6 Tips to Help Optimize Your Branding Efforts

People typically equate a company's brand with the company's logo. But a brand is much more than a stylized name: It is a primary symbol of an organization's purpose, vision and values. Indeed, the act of branding represents a strategic endeavor that encompasses a range of corporate functions—marketing, public relations, and customer service, not the least, among them.

Branding also includes the way employees present their company to its various constituencies, whether intentionally through the communication of key messages or incidentally through everyday emails, social-media engagement and phone conversations.

Digital's Impact on Branding
Before the advent of digital technology, buyers in both the business-to-consumer (B-to-C) and the business-to business (B-to-B) space would be open to receiving sales communications from a number of brand ambassadors. They may have been exposed to messages pushed to them from dozens of companies, clients, or products from which they could reduce the pool of realistic choices to those offerings that were closely aligned with their needs. Marketing and other communications professionals relied on this traditional "funnel" approach, and reached out to their prospects and audiences at specific intervals in the selling cycle—most often at the point of "consideration." The ball was essentially in the seller's court.

Things are very different today. "Consumers in both the B-2-C and the B-2-B markets still want a clear brand promise and offerings they value. What has changed is when—at what touch points—they are most open to influence, and how you can interact with them at those points," David C. Edelman states in a Harvard Business Review article. "In the past," Edelman explains, "marketing strategies that put the lion's share of resources into building brand awareness and then opening wallets at the point of purchase worked pretty well. But touch points have changed in both number and nature, requiring a major adjustment to realign marketers' strategies and budgets with where consumers are actually spending their time." He goes on to suggest that consumers are now most open to influence at the "evaluate" stage and not at the "consider" stage.

Essentially, successful branding communication has shifted from a seller-controlled to a buyer-controlled model. Nonetheless, many marketing and PR efforts persist in following the older, less-effective, model. Commenting on the Edelman article, Taddy Hall, chief operating officer of Meteor Solutions, writes in a post: "Marketers' mental and economic models assume that consumer behaviors are primarily influenced by the message pushed to them—through media and promotion. In reality, we live in a world in which consumer behaviors are primarily influenced by the content they pull to themselves through their social networks."

How to Optimize Your Branding Efforts
There is a lot of potential for communications practitioners to harness the power of the new marketing model described above. Here are six tips that can help you get the most out of your branding communications activities in an increasingly digital environment.

1. Employees are brand ambassadors. Brand advocacy starts with all employees and not just the media spokespeople. Customer-facing employees are the first point of contact for prospective new customers and for existing clients, which gives them considerable influence in shaping the impression that audiences have of your company.

2. Seek information thoughtfully. In a WebInkNow post, David Meerman Scott likens mandatory "contact us" forms to asking intimate questions before introducing yourself to someone you want to date. For example, he says that you would never go up to someone and immediately ask for their phone number; nor would you ask the person how much money they make after first introducing yourself. "...You're not likely to get too far in the dating world acting like this. Yet, this is exactly how many companies behave," Scott contends. Instead of requiring a prospect to disclose "intimate details" (like the number of company employees) in order to speak with a human at your company, Scott says "the next time you have to design a marketing strategy, think about how you would approach it if you were trying to date the buyer."

3. Listen and respond. There is a vast amount of energy being devoted to persuading consumers of what their needs are instead of discovering and meeting those needs that already exist. The best way to identify existing needs is to truly listen and enter into comprehensive, two-way dialogues.

4. Adapt and adjust. The world of digital communications has expanded almost unimaginably in just a few years, and it continues to evolve at astonishing speed. Yet, many organizations are still slow in keeping up with these monumental changes. Writing about "Branding in 2011," Nicole Armstrong, of More Than a Logo, states that "Brands need to be nimble. They need to be able to quickly adapt to both new and existing marketing changes, challenges, and opportunities." Without adjusting, companies cannot expect to remain relevant, let alone to be successful.

5. Spell out the differences. Today's audiences want to know what separates your company from the competition. "If you don't differentiate, your brand will become a commodity and you will be forced to compete on price," Dave Dunn of Branding Communications and Forrest W. Anderson, consultant. "Once you become just a price, you are no longer a brand, just another supplier, and you're vulnerable." For your company to truly stand out, make your communications both creative and innovative, resisting the temptation to rehash the same material.

6. Choose tools wisely. Pick tools that best fit your community's requirements and preferences. That means using whatever gets you involved in the conversation in a relevant and meaningful way. And don't be afraid to incorporate new tactics if research shows that they are well-suited to your audience.

Today's consumers are more likely to engage in word-of-mouth marketing both online and offline. By targeting consumers at the point in the branding-communications-buying cycle at which they are most open to influence and then fulfilling those brand promises—with the help of the tips outlined above—you can harness the power inherent in the activities today's consumers participate in already and potentially create brand ambassadors that can continue to propel your branding forward.

Why The Print Industry Can’t Leave The World Of Messy Ink

Lately we’ve heard growing concern from magazine and newspaper publishers regarding the challenge of providing content for mobile media while preserving their print franchises. The concern is nothing new, but it’s apparent that content providers are at risk of losing track of their customers like toddlers in a shopping mall, says John Squires, a former EVP of Time Inc., and founder of Next Issue Media.

Apple’s iPad success and the imminent release of new application distribution platforms from Google and other software companies threaten another seismic shift for publishers that may have far greater impact on their business models than the growth of free media on the web. Devices like the iPad offer consumers a rich reading experience and offer publishers even more targeted advertising, but the revenue tradeoff as publishers navigate the path from print to this new world is lopsided–and not in a good way.

While we all enjoy browsing publications at newsstands, over 90 percent of the circulation of U.S. magazines is delivered directly to consumers through the mail. The data and cross-marketing opportunities that these direct customer relationships provide to publishers is the fundamental underpinning of their business model.

Data informs advertising in magazines and allows for better targeting. It provides for the sale of ancillary products like books, videos and special issues. It allows multi-title publishers to solicit new readers across their enterprise. Even competitors agree to exchange lists because it benefits the industry by building more magazine readers from a pool of customers who already enjoy receiving their publications through subscription rather than by single copy purchase.

Without direct access to customers, publisher revenue will decline sharply and the publications that we depend on for in-depth reporting, news and entertainment will risk a final digital Armageddon. Should we care? Why can’t the publishing industry just leave the world of messy ink and rural route delivery? Can’t it pivot to a less costly distribution model where customer ownership isn’t as critical?

Unfortunately, even if we assume that publishers retain their customers, there are extraordinary business challenges in transforming today’s print consumers into exclusively digital readers. And publishers can’t afford to relinquish their direct connection to readers without a more attractive economic model than the digital publishing world presents today.

Here’s why:

1. The Advertising Model Won’t Pay.

Magazines are a wonderful advertising medium. Among the top fifty publications ranked by advertising revenues, each copy of paid circulation generates a pass-along audience that averages seven readers. Those seven readers factor heavily into advertising rates, and provide a significant revenue multiple to be weighed against the editorial, marketing, printing and distribution costs of delivering a copy to the consumer.

What happens to this audience with a digital magazine? If a publisher wishes to be paid for its distribution, it will likely set entitlement requirements that discourage free circulation of its products. Even with integration of social networking tools to enable article sharing, publishers won’t generate more than 1.5 or two readers per copy. So the advertising revenue per circulation unit will fall due to the fact that fewer people see the ads. Even to remain constant, advertising effectiveness per copy would have to increase over four times to make up for the audience decline from seven to 1.5 readers per copy.

Of course, most publishers believe these new digital magazines will have wonderful consumer engagement qualities that will result in a higher value being placed on their advertising. They believe digital ads will be better targeted and more efficient than print at delivering the right message to the right reader. But will that value be four times the value of print today? Not likely.

Some argue publishers must cast their lot with free content and endeavor to survive with an exclusively ad driven model. But we need to remember the lessons of the web for most publishers. Even with the powerful reach the web provides, The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair would fail without the significant vote their consumers make every month by making a direct payment to the publisher.

So editors and consumer marketers will bear a larger burden in this new mobile reading world. They’ll need to increase the revenue from consumers. And one could argue that this is a good thing, redressing the imbalance of an industry that has been too highly leveraged on advertising. But for the consumer stream to become more valuable, one of two things must happen: either the demand for magazines must rise, or the cost of distribution must fall.

2. A 30 percent Cut to the Store Isn’t a Great Deal.

Isn’t selling your magazine through an app store and receiving 70 percent of the revenues a great deal? After all, magazine subscription agents and newsstands don’t return anywhere near that amount to publishers. But this is argument misses an important point. In iTunes and the Android Marketplace, there’s virtually no merchandising of magazine products. A magazine app must swim to the top of several hundred thousand other applications. And even in the context of a dedicated magazine store, the publisher won’t control featuring. The value of the brand must pull the consumer through to the purchase. And brands are expensive to build and nurture. So the publisher will continue to bear a high marketing cost to ensure enough sales for a stable level of circulation, just as they do today in the offline world. These marketing costs would certainly erase any advantage that a 70 percent cut would provide over the conventional agent model, particularly if the publisher cannot capture information on the customer and determine an effective ROI against their marketing expenditures.

3. Margin Must Come Before Marginal Cost.

What about the fact that there is virtually zero distribution cost? Well despite the problems of the U.S. Postal Service, the cost of printing and distribution represents a relatively low percentage of publisher expenses–somewhere on the order of 20 to 25 percent today. Of course there are significant creative and technical costs in publishing a beautiful new magazine in tablet form. Just adapting to the variety of screen sizes, screen resolutions and operating systems requires significant new investments. These costs, together with the aforementioned ad revenue decline, more than eclipse the savings from eliminating paper and postage.

So where will this margin come from if not from the consumer?

Tablets provide publishers a wonderful opportunity to rethink their products and add more value. But no manner of reinvention will be possible if they can’t mine their customer relationships to merchandise these new products. If the relationship between the magazine publisher and customer is broken, the industry will end up like music and book publishers–removed from customers, wedded to old habits and powerless as digital delivery inevitably overtakes and diminishes the value of their physical distribution.

Lastly, let’s consider the argument from a consumer’s perspective. Nearly one out of every two Americans subscribes to a magazine today. Many will purchase iPads and other tablets over the next year. When they do, Apple and others suggest that 150 million consumers ignore their existing relationships with publishers.

In this battle over ownership consumers are the losers. They will not be able to direct publishers as they wish, choose to get both a print and digital version of the magazine, or move to digital only delivery. They won’t be afforded the opportunity to get a better value by bundling their print and digital delivery together. They won’t be able to align their print and digital purchases so that expirations synchronize and billing is simplified. They won’t be able to move their experience to the device that suits them–irrespective of the platform–and read on phones, laptops, tablets or anywhere they like. Nothing in the transition will remove friction or frustration. Is this an experience we will be proud of?