture (men’s travel-apparel site Unbound Merino), he started with the basics. “Memorability and ease of spelling,” Demsky says, plus “having the domain name.” He also hired a good trademark attorney.

You’ll pay $2,000 to $2,500 for a comprehensive trademark search and around $1,000 for the application, says Marc Misthal, a lawyer with intellectual property firm Gottlieb, Rackman & Reisman. Expect added costs, including extension fees, if the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejects your application.

2. Solicit, but limit, feedback.

Opinions are a dime a dozen, so while you’ll want to run your brand plans past some employees and clients, you’ll also need to drown out the noise. When content marketing software company PathFactory–formerly known as LookBookHQ–started considering a change to its name and logo in 2017, it limited the internal brand committee to five people.

“Keeping the decision-making committee as small as possible really helped, because everyone will have their own idea of what [the brand] should be,” Cassandra Jowett, PathFactory’s senior director of marketing, says. “Changing your company’s name is not necessarily a democratic decision. Not everyone should get a vote.”

Conduct customer research, but avoid simply asking people whether they like a potential new name, logo, or color scheme, says Emily Brackett, founder of Branding Compass, a web-based branding app for small businesses. Instead, focus on the value prop you would like your name, logo, or design aesthetic to convey.

“You could say, ‘We really want to come across as caring and compassionate,’ ” Brackett suggests. “Does this logo look caring and compassionate, or does this [other] logo look caring and compassionate?”

3. Have a rollout plan.

PathFactory officially announced its new name and logo at the 2018 SiriusDecisions Summit, a major event for the B2B marketing industry. “We tied it together with a product announcement to explain the need for a change in our image,” Jowett says. “The two together got a good reception”–and a lot of much-needed media coverage.

Prior to the official announcement, the company sent swag bags to select customers, and for months after the rebrand, PathFactory left messaging about the change on all its digital channels. Even then, “not everyone realized it was the same company,” Jowett admits.

Smaller-scale rebrands won’t require so many bells and whistles. But you should still communicate why you’re making a certain change, Brackett says. Messaging can come in the form of a press release, blog post, or email to your customers.

“You want to control the narrative,” agrees Bo Bothe, CEO of Brand­Extract, a brand strategy consultancy. “If you just throw it out there to the wolves, they’re going to tear it apart.”

4. Avoid second-guessing.

Once you’ve unveiled your redesign, expect some resistance to your changes. So don’t rush to backtrack if you receive immediate negative feedback. Chances are, the blowback will blow over. (See Slack’s early-­2019 logo redesign, below. The barrage of bad press ultimately dissi­pated.) Commaful had several users threaten to leave once it unveiled the new name and logo, though they ultimately stuck with the platform, Liu says.

“Keep in mind, the product is what matters,” Bothe says. “If the product is badass, the logo will become less relevant. As long as you’re not offending anybody, you’re probably fine.”

 If It Ain’t Broke…

When Nicolas Vandenberghe relaunched his software startup as Chili Piper in 2016, his wife and co-founder, Alina Vandenberghe, quickly designed a new logo and stuck it on the website. “It was meant to be temporary,” Nicolas recalls, but customers took to the little red pepper so much, it survived the company’s formal brand refresh last year.

Chili Piper hired a design agency to draft alternatives, but ultimately the New York City-based company realized “if we change the logo, our customers will go crazy,” Nicolas explains. “They love the logo.”

There are many reasons startups or small businesses rebrand, including copyright infringement issues and the lack of a competitive differentiator, says Brackett of Branding Compass. But founders should take a cue from Chili Piper and make sure they’re not trying to fix something that’s working.

For fledgling and cash-strapped businesses in particular, “there are so many people who haven’t fully learned about your brand,” Brackett says. “Don’t change it because you’re bored.”

 

Jeanine Skowronski Senior editor, Policygenius Magazine

@JeanineSko

 

Source: Rebrands Can Be Tricky and Expensive. Here’s How to Get It Right the First Time

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Rebranding your business can mean a complete overhaul of all of your visual marketing materials. This video can help you decide if your company is ready for this project or not. If you’re thinking about a rebrand, Visme can help you recreate all of your graphics. Try it free now: https://visme.co — There are many instances when your company might decide it’s time to start rebranding your business. The idea of a rebrand can be scary, but sometimes things happen and a rebrand just makes sense. In this video, Mike with Visme dives into a few of the reasons your company might be considering rebranding. Let’s take a look at what they are. Watch the video to see a few real life examples for each reason. 1. When your company merges with another brand. 2. When your company is bought by another. 3. When your company appoints a new CEO. 4. When your brand has acquired the wrong image. 5. When you want to reach a different audience. 6. When you’ve grown out of your initial mission. 7. When your brand needs to stay relevant. Does your company or brand fall into any of these categories? If so, it might be time to start thinking rebranding your business. However, you never want to take a project like that lightly. A rebrand is almost like a relaunch of your company in a more modern or different light, so you want to follow a rebrand strategy to a T. Learn more about our 12 step process for a successful rebrand in our detailed blog post: https://visme.co/blog/rebranding-stra… — The logos in the videos are trademarks of United Airlines, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Verizon, Huffington Post, Instagram, Burberry, MTV, TNT, airBNB, and Apple. Visme claims no ownership rights in any of these logos, and has no affiliation with these companies. All use is intended to be informative the significance of brand design details. Sources: https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/United_… https://www.verizon.com/about/our-com… https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/a… https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/2/924… https://www.fastcompany.com/1724731/a… https://www.huffpost.com/entry/huffpo… https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsina… https://www.huffpost.com/entry/huffpo… https://www.fastcompany.com/1673210/a… https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/compre… https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1469… https://www.wired.com/2016/02/mtv-wan… https://www.underconsideration.com/br… https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/TNT_(Un…) http://fortune.com/airbnb-travel-miss… https://www.underconsideration.com/br…

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