Branding Through Differentiation

It’s not enough for your company to merely offer a great product or service. To get ahead of the field, today’s competitive marketplace demands that business owners establish and develop a distinct brand. It’s important that your brand help create and further a clear identity, one that every employee, from the CEO down to the sales team, can understand and get behind. The brand must be your mantra, and it needs to be one that can be stated succinctly. It also needs to translate easily to advertising, marketing, graphics, display, and collateral campaigns. The real key to increased market share is differentiation. How you approach differentiation depends on your particular product or business. The critical starting point is understanding whether your business or your product is the brand. For instance, Procter & Gamble manufactures and sells countless products but consumers far more readily recognize P&G’s individual product lines: Mr. Clean, Tide, Crest, Folgers, and Charmin, for example. That’s intentional branding that favors the product, not the company. However, for most small businesses, the business itself will be the brand. How you proceed depends on whether your company or product varies greatly from your competitors or whether you’re one of several companies offering similar goods or service. No matter what, you must determine with certainty who is and who is not the intended audience. Good branding also considers how best to position your company, so you might weigh age, class, or lifestyle factors if your goal is to appeal to one of these groups. With a general demographic in mind, you can further differentiate your product. The key is zeroing in on what makes your company or product most noticeable or special. If the point of differentiation is that your product is the least expensive item on the market, that point can become part of your branding strategy, allowing the positioning of your product as the best bargain. Conversely, if your product is expensive, positioning it as the most luxurious could be smart branding. Some products might be more suited for an attitudinal approach to branding. For instance, a special events planning business or singing telegram company might be able to go wacky, zany, and fun with its branding, whereas a financial planning services company or health-care provider would be more suited to a steady, measured, confidence-building approach. Differentiation is more difficult when products seem less outwardly different. For example, insurance agencies often offer the same basic types of insurance programs. In such cases, the brand identity of the business must be more inherent, so these companies might be more successful by playing up the trust, loyalty, or experience angles of their reputations rather than exploiting differences where there are few. Companies need to be smart about branding so they don’t waste time. One way to be efficient is to be conscious of the desired and targeted overall market share. If you’re one of several businesses providing a basic commodity or service, such as an insurance agency or a financial planner, you’ll probably want to take a conservative approach with broad appeal. If, however, you’re a niche sporting goods producer of an extreme-snowboarding accessory, focus your branding on the narrow margin of dedicated athletes who crave the latest product. If your brand manages to communicate your company’s core values and distinguishes your product, you’re on your way to success. Expend energy determining your differentiation strategy and your brand may very well take on a life of its own. Differentiation can lead to that edge your brand needs to gain consumer recognition in the market, and once you’ve got your brand and identity percolating, you can get down to the business of building and growing your brand. Remember that your brand is permanent. It consistently reinforces the appropriate messages to your key audiences. A brand is the core identity of your company and represents the personality that goes to the heart of your positioning. Your brand is bigger than any advertising, public relations, or direct mail campaign you will ever do. It is the one thing that doesn't change.

Social Media is the New Advertising

According to Rajani Baburajan, contributing editor for TMCnet, the power of social media is best utilized by advertisers today. The evolution of microblogging technologies such as Twitter confirms the success of social media advertising among several businesses that communicate with their target customers through Internet. Social media optimization, or “SMO,” is also gaining traction among businesses that aim at improving the page ranking of their Web sites by connecting with different community Web sites. A recent study by BIA/ Kelsey analyzes the influence of various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace in the marketing activities of SMBs today. The latest wave of BIA/Kelsey's Local Commerce Monitor study shows that 9 percent of SMBs currently use Twitter to market their businesses. BIA/Kelsey also found that there is growing interest among SMBs to leverage the power of social media to improve the business. About 32 percent of SMBs surveyed in the study indicated they plan to include social media in their marketing mix in the next 12 months by using a page on a social site such as Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace. To invite more traffic to their business Web site, several SMBs – 39 percent – plan to include customer ratings or reviews on their own Web sites and 31 percent plan to include links or ads placed on social sites or blogs. Steve Marshall, director of research and consulting, BIA/Kelsey, said, that as local consumers increasingly gravitate to social networks, local businesses understand they need to be part of the conversation. “This opens up a market opportunity for local media companies that offer products and services that enable local advertisers to easily integrate social media into their marketing efforts,” Marshall said. BIA/Kelsey study also shows that use of social media advertising is more common in startups than the established ones. Among the SMBs that use Twitter for advertisement, 16 percent of them are in business for three years or less, 11 percent of SMBs are in business for four to six years, 6 percent of them are in business for seven to 10 years, and only 2 percent of SMBs are in business for more than 11 years. As the popularity of social media escalates among businesses as well as end users, service providers are looking towards exploiting the opportunity by offering innovative services such as free voice chat and video chat. According to another report published in TMCnet, Twitter is adding a free VoIP calling feature using JaJah’s VoIP technology. Twitter’s VoIP feature announcement comes just days after Facebook’s announcement about the launch of a new “voice chat” feature, using Vivox’s VoIP technology.

Multicultural Young Adults

Although multicultural audiences typically have racially mixed social circles and younger or second-generation Hispanics and Asians may be highly acculturated into mainstream American culture, Market Reasearch.com found significant differences still remaining amongst different racial and ethnic groups. For example, Asian audiences typically have higher incomes and a greater level of sophistication with technology, and are also more likely to be married, while black and Hispanic audiences often have lower incomes. PC ownership levels and frequency of web usage are also typically lower amongst these groups, although these differences also may be driven by differences in education and income level. Meanwhile, Hispanics are also more likely to begin families early and live in multigenerational households. Additional differences emerge by age, with those ages 18-24 having a strong interest in entertainment but limited household income available for shopping online and other expenditures, while those ages 25-34 are likely to be spending on furnishing their first homes and raising their families. Multicultural audiences are also likely to enjoy different types of entertainment, with dedicated music genres, TV channels and movies targeting the various groups. Although hit TV shows like American Idol, “big tent” movies and hit songs will still have broad reach amongst all of the multicultural audience, the overall mix of entertainment enjoyed by individual racial and ethnic groups is likely to vary. Certain groups may also be likely to have different interests and hobbies - for example, young Asian respondents to Mintel’s surveys have evidenced a strong interest in shopping, while young male black respondents are very interested in sports.