When is a brand not a brand? Now that takes some thinking about and if you ask a million marketers you may have a million different answers. In reality however I tend to believe that the brand is ultimately successful if it is understood. Not rocket science you may think, but nevertheless an important point and stay with me as I am getting to the good part.
What is to be understood? What exactly does your company hold dear? What is its driving force and place in the world? What do you actually deliver upon and communicate to the wider world? All these questions have to be understooddissected and answered in order for your brand to become active and successful. As important will be the consistent filtration of your brand values and attributes.
Let us understand this. Communicating online is not a brand in itself. Think of it rather as a voice piece; a touchstone and means of creating a relationship. In essence, a continuation of your brand experience. Online media is exactly that, but how we use it will determine if it fits your brand premise and grows your business.
How you communicate online, the language, tools, interaction, etc, should reflect your company’s brand platform. For instance, a company that is seen in the wider world as being a leader in interactive services would make sure that its online presence reflects this positioning and the values that keep it there.
This moves the whole idea of online branding away from being a stand-alone entity, and rather another media, a communication outlet that lets you reach your target market in a more direct and tangible way. Is it any surprise that corporations with a large media spend are insisting on better ROI from the marketers and are slowly moving away from old fashioned “trawler” advertising? Online marketing gives us a better opportunity to not only reach niche markets, but also clearly monitor and track their activity. This is something that traditional offline advertising could never do.
As a rule of thumb, think of any company and try the 30-second experience. Think about who they are and what they stand for: this could be determined in one word – creative, interactive, traditional, etc. Now visit their website and see if the experience matched the perception. If it does then you have brand alignment. If it doesn’t, then pick up the phone, you may have just discovered a sales lead!
You want to know more about employment brand positioning ? Follow Darren Evans‘ column on HRjob.ca. Darren Evans is National Brand & Creative Consultant at TMP Worldwide.
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