Recently I read two articles about companies and their brands. One is building their brand, while the other seems to be throwing a great brand away.

Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) workers are using Dawn brand dish soap to clean oil off animals on the gulf coast. Dawn responded by creating a huge branding tie-in that resulted in increased sales as well as cash donations of over $400,000 to the cleanup effort.

The National Pork Producers have announced plans to drop the universally known tag-line “the other white meat” that has become synonymous with pork over the last twenty-three years. The VP of marketing was quoted as saying it was great at first, but now “it doesn’t help sales.”

Both these examples made me think of the importance of our brand to our customers. While an “offer” or an advertisement can create sales, a good brand can build your business.

What is a brand?

A textbook definition of a brand will mention the logo (golden arches) or the mascot (gecko lizard). However, that is only one aspect of a company’s brand. Intuitively we all know a brand is more than that. It is more like a feeling or an opinion, based on trust that a product or service will give us what we want from it. Marketing folks call it the brand promise. The Branding Strategy Insider website says:

The ideal benefit to claim in a brand promise has the following three qualities: (1) it is extremely important to the target consumer, (2) the brand’s organization is uniquely suited to delivering it and (3) competitors are not addressing it.

Which raises the question, what does your studio promise? What is your brand?

For example, do you promise “professional service” but dress poorly or have a run-down studio? Do you promise fast delivery, then take weeks to fulfill an order? Do you promise great photography, but deliver average results?

These are hard questions for any studio owner, but they need to be asked. If all your marketing and advertising works together to build your brand, it will not only increase sales in the short run, but it will help you grow your business.

Tags: marketing

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 6:46 pm and is filed under business, marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.