The Buzz 101

Secrets of Minorities and Brands

2012-01-27T06:00:00.001-06:00

What are the secrets of minorities and brands? It was something we discussed at a recent #brandchat conversation and found BRANDidos shared this advice:

Your target market – understand and learn what is truly at the core of your target market. More than just demographics, understand the psychographics of your target customer.

Authenticity – creating a product that has that authentic feel gives you that unique edge. This increases your chance of selling and be talked about. However, when it comes to attracting minorities, your product has to have three qualities to make it effective and authentic: Aim for product quality, must have a strong reputation based on heritage and historical narrative, and must be sincere and identifies moral crusade. Minorities have a vast history, and brands that have the same qualities are more likely to attract them.

Engage them in conversation –don’t be afraid to ask questions because this is one way of getting feedback on how your business is doing. A lot of companies are not taking advantage of engaging customers on social media sites. Consumers are more comfortable leaving a comment or suggestion on your Facebook page or “tweet” you, making it an easy place to get raw feedback from your consumers. It’s also a place where they can interact with you on a personal level. They will feel that their opinions are given importance by your brand. It’s also a place to get connected with other minorities because you gain access to their network.

Go mobile friendly – according to statistics, a huge percentage of minorities use smartphones while only a fourth of white mobile phone users use a smartphone. This means that if you have a website, make sure that its mobile friendly. If you send out links to your website, make sure that they can view them on their phone because they are more likely to access it on their phone. Text-messaging is another factor. Minorities are into text messaging even though there are apps to make them communicate in another way.

Bloggers as brand ambassadors – a lot of minorities go online and when they look for information, they usually go to blog sites that they trust because they are created by peers. What your brand can do is partner with bloggers and let them feature your product on their sites. Or ask them to guest blog for your website. This will increase your reach and give minorities the idea that they can trust and rely on your brand. There are a lot of minorities who are expert bloggers; you can also ask them about how you can improve your products to appeal to them.

Brands that promote diversity and include cultural influences in their products will have a natural conversation reflective of their company and the people that make up their company. This will also reflect in their social media interactions and voice if it is aligned with the company brand.

All Business is Personal

2012-01-25T06:00:00.022-06:00

We always hear the phrase, “It’s business, it’s nothing personal.” The truth is that business is personal. We work hard to gain customers and we work hard to make them regulars and loyal to our brand. For a business to be successful, we need to build networks and reach out to customers that share the same interests. We look for channels where we can efficiently find customers that will help us grow with their feedback and suggestions - customers that will stay with us and help build a community around our brand.

Social media sites are considered hot channels for building communities around brands. It is also a place where we can market our business that’s why almost every business is jumping in on the craze. You will read a lot about how effective social media is when it comes to spreading brand awareness and making sales. However, it takes a lot of planning and execution to reap the benefits of taking your business into the online world. If you already have social media accounts, take the time to ask yourself how your site is helping your business. Do you have a good relationship with your customers? Did you gain customers; more importantly are they your friends now? Answering these questions can help you strengthen your brand in the online world.

Here are some tips on how you can build a community around your brand:

Take note of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – how is your social media site working for you? Are you engaging your customers with your posts? Have they given you feedback on your products and services? If you have a social media site that is not helping you gain anything, it’s time you reinvent the way you are handling it. Set goals and metrics, and measure your improvements from time to time. Your social media site is the place where you can build relationships with people who share the same interests. You have to give them something engaging, something they can participate in. Post content that is helpful to your customers and at the same time is related to your business. Tracking KPIs will help you gain a good following and a credible site, one where consumers readily participate.

Go for quality over quantity – making friends on your social media site does not mean that you have to befriend everyone. As you pay attention to what’s happening on your social media site, you will notice those who really care about your brand. They will comment and give you ideas on how you can improve a product or service. These are the ones you can pour your energy into because they get you and they want to help you. Once there’s trust and credibility, you will earn more customers through word of mouth.

Be social before selling – in social media, an effective approach to get people to join your community is to make friends. Find common ground and engage them in conversation. Earn their trust and respect before you introduce them to some of your products and services. It is said that first time visitors of a site are never potential buyers unless you have something that will engage their attention.

Listen to your customers – as part of being social, it is important that you pay attention to your potential, existing, and ex-customers. There’s so much that we can learn from listening, and when customers are engaged in a topic that you posted on your site and they start airing ideas about it, you get views that will help your business to be more successful. If you pay attention, you will also know when there is a problem, and then you can respond and solve it.

Use emoticons - customers might not respond to your posts on Twitter or Facebook when they feel that your posts are not open to comments, like when they sound too formal because you want to make your voice more credible. There are things you can do to change the tone of your post without making it sound less credible. You can use the smiley face emoticon or an exclamation point when necessary. The way to engage your customers is to let them now that it’s okay to comment on your posts.

Keep your cool – because you cannot please everyone, there are those who will make your blood pressure shoot up a bit. When you encounter them, never lose your cool because you don’t want to go viral online and gain a reputation that will damage your brand. When things go bad around your site due to customers arguing with other customers, you have to be the mediator and help them settle down. This way they never lose their respect for you because of the way you handled the situation.

If your social media site is not helping your business, don’t give up on it. Instead, change the way you are handling your site. Make it more fun and build a community that is engaging and helpful. Let it be a community with consumers helping other consumers out. Just don’t forget to measure your improvements and how your efforts are converting to sales.

Can We Really Trust another Brand’s Reputation?

2012-01-23T06:00:00.001-06:00

Brand reputation builds trust and trust builds brand reputation. Brands create a buzz if customers can trust our products and services. If we want our customers to refer our products, we have to make an impression and live by that. That’s the challenge for all business owners. That we have to constantly gain customer’s trust and maintain that so they continue to buy our products and services.

The efforts of a business to spread brand awareness and reputation depend on how the business reaches out to their customers. It depends on how honest their products and services are, the quality, and the level of customer service that employee’s give to their customers. Some brands can sponsor personalities to help with their marketing campaign. From top companies like Nike, who sponsor top athletes for each of their product lines, to those who sponsor different events to spread brand awareness.

Getting famous people to endorse a brand is a marketing move. When you get the right person for your brand and you know who your target market is, your campaign can succeed. But this doesn’t always work out. Even if a company pays an endorser for a high price, there’s the risk of it not paying out because your endorser suddenly gets a bad reputation. So how can we trust another brand to market our own brand?

Here are some tips on how to choose someone to represent your brand:

Choose an appropriate partner – it is best to choose someone who can represent your brand because their reputation speaks truly as your company’s vision. Paris Hilton used to get paid to be seen at different clubs, and that’s because she had the reputation of someone who goes to top clubs. If she’s seen at a club, other club goers may prefer that one over others in town. Nike gets top athletes like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant because they are considered the best in the NBA. Nike sells Kobe and LeBron shoes and apparel, and sport fans buy them.

Do your research –getting someone to represent your brand poses some risk that can be lessened if we do our research. Whether it’s a person or an event, make sure that you steer your brand in the right direction. You want to sponsor events for a good cause, something that will add value to your company. Same with a person - there are ways you can find information about them if you want to do a little background check. You can go to their social media profiles, especially when they're public.

This is also a way to find out more about your employees. Your employees represent your brand, therefore you must choose people who will fit in your company to represent, not risk, the brand’s reputation.

Strive for decency – scandals are inevitable. There is that possibility that people will do something “out of character.” Nike let go of Tiger Woods because of indiscretion that tainted his reputation. Nike doesn’t want to get the wrong message sent out by continuing sponsorship. But people are found to be understanding when it comes to mistakes. What consumers are looking for is decency. If your company was tainted because of an endorser, your consumers will still trust your brand if you are a company known for its decency.

Online brand reputation –people can easily talk about your brand online. The web is the fastest way to get news around these days. If you establish a good online reputation and engage interaction with your followers, you build trust and you get feedback from them. In case you suffer a meltdown due to bad publicity, you can use your website to explain and get back to your customers. Make sure to create content that translates to what your brand is really about.

A brand’s reputation depends on how well they establish their credibility with their products, services, and how they value their customers and employees. Choosing the right person to represent a brand goes one of two ways - either they add more credibility or not. It’s a risk to get an ambassador to promote a brand but through proper research and alignment of marketing goals, you can choose a person that will pose a lesser risk in tainting your brand reputation. Establish a good online reputation as well. Engage with your customers and make them feel important. Build relationships and loyalty, because when things don’t go the way you expect them to, you will have a place to rebuild.

4 Ways to Integrate Brand and Culture

2012-01-20T06:00:00.002-06:00

Integrating brands and culture is about knowing market trends and how to create and recreate our products and services to make sure that they will stick with consumers.

Brand and culture was a focus of a recent #brandchat discussion. Think about how our products and services can help consumers; turn the want into a need. It’s not easy but there are ways now to easily get feedback from consumers to help improve business. Creativity and innovation to integrate brand and culture will help your business compete in the tough market. The market is always evolving and consumers jump from one new thing to another, but if we can establish our brand with culture, make it consistent, then consumers will have something they will never forget.

Here are four ways on how integrate brand and culture:

Become an icon – this is not easy but if you dream big, you will set business goals to reach that dream. A product becomes iconic when people start talking about it and spreading it to others. You have to find ways you can create and invest in establishing a culture around your brand. Make sure that everyone in your company lives up to your mission and vision because they represent your brand. If they do a great job in providing customer service, customers will have a memorable experience and will surely come back for more. Same with your products and services, if they feel that you truly live up to your ads, they will have a brand that they can trust and will come back again. In integrating brand and culture, make your employees happy and they will be happy to serve everyone too.

Work on your niche – If you find your brand’s niche, work on that. If you work on your brand consistently, people will start talking about it until it becomes a cultural figure. If you can tap into the emotions of your customers, they will not forget it. Take Apple products; they are now the leading makers of cool gadgets. That’s right, cool gadgets. And their products are not just physically designed to be cool, they are built to process and make computing really convenient. They have iPods, iPhones and iPads. A lot of critics say that these are just toys, but Apple is proving them wrong because a lot of professionals are taking iPads to Boardrooms, the office, and everywhere else, especially iPhones.

Create something that is culturally influential – one way to make your brand culturally influential is to know what your consumers want. If you can create something that has everything they want in it, and then a few extras, the want becomes a need. Your advertising should be aligned with the quality of your products. Once consumers can trust your brand, they will be loyal and spread the word to others. Take RIM’s Blackberry vs. the iPhone. Blackberry started the smartphone craze and everyone doing business has to have one. Blackberry lets you do emails on the go, Internet when you need it, everything to make a businessperson’s work easier. Now Apple tapped into that with the iPhone, a touchscreen smartphone. It’s not just for business either because there are so many apps you can use, depending on your needs. A lot of people are making the switch because they can do more with an iPhone.

Create a strong branding campaign – this point might mean more money for marketing, but there are tools now that will help you get your brand out. Create a marketing strategy on the Internet, make use of social media sites to attract and interact with your target customers. Through these sites, you can post images, videos, and stories that are related to your brand, something you can use to make an impression. Ford has a blog site that accepts stories from their customers about how a Ford product helped them or inspired them. These stories get published in the site, no marketing whatsoever. But the site gets around and so does the brand.

What do you think? Perhaps you’re a BRANDido (people who chat on #brandchat weekly) even if you’ve never chatted with us on the chat – chime in here!

Achieve Versus Impede

2012-01-18T06:00:00.002-06:00

Sometimes you must upgrade the relationships in your life to pro-actively surround yourself with people who will help you achieve the life you want rather than impede the progress.

This is not saying that you only hang out with people who can do something for you or help you get ahead yet it does mean that you take a good strong look at who you know and who you spend time with to see if they are “taking away from you” or “getting in the way” of you achieving your life goals.

There are some people you will connect with who can stand beside you and be a support, compliment your strengths and create a synergy. There are those that will “leech” on to you and drain you. There is a great difference in being “needed” and associating with those who are “needy”. And, while “users” can come dressed in “sheep’s clothing” (I know this from personal experience!), their true intentions, over time, will reveal themselves. Hopefully, you’ll get really good at seeing what you are putting up with and realize that you do not have to tolerate their behavior or neediness.

Do you have:

1. Friends or connections (even family members) who criticize and judge you always? Often their statements start with “here’s what you should do.

2. People who take you for granted?

3. People who manipulate?

4. People who “expect” things from you - feel you owe them?

Rid yourself of these people! It’s time to do some “spring cleaning” for your mental health and successful well-being.