“How to Effectively Position Your Brand Now and For The Future”
“How to Effectively Position Your Brand Now and For The Future”
By: Jeffrey Scott Sherman
Times are tough and the current feeling is that saving money “at all costs” is the best way to go. Individuals are cutting back on how they spend and therefore businesses are cutting back on their spending. The biggest difference in businesses right now is where they cut back on their spending and how they look at what is important. This paper is going to dispel some long thought information and for many business owners may be very hard to swallow. The fact is though that many things that are right are not easy, and therefore mean stepping far outside our comfort zone. We are going to talk about brand positioning and marketing as a whole, we are going to look at numbers and examples of why it is important as well as tools you can use. Finally we are going to look at why “EXPANDING” brand awareness and “INCREASING” marketing are the correct way to handle this economy. If you are a small business owner in this economy the following information may just be the difference between making it or breaking it during these times. I hope that all of you will join us as we take a journey through the world of brand positioning and marketing and show how through the right type of spending and marketing you can actually grow in this time coming out a leader in the industry you
serve.
First of all there are disturbing facts that come with a weak economy. Those sad facts are that money gets tighter and people become more choosey of the things they spend their money on. Maybe the family that once had their house cleaned by a service decides that they can do it themselves. Perhaps the lawn mowing responsibilities fall back into the hands of an unwilling teenager as a punishment for not quite doing what they were supposed to (that never happens does it) instead of the lawn service that used to come once every two weeks. People take to washing their cars in the driveway and start driving less because they want to save on gas. In all of those examples, the family is cutting back on the wants in life. You will find very few families that will stop buying food or medicine. Not many people make the choice to cut off the power and water in their homes in fact few are willing to cut off the cable or the internet. Those are now considered needs. I am not arguing whether that is truly the case, nor am I stating that all of the things above are actual needs, but they have become what people see as needs and that really is what matters. The biggest thing to remember here is that the family has looked at the big picture, what is going to least effect the family’s life and cut them in order to save the money. So why is that not what we do in business, and before you say you do, remember the family looked at the big picture and then saved money.
So then how do businesses make their cuts? The first they cut is jobs and things associated with those jobs. The next thing that a business looks at believe it or not is their marketing budget, in a recent article by Barbara French she quotes the Vice President of IDC’s Executive Advisory Group stating that marketing budgets are going to be cut 15% in the first quarter of 2009. This means that companies are looking at stopping their message and branding in response to people not purchasing their product. Drawing this back to the family example that would be like telling everyone that due to the fact that money is tight all social activities are going to be cut out completely, there will be no getting together with friends or socializing at all. Once again not even close to what we would do for our families. Why, because that can be one of the few ways that a family stays sane. They get together with people for a Bar-B-Q or at the pool. They sit around and watch a television program or play a game. In doing that the family stays active, and in staying active they keep up the opportunities that something great might happen. This is what marketing is for a business, it is the way of keeping your business socially relevant and your brand involved so that there is a chance that something great might happen. Do I simplify too much, well, I have always believed in asking an expert so I am going to a direct quote once again from Barbara French’s article from that very Vice President. His name is Richard Vancil and he believes “…that good marketing investment policy has elements of a large inertial flywheel: let it stop spinning and the fuel to get it going again costs a lot more than if steady increments had been consistently applied. Vendors should have the wherewithal and courage to keep their investments basically steady.” What he is saying here is that stopping that message and cutting off your marketing can in the beginning not look so serious but the longer it is off the more serious it gets. It also going back to that flywheel analogy means that when you go to start it back up again it is not just going to go right back to where it was it is going to have to regain the momentum building itself back up so you are actually hit twice. I know that this can sound abstract to some, and so I am going to try to show it in many different ways. If you are a numbers person let’s look at it this way, you decide because your business is not as successful that you are going to cut your marketing budget by 15%. That slows the wheel down, then when the economy turns around you want to ramp back up. Get back to that same momentum. You are not only going to have to make up for the 15% cut, but because you stopped and that wheel slowed down by that 15% you are going to have to make and additional 15% increase to get that inertia back flowing, and nothing states that this will even work.
So then the question becomes what business owners do to make sure that we don’t cut their marketing and slow down that wheel. There are a couple of key things that can be done here, and both of them require thinking outside the box a little. The first is change how we go about marketing, and the second is to change the medium within which we are telling the story. In both of these cases there is a chance that you could accomplish your primary goal which is to cut the cost to you of the marketing while maintaining or possibly increasing your awareness to clientele in the marketplace. The tools that you use are different, and not many people have mastered these tools. So we are going to take this opportunity to describe some of the tools and give some information on them. The tools we are going to look at are Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. These three tools are a microcosm of the broader digital marketing medium with Facebook representing the Social Networks, YouTube representing online video and Twitter well representing Tweets.
Facebook
It wasn’t too long ago that when someone asked if you have a social networking site people talked about how they were on “MySpace”, however in a huge change of events MySpace while still large has lost its footing as the number one social networking having been eclipsed by Facebook. There were numerous reasons for this, but those reasons are not important to the reason why this should be a medium upon which you are marketing. According to an eMarketing.com article in the June 18th Newsletter, Facebook overtook MySpace with 70,278,000 unique visitors in May of 2009. You did not read that wrong 70 million unique visitors in one calendar month. Now here is the incredible secret to it all, if you have a blog and a personal Facebook page you can link your business site to it for…. FREE. You can create a fan page for your business or yourself and it costs you… NOTHING. The fact is that you have an opportunity if done right to reach millions of people a month in an environment where simply acting right, and not just shilling your products all the time can lead to you building a trustworthy relationship. Now to really give a nail in this one as a legitimate way of keeping that wheel spinning, that number for May 2009 was a 97% increase from May 2008. 97% growth is something we should all aim to one day hopefully make. So if you are not on this medium or you are unsure how to take advantage of this medium there are people who can help you, you can Google information or you can mess around with it till you figure it out. It all depends on the amount of “time” you want to invest. However, the successful business owner’s greatest tool is to “know what he doesn’t know”. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
YouTube
Now, I remember when I was younger I used to tell people that when I got older I wanted to own my own TV station, and I could put out all the shows and original material I wanted. Now at the time I didn’t understand how television truly worked and I soon realized that owning my own TV station was not something that was easily accomplished. Little did I know that by the time I turned 21 people on the cutting edge would know that they were heading in that direction, and now anybody that is willing to learn how to cut digital videos can have their own online TV station on YouTube. Imagine a way to reach the internet with a video that you have made about what you do, information about your service or product, or just for fun. Little did we know that things that once took weeks or months to make it out across the globe now are out there in a matter of hours online. So is this a valuable tool, well let’s look at numbers. By sheer numbers there is 1,596,270,108 users on the Internet according to March 31st, 2009 numbers from a site called Internet World Stats which can be found at internetworldstats.com. And looking at world population stats that are estimates as of mid-2009 found at infoplease.com we find that China is the country with the largest population at 1,338,612,968 this means that if you made the internet population a country it would simply be the largest country in the world by population by over 400,000,000 people. So we know that you would spend millions of dollars to put a commercial on during a TV show such as American Idol or The Super Bowl. This would reach millions of people costing a company much of their budget. They however will still not reach the audience that a video on YouTube could reach and the total cost to you to do that is… NOTHING. Once again, you have to know the best way to use it and be able to make use of the technology, but could your business use a base of 1.5 billion customers that you could market. I would think so. This is once again another way to keep or increase that inertia and possibly decrease cost to you in the area of marketing and branding.
Now this is an interesting bird, no pun intended at all. Twitter is an internet medium that allows you to post 140 character statements that go out to your followers. These statements can include links to websites, personal information, or simply an update as to where you are. These updates can be sent through your computer or even through the use of your cell phone. This allows any user to create their own little tribe of individuals that are staying updated on what it is that individual is doing. More importantly each Tweet that is sent turns into its own webpage that can help increase the legitimacy of the person putting out the Tweets. The effect of Twitter is still being calculated but the numbers are still staggeringly impressive. In the same span of time that Facebook grew by 97%, Twitter grew by a whopping 2,681%. That is not a misprint that is a percentage of growth. That percentage of growth harkens back to the type of growth that was seen during the dotcom boom. So once again can your business afford to miss out on a way of networking and marketing that is growing at this rate, I am guessing not. So once again the question gets asked how much it costs to take advantage of Twitter, and the answer once again is nothing. So does it matter if you know the technology or not, is it something you are going to learn or is it something that you will get someone to help you do. This is up to the individual business owner and I go back to that statement earlier of knowing what you don’t know, and state again, don’t be afraid to ask for help.
So there should be one last question then on everyone’s mind. A question that all business leaders want to know the answer to, and that is if we take the gamble will it pay off. Is there examples of businesses that have not cut the marketing and branding during a economic downturn and made it out the same or better. So I went and did some looking and found that Kellogg’s aggressiveness during the Great Depression helped put them over the top of C.W. Post. Another company that didn’t cut is Proctor & Gamble, which by the way has a company policy to never cut its marketing and advertising budget. I wonder if this could be why they are consistently at the top of their industry. Another example which seems a little weird now, but Chevrolet became the number one brand by using its aggression in marketing during the Great Depression. These companies all took a great chance, and at a time when we were close to being at our worst in this country, they did not cut the advertising and marketing budgets. They stayed strong, cut in other areas and continued to push out a message that helped build brands that are now household names today. So now you have that chance as well. Remember that there was no internet and no way to utilize the tools that I have explained today. Yet somehow these companies were still able to achieve the goals they had set.
There is a lot of things that business can look to cut instead of marketing, and I suggest going back to what you would do in the household. Maybe the lease of your building can be renegotiated, the building made more efficient to keep heating and cooling bills at a minimum. Perhaps there is a way that you can save money on some of your infrastructure costs such as phones, shipping, fleet and travel. Perhaps using online meetings is a way to make the difference or going back to an old fashion way of doing business which is closing deals over the telephone because it saves money, time and fuel. Yes it is harder to do things this way, yes it is not as quick to come up with the answer that all bosses ask or you might ask yourself which is how can I cut to make my business more successful. Simply put, that is the right question, but you need to answer it the right way. The right way is to find inefficiencies and iron them out while maintaining a clear and concise branding message that will help grow your brand or product through the tough times. Keep that wheel spinning and launch you out the other side not just a member of your industry, but a leader in it as well.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004379.html
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-watched_television_broadcasts#United_States
