Archive for May, 2008

Top 10 Reasons Why Your Business Could Fail Without Online Marketing

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008




Online marketing is no doubt the most effective way to reach people. Its capability to earn millions is unquestioned.

Perhaps, this is one of the most momentous discoveries of mankind. The internet has brought about a lot of changes in the world. It allowed us reach the unreachable; it permitted us to communicate with the people around the globe without spending much money.

These are also the reason why people nowadays are investing in online marketing for their businesses…because beyond a doubt, online marketing will work for them.

We do have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to advertising. In fact, we have the television, radios, print media and all. However, online marketing still belongs at the top of the list for many reasons.

First, people prefer online marketing because it reaches the whole world. Your supposedly very small business may become very large almost overnight because of the magic of using online marketing because everyone in this world can literally see what you offer.

Second, you reach the world and get millions without having to pay millions in return. The cost of online marketing compared to other forms of media is very efficient and cost effective. Let’s say you use print media. If you are going to make a flyer and advertise it over the world, how much would it cost you? If you were to pay for TV advertisement, you would definitely have to pay for every single second that your business is aired.

Third, online marketing creates a two-way communication process. We do not simply promote what we have. Hence, we get to know what our visitors or what our customers think through the ”Comments” box on our web pages. By doing so, we get to know what they want and we are able to improve our products and services.

Next, it is also very important that we build relationship with our customers. Yes, we may have benefited from them but we should always find ways to keep them coming back to our place of business or at least our website. With online marketing, we are able to do this because we can become interactive with them, thus, making our customers feel that they are valued.

Fifth, in business, we always have to budget our resources. Unlike in other forms of media, we save a lot of money with online marketing because we will no longer need to keep sending letters, flyers or postcards every time we want to contact our customers or offer a promotion. In fact, the current trend is to only mail your customer information if they need additional resources or information about your business. For advertisements in newspapers and magazines, you have to pay for every inch of space, and even every color used in the design your ad. With online marketing, it is always cost-effective.

The sixth reason why people have shifted to online marketing is its flexibility. For example, let’s say there has been a change in the benefits or features of your product or service, or even a change in your prices. Well, you’ll have to hire someone to redesign your ad, reprint it and send it out again…and that cost more money. But with online marketing, you can easily update your site and make the changes without removing money from your wallet. Does it sound great? Yes, it does.

Well, are you getting the picture on why there is a craze with online marketing? Here’s more.

Another reason a business should prefer online marketing is because you have a lot of media choices when promoting your business. You can opt to show videos, photo presentations, audio, blogs or even social media. There is nothing really hard about this type of strategy. It will definitely save you more time and of course, resources.

Moreover, you can monitor what is going on with your business. Through the use of tracking, you have the chance to see the traffic generated by your site. With this feature of online marketing, you get to know what else you can do to tweak and improve your site because you see what keywords prospects are choosing to find you and incorporate more of those into your website.

Online marketing is also an extremely effective type of advertising because you can design your website the way you want it. You have the power to add features in it, to create a web design that would attract visitors and make them stop on your web page and take a look at what you have. The best thing about it is that, you can do the changes anytime you want without worrying about your expenses. By controlling the design, more and more people will be attracted to your site and you will be able to create an amazing impression on them.

Lastly, people go crazy about online marketing is because it is beneficial not just for businesses but for the consumers as well. Why? Simply because it makes everything much more convenient. The consumers need not go out of their house anymore and search around the city to look for what they want. With just a click, they can have it. And another thing is that the communication between the buyer and consumer is immediate. Response is very fast and that is why transactions are almost immediate.

So there we have it. These ten reasons explain why online marketing has become the number one source of advertising today. You need not have a second thought anymore. All you have to do is close your eyes and dream of how money can be made when you invest your money in online marketing.



The Important Role Of Public Relations

Monday, May 19th, 2008




Public relations is fundamentally the art and science of establishing relationships between an organization and its key audiences. Public relations plays a key role in helping business industries create strong relationships with customers.

Public relations involves supervising and assessing public attitudes, and maintaining mutual relations and understanding between an organization and its public. The function of public relations is to improve channels of communication and to institute new ways of setting up a two-way flow of information and understanding.

Public relations is effective in helping: * Corporations convey information about their products or services to potential customers * Corporations reach local government and legislators * Politicians attract votes and raise money, and craft their public image and legacy * Non-profit organizations, including schools, hospitals, social service agencies etc. boost support of their programs such as awareness programs, fund-raising programs, and to increase patronage of their services

Public relations in present times employs diverse techniques such as opinion polling and focus groups to evaluate public opinion, combined with a variety of high-tech techniques for distributing information on behalf of their clients, including the internet, satellite feeds, broadcast faxes, and database-driven phone banks.

As public image is important to all organizations and prominent personalities the role of public relations specialist becomes pertinent in crisis situations. Public relations agencies provide important and timely transmission of information that helps save the face of the organization. In the words of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), “Public relations helps an organization and its public adopt mutually to one another.”

Experienced public relations agencies have formulation press releases into which they can plug the company news, as well as a targeted list of publications for their industry. Truly good public relations agencies generally have a good working relationship with key reporters, boosting their chances of getting coverage. Some public relations agencies deal only with large, established clients, while smaller boutique public relations agencies specialize in certain areas.

At present public relations as a career option exists in private companies or government institutions that actively market their product, service and facilities. Public relations training courses are widespread in educational institutions. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 122,000 public relations specialists in the United States in 1998 and approximately 485,000 advertising, marketing, and public relations managers working in all industries.

Most public relations practitioners are recruited from the ranks of journalism. Public relations officers are highly trained professionals with expertise and knowledge in many areas, for example shareholder management during a crisis, the evolving role of the in-house public relations professional, account management skills for public relations, an introduction to financial public relations, an introduction to consumer public relations, an introduction to public relations software etc.



Printed Badges And Emblems For Your Brand Awareness And Standardized Customization Of Services

Friday, May 16th, 2008




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Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organization, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on a promotional product with different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations). It affects phenomena of different scale, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.

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Top Public Relations Professionals Should Face Charges in Corporate Misconduct Cases

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008




Public relations professionals are paid to build and protect reputation … so in cases where reputation collapses and there is evidence of management misbehaviour, should the police or public prosecutors be investigating what the PR boss said and did? I certainly think they should. Public relations professionals should have nothing to fear through being accountable. Only those less competent should be worried. If we faced legal investigation when a disaster strikes the organisations we advise, maybe those weak and ineffective people in public relations would take their responsibilities more seriously? We all know who they are, for any journalist will tell you who shrinks back into the woodwork when trouble strikes.

And if one or two of our timid, lightweight or downright useless brethren found themselves facing a spell in jail, it might be the single most important motivator for us to improve our standards. It would also show what we should be doing – checking, monitoring and advising on what the organisation DOES, not just what it says. A jail sentence for a top PR adviser would also remind business mangers that we are (or should be) responsible and vital to corporate credibility.

Where were the public relations people and what were they saying or doing in major corporate scandals? Remember when Ford fought Firestone over the Explorer accidents, or when Nike was charged with using illegal child labour, when Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and others folded amidst accusations of gross corporate misconduct, theft and fraud?

Incidentally, why do our professional bodies not seem keen to take any action in such cases? Could it be that our business is considered to be so unprofessional that an estimated 86% of practitioners are not members of any professional body? Should a commentator like myself risk corporate action for raising a few simple and obvious questions? For the truth is that corporate standards across too many organisations are not high enough … and, shockingly, the rate paid to the PR chief is no indicator of the standards applied.

Consider a more recent example. Global pharmacy company, GlaxoSmithKline, stands accused of ‘economy with the truth’ that they alone knew, in a current high profile case in Europe. Their bizarre ‘leaves on the line’ delays in accepting their responsibility, yet again raise questions over the role and the authority of public relations professionals; many claim ‘director’ or similar in their titles – and are supposed to be confidantes at board level – yet too often do not seem to know what is going on under their noses. Ignorance of malpractice is no defence for company directors and other senior executives. And, of course, neither is it for us in public relations. How can we take the money and not the responsibility? Take the money and you should carry the can if it goes wrong.

Legislation in the US, UK, Europe and other parts of the world will put a fiercer spotlight on the top person in the PR job. According to a BBC report in the UK, British government Ministers have promised to tighten laws requiring drug firms to disclose data from clinical trials. It comes after the drugs regulator announced GlaxoSmithKline would not face criminal proceedings over claims it withheld information on their drug Seroxat. But they warned GSK should have been quicker to raise the alarm on the risk of suicidal behaviour associated with the antidepressant in the under-18s.

One question not yet asked, let alone answered, must be what did GSK public relations professionals know about what was going on? The story suggest that trials had indicated the drug had potential dangers with young people but, many journalists claim, the company hid behind a defence, legal but rejected by the regulators, that the drug was not approved for prescription to young people.

A tough new UK law on coronate manslaughter becomes effective in April this year and will allow, for the first time, indivudal managers to be prosecuted for deaths that occur in their companies or through their company policies, products or activities.

The power of public relations is undoubted in projecting the messages it wants to put over, but what about when the news may be bad – or corporate activity may prove unacceptable if exposed?

Following recent criticisms of public relations integrity, UK newspaper Guardian columnist Peter Wilby took his own swipe at public relations by claiming that the craft … “at best aspires to a partial truth and, at worse, to outright fabrication. PR far more than journalism shapes the news agenda…At least half the news in papers is generated not by journalist, but by PRs or spin doctors.”

But with this power comes responsibility.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Top organisations with major public relations resources that have managed to get themselves into areas of serious public misdemeanour read like a roll call of some of the greatest organisations in the world. In recent years alone, organisations that have been challenged for practices that could never match any ethical code – knowingly or not – have included the BBC, BP, British Airways, Coca-Cola, the European Union, Firestone, Ford, MacDonald’s, Nike, Shell, Starbucks and Wal-Mart amongst many others.

The problems are not limited to in-house professionals. Some analysts have claimed that more than half the top public relations consultancies have been linked to public relations disasters, including fake lobby groups, fabricated evidence, misleading information and conspiracy to keep issues quiet.

Some years ago in my best seller, Manage your reputation, I wanted to use, as an example, a solid company name with a brand you could trust for its values of honesty, integrity, reliability, safety and performance. To illustrate that a brand makes promises that means it is much more than just a product, I commented that you would not expect Ford to make cars that could kill you. In the next edition, I had to remove those words following the human death toll, of around 100, through the problems with its Explorer vehicle. Questions still remain over who knew what and when -rather like the current GSK product that may have harmed innocent people.

Reputation depends on what the company does, not just says

According to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in the UK, which has many but not all of the top UK advisers in membership, their members are the corporate custodians of reputation; few would argue with this theoretical definition of the job.

But to accept that role and to do the job, they must know what the company is doing. If they do not, then they are not really carrying out a public relations job – it might more accurately be called media relations, information, communications, publicity or even a propaganda function. It would certainly not be about ‘relations’ so cannot be public relations. If practitioners do know what the company is doing and it is pursuing shortcuts or even following outright dodgy practices, then they must be complicit in this deception of the publics with whom they are supposed to building both reputation and relations on behalf of their organisations.

Surely the public relations person, above all, should carry not just some responsibility but a primary responsibility? After all, their job is not to make sure the organisation says nor does anything that would harm its reputation or be any disadvantage to the publics it serves.

The top public relations professionals in every disaster should be challenged both by the media and, if relevant, by the law. Did these professionals know about the practices that were taking place? If not, why not? If they did, did they judge them to be unacceptable? If so what did they do about them? What advice did they offer management? How forcefully did they present this?

PR professionals cannot allow malpractice

The rule must be simple. If any organisation is following practices that would damage its reputation if these were discovered or disclosed, the public relations professionals must know about them if they are doing the job. Their only duty must be to stop these. If they do not know, they are incompetent. If they fail to take decisive action, they are ineffective.

Whilst some public relations people may have taken the silver shilling and others may simply be timid, good public relations people are an example to us all and have great influence internally and externally on policy, backed by impeccable integrity. Look at the public relations performance and recognition, for example, of Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, FedEx, GE, Johnson& Johnson, Marks & Spencer, Toyota, Virgin and Vodafone.

We need to condemn poor performance … and not leave that just to journalists. And, equally, we must praise the outstanding. And if future legislation puts our work in the area of corporate responsibility into sharper focus, that must be good for our business. Even if it means a few of the poor performers suffer along the way.

The new generation of young professionals coming into our business will set higher standards, will work to better values and demand more integrity from management colleagues. And it is the job of all of us in the business to encourage these new professionals and help them to find their feet in our craft. This means we must offer training, development positions, work experience. And we must, as many do, support the work of the universities and colleges that are educating these undergraduates to superb standards.

1600 words

—–

Roger Haywood, the author of this commentary, is a past chairman of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and the world’s largest network of independent public relations consultancies. He founded the Public Relations Standards Council and is currently chief executive of the issues auditing leaders, Issues Management Limited.

He has just published a guide to getting started in public relations on www.getstartedinpr.co.uk

Roger Haywood: UK 44 2072474670, UK 44 7802874584, rhaywood@issuesmanagers.com





The Top 10 Reasons To Use Article Marketing To Grow Your Business

Saturday, May 10th, 2008




Several methods of promoting businesses have been created and developed in recent years. Traditionally, article marketing is published in paper-print form but as the marketing world is evolving, as well as technology, article marketing is now available online through the internet. Article marketing is considered as one of the most effective and fastest ways to promote products, companies or businesses in the world through write-ups. You can’t just set aside the benefits your company can achieve by using article marketing. Here are the top ten reasons to use article marketing as part of your business plan.

REASON #1: INCREASED ONLINE PRESENCE WITH ARTICLE MARKETING

Most businesses nowadays desire to make their presence known to the online world in order to have increased exposure with their target audience and one of the best ways to achieve this is by using article marketing. Making your products or services more visible in the market is one good reason to use article marketing as a marketing tool. All you have to do is write quality articles related to your business that include useful links leading back to your website and submit them to the article directories available on the web. By this, you influence people in your particular niche to become your customers and persuade them to buy your products on a regular basis.

REASON #2: ARTICLE MARKETING IS INEXPENSIVE AND COST-EFFICIENT

You don’t even need to spend a single cent to have online exposure for your business. Several free article directories can publish your articles on the web or you may also consider your own site or blog to promote your company. With article marketing you are earning but not spending…that’s a pretty good return on in investment, don’t you think?

REASON #3: ARTICLE MARKETING OFFERS A GREATER BRAND AWARENESS FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Article marketing is not intended just for exposure but to improve your company’s visibility on the web and increase the awareness of your products or services to target consumers. Websites with new and updated content are more preferred by search engines. So, your article must be of high quality and with a bulk of information that will catch the attention of many prospects. Well written articles will be re-distributed to other web pages and will further promote your own web site. Also, if you publish a good quality article with high ranking article directories you can attract millions of visitors each and every month. Article marketing creates great exposure for your company’s brand by including your business’ signature, information and most importantly links leading to your website.

REASON #4: GENERATION OF BACK LINKS TO YOUR WEBSITE WITH ARTICLE MARKETING

Page rank in Google and other search engines are often based on the number of inbound links and also the page rank of the provider of the links. The higher the page rank, the higher the importance of the content of such a particular website. Article marketing is a highly effective technique to increase the number of back links to your company’s web site. Whenever your article is published and re-distributed it will benefit your business by receiving a link back to your website, increase traffic and attract more visitors. Article marketing will be more beneficial if you publish a high quality article in a high ranking page of article directories.

REASON #5: ARTICLE MARKETING IMPROVES YOUR COMPANY’S REPUTATION AND PROMOTES YOUR EXPERT STATUS.

If you write more than a couple of high quality articles concerning your business it will enable you to establish a degree of authority and improves your reputation from other authors and companies on the web. Publishing many articles with good quality will prove your expertise in the field and thereby improves your article’s visibility and business’ exposure.

REASON #6: ARTICLE MARKETING WILL PROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS, PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Millions of people are surfing the internet so it is a great opportunity to promote your products or services compared to what traditional advertising can give you. Expanding your reach to people all over the world to promote your business is possible with article marketing. Provide your readers with useful information that they can use and share among other people and your business will spread to thousands of readers around the world.

REASON #7: ARTICLE MARKETING INCREASES YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKING

Article marketing is a known technique for making your page rank higher with search engines. Your website will also benefit with additional traffic from the directories where your article was published if their web pages are also high in ranking.

REASON #8: ARTICLE MARKETING ATTRACTS MORE CUSTOMERS

Making your articles place on high ranking pages from search optimization will attract more actual and potential customers, especially if you provide the information they are looking for. The possibility of referring your articles to others is clear if you meet the criteria and publish high quality articles.

REASON #9: INCREASE YOUR SALES WITH ARTICLE MARKETING

Letting the world know about your and your products or services though article marketing will increase the awareness of your target customer and they may consider your company the one who can satisfy their needs, hence they will become your regular customer and your business will generate higher sales.

REASON #10: USE ARTICLE MARKETING TO PROVE YOUR BUSINESS CAPABILITIES

By utilizing article marketing, your business will be well known for its expertise not only in your particular niche but also in any associated fields, which will help to develop trust from potential customers. You can prove your business’ capabilities by lending your audiences useful information by which your company can provide.

With the increased tension of competition in the marketplace, article marketing can make your products or services stand out among the others. You will not appreciate the benefits article marketing can give you unless you try it and see the unexpected success it has on your business throughout the world. You must be practical in this time of global recession and make the right move! Start achieving your success through article marketing now!



Creating Brand Awareness through Effective Brand Names and Symbols

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008




There is no disagreement that effective branding through ‘use of a name, term, symbol or design, or a combination of these’ (Quester et al, 2001) can create brand awareness and recognition in the quickest manner. Companies use different kinds of ‘Brand Name’, that is, a word, letter or a group of words such as AOL, Intel Pentium III etc to project their companies. Sometimes such words, symbols or marks are legally registered and copy righted to a single company known as trademarks (for product oriented companies) and service marks ( for service offering companies) (Perreault & McCarthy, 2000).

However in any form, branding can be used to create brand familiarity among consumers in terms of brand recognition and brand preference (Papers4you.com, 2006). The advantage of using branding effectively is both for consumers as well as marketers. For instance it becomes easy for a customer to choose preferred brand among 1000s of other items just because of famous well recognized symbol, word or trade mark that can not be possible with out effective branding (Quester et al, 2001). For instance imagine you are driving down the road with hunger and suddenly you see a symbol ‘M’ on a sign board with red background and yellow font. It is not difficult to realize that McDonalds is waiting for you, easily manifest effective projection of McDonalds’ through brand symbol ‘M’. Similarly imagine buying a computer accessory and among thousands of unknown brands, suddenly you observe ‘Intel ®’ sign. A quick reminder will prompt that it’s a well-known brand symbol that you observe common everywhere in media and at your own computer.

Now keeping these examples in mind, it is obvious that marketers can cash in such advantages as well (Papers4you.com, 2006). One best way to use word and symbols is while launching new products under same brand names (Quester et al, 2001). For instance, as every one is aware of ‘Coca Cola ™’ , any new soft drink introduced under this brand name has highly probable chance to achieve awareness and attention of coca cola lovers. Similarly it is quite often that no matter ‘ IBM’ entered in so many IT related services after initially famous for IBM computers but whenever you observe its trade mark of ‘IBM’ written in horizontal lines, consumer is not bothered about checking the background of the company. So as a result it also saves huge promotion costs that a company with less famous brand names and symbols needs to incur.

To conclude discussion, the outcome of effective branding can be seen in terms of ‘brand equity’ that is the value of a brand in terms of its perceived brand awareness, recognition, loyalty and associations from customers. To give the advantage of effective branding, the brand equity of the Coca Cola brand is valued $ 43 Billion, IBM brand at $ 18 billion and Kodak’s at $ 12 billion (Kotler & Armstrong, 1999).



The Building Blocks of Effective Marketing

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008




Whether you’re starting a new business or attempting to grow an existing one, it’s easy to spin your wheels when it comes to effective marketing. Often times, business owners will try to make a big splash by running a large ad in a local newspaper or a television commercial during the most expensive time slot. While these will probably be seen, they probably won’t have much impact because there is often no repetition. The business owner runs them once (or a few times) and then simply stops with the conclusion that advertising doesn’t work. In order to achieve results from any form of advertising, you need repetition of your message. This has always been true, but it’s even more important with the number of marketing messages that today’s consumers are presented each day.

If you’re ready to start marketing your business, begin with the basic building blocks to form your foundation and grow from there.

Network — many networking events can be found in just about any city or town. If you, like most business owners, are short on time, focus on the ones that are during the evening hours. In many cases, these events are free, so the only cost is your time. Networking is a great way to make face to face contact with prospects without the distractions you would normally face during the work day. All you need is a handful of business cards, a winning smile and a great attitude.

Business cards — Obviously, you’ll need them for networking and sales calls. Don’t forget all the other ways you can distribute them. Business cards a an easy and inexpensive way to generate exposure for your business.

Direct mail — You don’t need to mail to a list of 50,000 for direct mail to be effective, you just need to be consistent. You can have 1,000 postcards printed, affix postage and labels yourself, and mail out 50 or 100 to the same targeted list each week. As you begin to generate revenue from this, you can increase the size of your mailing list.

Web site — If you don’t have a web site, you are wrong. Plain and simple. Web sites aren’t just for e commerce, nor are they just for large companies. These days, people use the internet for comparing companies and without a web site, you’re out of the running. You don’t need all of the bells and whistles, but you do need an effective and professional web site.

There you have it. The basic building blocks you’ll need to effectively market your business. With these blocks in place, you can begin to add additional things, such as search engine optimization, television and radio advertising, or billboards. The idea is to build a foundation, and as you achieve results, add more to your marketing campaign.



Creating Brand Awareness through Effective Brand Names & Symbols

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008




There is no disagreement that effective branding through ‘use of a name, term, symbol or design, or a combination of these’ (Quester et al, 2001) can create brand awareness and recognition in the quickest manner. Companies use different kinds of ‘Brand Name’, that is, a word, letter or a group of words such as AOL, Intel Pentium III etc to project their companies. Sometimes such words, symbols or marks are legally registered and copy righted to a single company known as trademarks ( for product oriented companies) and service marks ( for service offering companies) (Perreault & McCarthy, 2000).

However in any form, branding can be used to create brand familiarity among consumers in terms of brand recognition and brand preference (Papers4you.com, 2006). The advantage of using branding effectively is both for consumers as well as marketers. For instance it becomes easy for a customer to choose preferred brand among 1000s of other items just because of famous well recognized symbol, word or trade mark that can not be possible with out effective branding (Quester et al, 2001). For instance imagine you are driving down the road with hunger and suddenly you see a symbol ‘M’ on a sign board with red background and yellow font. It is not difficult to realize that McDonalds is waiting for you, easily manifest effective projection of McDonalds’ through brand symbol ‘M’. Similarly imagine buying a computer accessory and among thousands of unknown brands, suddenly you observe ‘Intel ®’ sign. A quick reminder will prompt that it’s a well known brand symbol that you observe common everywhere in media and at your own computer.

Now keeping these examples in mind, it is obvious that marketers can cash in such advantages as well (Papers4you.com, 2006). One best way to use word and symbols is while launching new products under same brand names (Quester et al, 2001). For instance, as every one is aware of ‘Coca Cola ™’ , any new soft drink introduced under this brand name has highly probable chance to achieve awareness and attention of coca cola lovers. Similarly it is quite often that no matter ‘ IBM’ entered in so many IT related services after initially famous for IBM computers but whenever you observe its trade mark of ‘IBM’ written in horizontal lines, consumer is not bothered about checking the background of the company. So as a result it also saves huge promotion costs that a company with less famous brand names and symbols needs to incur.

To conclude discussion, the outcome of effective branding can be seen in terms of ‘brand equity’ that is the value of a brand in terms of its perceived brand awareness, recognition, loyalty and associations from customers. To give the advantage of effective branding, the brand equity of the Coca Cola brand is valued $ 43 Billion, IBM brand at $ 18 billion and Kodak’s at $ 12 billion (Kotler & Armstrong, 1999).

References

Kotler, P & Armstrong, G, (1999), ‘Principles of Marketing’, Eight Edition, New Jersey: Prentice- Hall Inc

Quester, P, G, McGuiggan, R, L, McCarthy, E, J & Perreault, W, D (2001), Basic Marketing- A Managerial Perspective’, Australia: McGraw Hill Book Company Australia Pty Limited

Papers For You (2006) “P/M/457. What is successful branding?”, Available from http://www.coursework4you.co.uk/sprtmrk31.htm [19/06/2006]

Papers For You (2006) “P/M/270. A consistent brand identity can only exist as a result of a well planned advertising strategy, which has clearly stated communication effects and one which considers exposure to appropriate target audiences and positioning strategies. Discuss”, Available from Papers4you.com [19/06/2006]

Perreault, W, D & McCarthy, E, J, (2000), ‘Essentials of Marketing- A Global Management Approach’ International Edition, USA: McGraw Hill Companies Inc



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