The following seven factors continue to rule the day for building leading brands:

Organization Support

•  CEO leadership & support

•  Distinctive corporate culture that supports brand promise

•  Ability to obtain support from a broad spectrum of employees

•  Alignment of brand messages across functions

Brand Presentation

•  Strength of brand identity system

•  Effective use of visuals/imagery

•  Ability to capture the brand in a slogan

Source: The Conference Board’s 1998 “Managing the Corporate Brand” study

Ever wonder what is really behind this thing we call “identity”?

It’s one of those words that attracts a variety of meanings, ranging from a company’s name and logo, to its business definition (Fuji: We’re a digital imaging company), to its image in the marketplace, to its values.

Sometimes, executives manage to go a level deeper and talk about identity, their company’s, and even their own, as the unique characteristics that define how they create value in the world. From this vantage point, identity provides the seeds of differentiation. Ahhh. I think these guys may be on to something.

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in; if you’re going to successfully re-shape your brand, you need to start by knowing who you are. This imperative isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have, which we discovered recently through a research study, the Identity Impact Survey, that quantitatively demonstrates the impact of identity strength, organizational and individual, on employee engagement and business performance. The key findings of the survey, which included nearly 2,000 participants across five diverse companies and industries, were dramatic.

Increases in identity strength translate into predictable increases in revenue and other economic benefits.
Organizational identity strength is more influential than individual identity strength in driving employee engagement and business performance. Their combined effect, however, is greater than either one alone.

Although organizational identity emerges as a prime performance driver, employees don’t typically think that their organization actually has a strong identity.

The last finding made me shudder: Organizational identity strength has a major impact on performance, but most people don’t believe their company has a strong identity. Now, there’s a gap to be reckoned with! The implications get worse. What we found was that for all the innovative workplace activities companies use to boost engagement, better relations with one’s boss, more recognition, more work-life balance, none of them can make up for low identity strength. What’s a smart executive to do?

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You’ve read the statistics, you know that social media is NOT a fad and that people are using social media for health. You’re regulatory and legal people are hesitant to sign off on anything with the word “social media” in it. So what is the bottom line ? Should you engage patients via social media ?
First, let’s take a step back and look at the two biggest platforms on the Web. Facebook is not closing in on 500 million users and Twitter, even though it has recently had some problems, is still growing and evolving. My Space has all but faded to obscurity. Facebook is good for building a community Twitter is good for customer service but it has limited reach right now.

Before you embark on a social media strategy you need to know more about your target audience. I don’t mean just demographics I mean psychographics. Are these the kind of people who are looking for help and community support ? Is this the kind of healthcare condition that supports a community strategy ?

When you launch you need to have a plan to ensure that your social media site is updated on a regular basis and you need to have a plan if someone attempts to hijack your site. Also keep in mind that hard metrics like number of followers or friends do not apply to social media. There are a lot of people who are going to go to your social media page and not leave their names or become a follower. 10% of followers can influence the other 90%.

Finally understand that social media alone is not going to be the brand savior. It is a new way of thinking about consumers and part of an overall understanding that empowered patients are looking for health information and that your social media site is one train stop on a long journey to collect the missing pieces of health information.

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Facebook can be a key component of your social media marketing plan. Using Google Analytics with your website or legal blog shows you detailed information on who is visiting. Once you know your audience, you can modify your marketing accordingly.

Although Google Analytics cannot be used with Facebook, a new analytics tool from webtrends will provide a bevy of information on your firm’s Facebook page.

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It can be said that creative advertising is like brain surgery. When advertising is artfully done it cures people of the status quo by activating neural circuitry.

To be creative artfully requires a dynamic mix of imagination and understanding of how the world might work. This is not a matter of being correct, but rather a matter of making the audience wonder,

provoking a self-referring reverie that elicits an expanded idea of ones-self and how the world works. As a result, we see anew.

This, of course, flies in the face of traditional methods of measuring advertising effectiveness. It also runs counter to today’s corporate metric-mania and near incapacity to conceive bold strategies and innovations.

Insight is the coin of business success. While numbers can provide a means for measurement they cannot “embody,” or suggest, meaningful insights into the human experience. At worst, numbers provide an excuse to abdicate decision-making responsibility while placating executives desirous of propagating ‘business-as-usual.

What’s Needed for Creativity?

Continue reading “Marketers Need To Better Understand Creativity” »

ECommerce website optimization and search engine optimization strategies are very similar to other types of websites. However, there are some common mistakes that prevent eCommerce sites from achieving top search engine rankings for their targeted search terms. The focus of my next few blog posts will be on these common mistakes starting with the biggest one: too little or no unique content.

We’ve Heard it Before — Content is King

Search engines rely on website content to determine what search terms a specific page of a site should rank for. The search engines use “crawlers” to read content in various elements of Web pages, and then use an algorithm to rank the page based on that content. Problems occur when the only content on the site is the generic product descriptions that have been copied from different manufacture sites.

The Conflict

ECommerce sites that lack unique content cause a conflict for the search engines try to rank the pages of the website. The conflict occurs as the search engine crawlers discover several pages that are very similar, with the only difference being the type of products displayed on the page. The images and brief generic descriptions simply don’t offer enough information to help the crawlers know what the pages are about. In the end, the similar pages of the site cause the website to never get top rankings for any relevant keywords.

An end to the Conflict — Unique Content is the Real King

The way to end the conflict is to add unique content to the pages of the website. If you have a product category page with several sub-categories linked from it, a couple of paragraphs of content will be the only thing that will let the search engines know that page is different from the sub-categories.

Don’t be afraid to push the products down to allow space for a couple hundred words of content. Pushing the products down will have little to no effect on conversion. Without the content, the page will not be able to rank well and there will be no visitors to convert.

If you have featured products at the top of the page and don’t want to push them down, then break up your content. Include a couple sentences at the top and place the rest of the content below the products.

Final Thought

It is very easy to copy product descriptions from manufacturer websites and past them on to the product pages of your site. However, if you take the time to write your own product descriptions, the end result is well worth it. Copying product descriptions is quick and easy, but the search engines know which website had the content first. If your competitors write their own descriptions, and you copy the manufacturer’s descriptions, you will never rank better than your competitors for the best converting keywords — the product specific keywords.

From Dustin Williams