To many, branding is nothing more than a really cool logo, and perhaps a neat tagline to boot. In reality, branding is more about building a unique, differentiated experience and a series of expectations with one’s customers than anything else.
At Sydcam Marketing Communications, we strongly believe in a pre-defined methodology that can lead to creating a successful brand. This process would include the following steps:
1) Study and understand consumer behaviour – marketers perform research on their target audience(s) to better understand their needs and wants, and how their products/services can meet them.
2) Develop a marketing strategy – this all-encompassing tool takes a variety of marketing and business inputs and creates an overarching strategy that defines your brand and what it stands for.
3) Create a marketing plan – leveraging the aforementioned consumer research and marketing strategy, this plan will select the key marketing tactics that will deliver on the ‘brand promises’ that were identified.
4) Evaluate your results to objectives – no marketing campaign or plan is complete without an effective post-implementation analysis. Determine if your tactics delivered on your brand’s attributes; if not why did it fail? Adjust and try again.
5) Look for changing sentiments – your customer’s tastes, needs and wants are changing more rapidly today than ever before. ‘Litmus tests’ completed regularly will ensure your brand’s attributes are consistent with the expectations of your target market. If they aren’t, what happened and how can you adjust your brand so it’s still valued by your clients?
These are all fairly complicated issues for even the most seasoned marketer. Oftentimes, businesses are too close to these issues, their customers and their products to provide a truly objective perspective on what is happening, and most importantly what if anything needs to be adjusted for your brand to retain its relevance.
That’s where hiring an external agency can prove valuable. With an impartial and objective perspective on the matter, we can analyze the situation and provide the business with tangible recommendations to get you back on track.
If you're unsure if your business and brand still has the relevancy it needs to stand out your competitors in this challenging landscape, give us a ring. We'd be happy to sit down with you, review things and provide you with a fresh perspective.
