Five Tips to Create and Manage Brand Equity

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Five Tips to Create and Manage Brand Equity

Design Lots recently updated their corporate image and a new update in their own website is due soon. Add to this a new face or two and one might not even recognise us anymore. This is an all to common scenario in business, as the corporate culture of your business changes, your identity sometimes fails to.

As your company grows, so should its corporate identity. If you are a new business, developing a corporate identity is crucial. A corporate identity includes your logo, relevant branding, a style guide and a set of best practices for using your logo, fonts, etc when communicating with customers. Consistency between employees is crucial in developing a set of standards for effectively managing customers and clients as well as your brand.

Keeping your website and corporate image up to date is an important aspect for any business. When first impressions last; having the foresight to recognise where potential customers first make contact is important. Then, implementing tools to both convey the correct message and draw those potential customers through the door is paramount.

Below is a set of five tips to help you make the best first impressions and convert potential customers into real ones as well as managing change within your brand.

1. Invest in developing brand equity. Branding assists in developing brand equity and brand equity is very important to business.  This is because it is the value consumers are willing to pay for your product or service based on a set of factors like, name awareness, perceived quality, and brand loyalty.

In 2004, Coca-Cola’s brand (not their assets) was worth 2.55 bn, Microsoft was worth 1.64 bn and Toyota was worth .27 bn. That is simply the price someone would pay to own that companies name; why? Because they’ve successfully built a brand, they have positioned themselves as leaders in their respective fields.

When you strengthen the factors that contribute to brand equity, like name awareness, through consistent branding, then you slowly build and strengthen your brand equity, which in turns leads to a more profitable business for yourself.

2. Develop a corporate identity and use it. Included within a corporate identity is your company’s name, logo, specific font sets, email signatures, letterheads, invoices, and business cards, just to name a few.

The corporate identity is the first step in branding your business. These both lead to increased sales, loyalty and eventually, a better price point for your products or services. Branding is the basis of marketing your company, and even small business can begin to harness its potential power by using consistently branded and formatted emails, letters, business cards, and even your company’s website.

3. Develop a website and use it. According to the Sensis 2007 eBusiness Report, 92% of businesses in Australia utilise online services when running their business but only 51% of businesses have a website.

While these statistics will have changed marginally over the past two years, they still show that Australian businesses utilise the Internet to find information and make purchases as well as showing that Australian businesses are not fully embracing the Internet as a medium to disperse information and sell products.

Increasingly, we use search engines like Google to help us find what we are looking for. Slowly, phone books and telephone information services are disappearing, giving way to a new medium for conveying accurate and useful information; the Internet.

4. Use a professional graphic or website designer. Below are three websites examples (linked), one site is a D.I.Y., one site is designed with a web template, and one site is one of our recent projects.

DIY website | Able Roofing
Web template website | R&T Home Insulation
dlc website | Impact Insulation

Take notice of the quality of the three different designs, and ask yourself how long you would give each site when browsing them as a potential supplier of home insulation for your home; 3 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute?

The time it takes to dismiss a potential supplier of a product has decreased in the past two decades as a direct result of our over exposer to marketing messages. Meaning, those businesses who can capture your attention and hold it for 30 seconds to a minute are already well ahead of the competition.

5. Finally, if you have a website or corporate identity, update it. The vast majority of sites that we build are built with Content Management Systems (CMS). That said, only a small minority of our clients fully utilise this invaluable tool to update their sites with current and useful information.

One simple thing that you can do to help your site improve its page ranking is update the information on it. Google (and other search engines) occasionally ‘crawl’ your site looking for updated content. If it finds updated content, that works for you, if not, it works against you.

A common mistake is to say we built it, they will come. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Having a website and having a website that gets found are two very different things. Developing a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign is a more comprehensive way to effectively market your website online through search engines. It does cost money because it takes time to do effectively, but when done correctly, the pay off is huge.

When it comes to a logo or corporate identity, fonts and colour schemes come and go over time. What was hot in the 80’s and 90’s isn’t so much anymore. Embrace change and make it work for you and your business.

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Using Twitter to Build Brand Equity

admin    Twitter Marketing     Brand, Build, Equity, Twitter, Using

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chairman of Twitter, Inc., said that the definition of Twitter was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds,”1 which was exactly what Twitter was. But instead of just chirping, the micro-blogging social network service has become one of the biggest buzzes in 2009, capturing countless media headlines and stirring up conversations worldwide. Apart from Twitter, the economy is also a main topic this year. While companies find their customers are spending much less money during the economic downturn, they turn to Twitter to help build their brands, promote their products or services, and keep in touch with both loyal and potential customers. So how do companies use Twitter to build their brands? To answer that, let us first learn some facts about Twitter.

Twitter, founded in 2006, is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as “tweets”. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers, known as “followers”. The three-year-old Twitter, whose popularity is still proliferating as we speak, is already the third most popular social networking site in the world behind Facebook and Myspace. Twitter is different from other social networking services because users do not need to send requests and get approved before they can follow others. A simple click is enough for a Twitterer to follow or unfollow any other Twitter users, who may be a celebrity, a politician, a company or an individual. Not only can users send private Direct Messages (DM) to a follower, they can also send public replies to whomever they want in the Twitter-verse. Because Twitter is text-based in nature, users must post pictures or videos through URL links, which enables Twitter’s interface to stay simple and clean. Even though Twitter does not and will not put any advertisement on its website, it is still a free service, which means businesses do not need to pay a dime to promote themselves and communicate with tens of millions of potential customers. Labbrand believes that brand equity includes brand strength and brand stature. While brand strength is determined by brand differentiation and brand relevance, brand stature is determined by brand esteem and brand knowledge. Twitter can help a brand build up these four pillars of brand equity through different dimensions of interaction between a brand and its stakeholders. We will address four examples to illustrate the point. While the brands cited in the rest of this article may satisfy all four criteria, we will only use one brand example to highlight each measure.

Differentiation under the Communication and Design Dimension Businesses strive to make their brands unique. Differentiation is strongly associated with a brand’s communication and design. Given the proximity that Twitter provides, twittering is undoubtedly a highly unique way for companies to communicate with customers. However, this advantage may not last for long due to Twitter’s fast growth, because when the majority of brands have their own Twitter pages the fact that a brand has a Twitter page will no longer be unique. At least for the time being, however, Twitter can contribute to brand differentiation. JetBlue Airways, an American low-cost airline, has differentiated its brand through Twitter communication. Since problems with flights can cause a lot of headaches, JetBlue has set up a service where customers can complain about flight problems directly to airline staff via Twitter. It is no wonder JetBlue has already attracted more than 1.1 million followers since the launch of its Twitter page in the spring of 2007. Today its account is often cited as an example of smart corporate twittering. Using Twitter to create an efficient customer service communication platform will contribute to JetBlue’s differentiation and overall brand equity. Relevance under the Market and Consumers Dimension Brand relevance is a measure of appropriateness and relates to a brand’s appeal. Relevance both drives and reflects consumer choice. Relevance basically answers the question of why consumers choose to buy a particular product. It can be called the cornerstone of a brand. For companies new and old, including small businesses, how to make their brand relevant is often difficult in a highly competitive market with diverse and demanding consumer groups. Yet, Twitter can give a brand the chance to build relevance and even loyalty among today’s consumers. Teusner Wines, a boutique winery in Australia’s Barossa Valley, has only three employees, but its Twitter account (@Teusnerwine) has nearly 6,000 followers. Dave Brookes, Teusner Wines’ one-man sales and marketing department, believes that using Twitter is more about building relationships with existing and potential customers than selling products. Brookes sends friendly messages to those who are talking about Teusner Wines on Twitter. After keeping casual, relaxed exchanges with followers and avoiding product promotions, Brooke saw more people coming to the winery for tours and an increase in traffic to its website. Even though shipping restrictions prevent Teusner Wines from selling directly to individuals outside Australia, a number of people from United States and Canada have asked where they can find Teusner Wines at stores and restaurants near them, demonstrating that these potential consumers find the brand highly relevant. Moreover, Twitter users might like a brand and consider it relevant simply because it uses Twitter.

Esteem under the Products and Services Dimension Differentiation and relevance are still not enough to build a successful brand. Eventually, customers need to decide whether or not they will purchase the product or service, and how much they like the brand. Since Twitter as well as other social media are strongly interactive, they are always linked to the esteem dimension of a brand. American Apparel (@americanapparel) has more than 40,000 Twitter followers. One of the United States’s largest clothing manufacturer’s unique ad campaigns was inspired by one of its own Twitter followers. American Apparel received a DM from a freelance photographer (Ryan Marshal @ThePanicRoom) chronicling his wife’s pregnancy with week-by-week photos of the mother-to-be in American Apparel clothing. The company liked the photo series so much that they used the images as the basis for an ad campaign showing cute and comfy looks for expectant moms. American Apparel also set up its ad on Marchal’s blog (pacingthepanicroom.com). They ran a unique banner ad for baby clothes, and the blog became one of American Apparel’s top performing sites for online ads. As you can see, Twitter helped drive American Apparel’s product promotion decisions, and at the same time demonstrated the brand’s proximity to their customers, thereby building esteem.

Internal Effects – Esteem & Knowledge under the Culture and Behavior Dimension Thus far we have discussed external brand interactions; however, Twitter can also enhance interactions between employees and the companies that they work for. This means Twitter also has internal effects on a business and their internal brands. Just like a twittering company would appeal to its twittering customers, it will also appeal to its twittering employees. It works the other way around too; some companies test applicants’ ability to use twitter when recruiting new employees, since Twitter is considered to be a vital tool by many marketers. As for knowledge, it measures whether there is a true understanding of what a brand stands for. No one knows better about what a brand stands for than its own top executives who get to decide what their brands mean. Normally, only a few privileged employees could directly interact with their top executives, but Twitter can help to change this. For instance, Zappos.com’s CEO Tony Hsieh is in charge of the electronic commerce company’s Twitter account (@zappos), which has nearly 1.2 million followers. Not only can customers contact Hsieh via Twitter, so can Zappos.com’s employees. Hsieh constantly writes his thoughts on business and Zappo as a brand like “Good businesses figure out how to continuously add value. Great businesses figure out how to continuously multiply value,” and “When your work is an extension of who you really are deep down inside, it’s no longer a job or a career. It’s a calling,” so that employees can better understand the brand and better serve customers. By building esteem and knowledge internally, Zappos will build a stronger and more valuable brand overall. (In July 2009, Amazon.com Inc. announced it will purchase Zappos.com, and the deal is expected to go through in the fall. It will be interesting to see if this acquisition will affect Zappos Twitter account!)

Conclusion From the above exploration of Twitter, we can see that Twitter does have the potential to help businesses build brand equity. However, we are sure that the most effective way has not yet been discovered. The new-born Twitter leaves businesses a huge space to explore, innovate, and experiment with the most effective ways to twitter up brand equities. 1 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html