Brand: Unleash the power within

What is a Brand?
Brand is an identification of a company and its products. It can be in the form of logo, symbol, color or just a name. This identification helps distinguish itself among its competitors.

Creation of brand is not just creating a logo or byline statement or a symbol. It is the creation of experience, which would make the customer, want more and more of it. An experience, which can create strong positive emotions, something that can lead the customer to trust and become loyal to it. First thing that qualifies a company or product to be a brand is the ability to create emotions. Brand has to be associated or should trigger emotions.

Logos, colors, symbols, statements, advertisements and promotions are the main tools for the communication of a brand. Now coming to the main point of the article –Unleashing the power of brand internally & unveil a new power, i.e. Internal Branding or promoting the brand internally among employees so that they are aware of the capabilities of the company and are proud to be working for it. With the help of internal branding, a new source of powering the brand comes to force. All employees are people who connect with the outside environment after office hours. All positive vibes sent out by employees to their friends, neighbors, relatives, etc creates a compounding effect on the image of the company.

The pride the employee shows to be working for an organization itself speaks volume about the company. The manner in which employee behaves itself portrays or communicates something about the image of the company. It can be either positive or negative. So how do we go about the internal branding? How do we harness this hidden power?

First Step:

To be able to harness this power, there needs to be a synergy between the organization and the employee, a bonding, or you can say an environment in which the individual can thrive and bring out his best for the company. Every organization has a different culture and every individual a different temperament, this should match. I hope I have made the point now. So lets move ahead

The whole process starts with recruiting, recruiting people who can gel in with the organization. Any Employee joining the organization or selected to join the organization needs to be evaluated in terms of his personal characteristics.

What about existing employees??

In case of existing employees they need to be conditioned to behave or exhibit certain characteristics as deemed fit. All this is possible only with the motivation of the individual and Focus.

In a company the employees are the first customers of the brand and the brand should be able to fulfill their promises. Brand is also the outcome of all the company employees’ efforts; so they need to give in their best to the brand.

Who is responsible for Internal Branding?

Internal Branding is the responsibility of the Top management/Leadership or the Brand Manager in charge of the particular brand. Alternatively the best solution is to have a team of Marketing, Admin and Finance guy to form an internal branding team.

Some tactics to internalize the brand:

1. Brand the atmosphere
The workplace atmosphere affects the way the person works. Put on the posters of the brand and its promise or attribute visible to everyone. The brand promise visibility in the office should be exceptional.

For eg: Put up a notice board and highlight every day some news about the brand progress or send an email to everyone on the update or the progress made by the brand or by the executive working on the product. (I don’t mean a formal email stating simple fact what has been done, an email, which evokes passion, smile and motivate. Some time an email with good intentioned criticism also helps to push people, personal notes by leaders inspire staff)

2.Team Involvement:

Ask for suggestion, start in a forum where ideas can be discussed openly without the fear/hesitation of organization hierarchy, but make it clear who the decision maker is. Keep everyone informed. Keep the buzz on don’t ever give the guys time to slack down. Keep them charged, keep them interested.

3.Responsibility, Credit & Incentive:

Give out Responsibility and authority to carry it out and give credit where it’s due. There is nothing like incentives, which can really motivate people along with appreciation. Give out a “ Champs of the month” in various functions for the brand like marketing, admin, customer service, sales, merchandising, etc.

4.Brand Training

You might have heard of product training, but brand training is different and unique. Educate, Reinforce and inculcate the attributes that really make the brand stand out amongst the other competitor in the employees.

If necessary, Spoon-feed the staff on the behavior that compliments the brands, especially the staff that will come in contact with the outside world. In simple terms each of your employee has to be a brand ambassador. Let everyone hear the facts and things that need to be projected for the brand.

5.Brand Culture Development

Create & promote the culture of the brand in your organization, as most of the brand guru has said LIVE THE BRAND. Develop the culture in your organization that reflects the brand nature.

Once done, you might have single brand but 100 to 200-brand ambassadors (depending on the number of employees) projecting your brand everyday to the world. If I summarize, Internal Branding can create salesman out of every employee and who ever comes in contact with your employee will be influenced by the brand.

Thats Me!!!!...with my new look

Advertising 5- Print Media Budget

Its been long time that I have not updated my blog....Was trying to figure out the way to upload some xls sheet and document template for advertisement plans.

Neway I will just put in details today about creating the advertising plan. If anybody is interested to have look at the template they email me at santosh.pania@gmail.com

Advertisement plan

Two approaches:

1. Have a preset budgeted amount for advertisement plan ( using your judgment and then fine tune it as you examine the results)

2. Prepare a budget depending on the awareness and reach of the medium ( this is something that you would like to have your company ad in a certain magazines and newspaper for creating an image of being in elite class, or the magazine is widely read by your customers and you advertisement is imperative, selecting various magazine of such sort and identifying the ad that will be put across and then coming to the cost of advertisement for all such magazine)

Steps

1. Identify Top magazines/newspapers and media based on the circulation figures, content and audience classification for your market. Short list them and put them in your xls sheet.

Sl. Name of Magazine Ad 1 Cost Ad 2 Cost Frequency/number of ads Total Cost of Ad1 Total Cost of Ad 2 Circulation/Exposure Cost Per Exposure Time Period Sales Increase (To be filled in after the campaign)

2. Shortlist Advert (position & frequency) program for each of these magazines. And note it down in ad 1 and ad 2 columns along with frequency and other details as required.

3. Depending on the various criteria you can identify which media to choose . Trade off can be made on price or Cost per reach or exposure or the media content itself. If the total budget is of no constraint or is within range intended, then various alternatives can be selected based on criteria and tested.

4. The Last Column Sales Increase is the data that needs to be filled in every time an ad campaign is done. The sale increase figure should be incremental sales generated as compared to last year during the same time or it can be compared against the trend of the sales before the ads were placed

5. After 2 or 3 campaign some result will come up but you need take care in your analysis various other factors like peak season, addition of sales executive, increase in market demand etc which might be the factor of increased sales instead of advertisement. The best way would be to sample test all the new customers or job coming in during the advert period, asking them on telephone , how did they came to know about you or was it because of the advert they saw. Probably if your ad is targeted and correct you will certainly get 4-5 clients.(minimum).

6. Continues Record of each campaign and its end result will provide a benchmark to test all other parameters of advert. Certain Type of ad will be effective for certain market for eg: An Information based article was more successful instead of one page full ad. Or an loose insert along with magazine was more successful then a half page ad. Etc

This is just a normal advertisement plan which can include directories also. A survey a few marketing related question like which directories are being used to source products and services etc. can be asked with multiple options and some media habits can be sent to prospects and customers. This information is useful in determining which directories/magazines reaches your target market. This survey twice a year is really useful.

Your first initial Advert plan would be based on your analysis of media and your instincts while after some period you will be able to judge and quantify the effetiveness of each media and its parameters if you keep it recorded.

If there are no noteworthy change in sales figure, then either your medium is wrong, or the ad type is wrong or your company doesn't really need to advertise a lot. you can slowly decrease the participation and look at the figures and if there's no noteworthy dip after a period of no advertisement, i guess you need to look to some other activity like events or customer service initiatives etc to put your budget in to have some positive feedback instead of wasting it on adverts.

Advertisement 4- Print Media

Media information

1 Newspapers

UAE has 6 daily English newspapers. Gulf news being the market leader followed by khaleej times.

• Gulf News 91000
• Khaleej Times 72000
• 7 Days 65000
• Gulf today 36000
• Emirates Evening Post 28000
• Emirates Today 81000 (expected)

Circulation Information are from www.aqoul.com dated Sep 2005..

2. Magazines:

Considering our subject is an industrial Marketing based company instead of Consumer oriented. The list is too big for me to list down the magazines. I would note down the names which I have personally seen and/or have participated in advertising. These are category based or circulation based. ITP Publications Caters to mostly all segments of Industries.

• Construction Weekly
• Oil & Gas
• Pipeline
• Cargo Village News
• Gulf Business
• Gulf Marketing Review
• Middle East Plant & Equipment Guide
• Al Majlis
• Autocar Middleast
• Wheels (weekly from gulfnews)

Right now I can only remember these. for detailed information on listing of newspapers and magazines you can visit www.middleeastmediaguide.com

first and foremost advertisement in newspapers and magazine is really expensive, My suggestion to do an advertisements campaign with magazine or newspaper would be ONLY if

1. Launching a new product

2. Considerable Budget Leverage

3. Ad support for Specific Product Sales Push

Ad campaign over a period of more than 3 months would really be of some consequence and if your looking to give an ad for 3 months in a least prominent position you are looking at a budget of a minimum 1500- 2000$ per month. (except in case of some magazines, you can always negotiate a better deal but you can't be sure of the subscription ). I would suggest a min campaign of atleast 7 months to 1 year to really get noticed, considering you don't go in for a front page or one page advert. So if you do a 7 months campaigns on rate of 1500$ and the magazine dishes you out 15-25% discount .

First of all I forgot to address the issue of how to set an advertisement budget..Will first give 6 steps to your perfect budget in the next blog...To be continued>>>

Advertisement 3 : An Addition

Continued From Advt 2:

Before I continue my analysis on the various medium of ads, I would like to highlight one more point that can be an important factor to influence the decision to advertise or not.

The market condition or the role of the company in the industry and industry status. Is there going to be a boom/slowdown in the industry or is the trend going up/down. The Status of the company life cycle- has it just started or is it a market leader and well established.

These external factors are quite strategic in nature and the tactical and strategical plan of advertisement and media should be inline with them. The various example of strategic plan would be either one or multiple of these.

1. Expansion of operations

2. Expansion of markets

3. Stabilize & Organize for future Expansion

4. Increase Profits & Sales /Growth

5. Stabilize and Breakeven (make it profitable)

6. Recuperate Losses & minimize Costs

6. Sell Off & Exit the Business

Let me again revise the whole topic ..To advertise or not is the dilemma faced by many industrial products and services and the whole focus of this topic is on ad & media optimization for industrial products & Services.

Next Blog: AD & Media Optimization plan & Media Analysis

Finally I have become an author!!!!

Sales Vs Marketing article featured on three article based sites

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and finally I can say that I have become an author ...;-)

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Contd. Advertisement 2 : YES or NO

Advertisement is generally about creating awareness about the product and to persuade and motivate the customer to buy it.

In an industrial scenario- purchases are not normally made by only one person but by a group of person . Some times the person are from varied field. One would be technical guy, other would be finance person, third would be the actual user etc and to have a message that would be create an impact on all of them would be difficult since they would be having a different view point.

But the main point is that all of them are still human and prone to emotions and likes and dislikes. The persons can be attracted by the color of the packaging box or the color of the brochure or he might like the caption on the brochure or the way it is presented which can create a positive perception about the product. or sometime ...Negative.

Now coming back to the main point does advertisement really affect them and to what extent?

I am presenting the analysis of the below ads types in relation to the UAE market
1. Print Ads (Magazine, Newspapers )
2. Online Ads
3. Directory Ads ( have kept it different from print ads)
4. Mailers Ads
5. Billboard Ads

Next blog in detail on each of these ads & medium

Advertisement 1 : To advertise or not to ???

<<<<<<<To advertise or not to>>>>>

does B2B companies really need advertisements??
do advertisement really bring in business ??(in context to B2B scenario)


Does a company having a long sales cycle or techno commercial products or service really need advertisements as a medium to support to sales??

well theoretically the answer would be yes the advertisement do support but not to the same degree as B2C market.

well if it does how effective or till what extent is advert useful, how do we have an optimum mix of sales & advert.??

If a company doesn't advertise and only rely on personal sales call , will it be a life threatening situation for them??

MOST IMPORTANT: How do we track the effectiveness of advertisement in a real world situation and how do we present it to the management the real result??

will continue on this in a series of blog: certain situation and case studies and some samples of format that can be used for management reporting. Also included will be the impact of online advertisement in the overall advertisement plan.

Few additions made in the blog

As you guys might have noticed, I have added some more ad's in my blog. Trying to see if it really works. I have added four category of advertisement on the blog.
1. Music
2. Books
3. International magazines
4. Computer Games

I guess it gives more color and graphics to my blog and I hope its useful too.

Outsourcing ..Nice One

Email Marketing - Technology

Continuing From earlier blogs on email marketing, this one has information on the technology front of email marketing.

Technology is the most vital component of email marketing and one of the thing that keeps on developing at a very fast rate. When I started we used to have topics like HTML email vs Text emails, opt-in, double opt-in policy etc now things have moved on to more advanced level . Increase in SPAM has resulted in software's being created which can authenticate whether the email is genuine email or a bulk email. Several Technical Things need to be taken care of especially relating to avoid being labeled as a spammer. Noting down some very simple & basic technical mambo jambo of email marketing

1. The email application in which u see an email is a different browser than your computer browser which is used to open the sites. Every email provider has a different setting for its browsers in which you check the email. Check your email proof in as many email clients and browsers(internet explorer, yahoo, hotmail, eim, outlook, Microsoft outlook, Eudora, incredemail, aol, netscape, firefox, mosaic etc) as possible before sending. Study your database and identify which email program they might be using.

2. Permission is the key thing. Aptly stated in their regular column in clickz by Kirill Popov and Loren Mcdonald underline permission as one of key ingredient of email marketing

"Permission is now a required practice and is critical to your e-mail program's success.
Sending e-mail without permission hurts three critical facets of your e-mail program:
deliverability, customer brand experience, and ROI"

But who really cares about this ..especially in middle east. We receive a whole lot of junk in our emails and companies send out email without prior consent. Hope that the situation improves here soon. Mention the source and inform the client as to from whom are they receiving the email, have they signed up to receive such an offer or not.Major ISPs across the world have become tough and they block IP address through which bulk mail originate and the IP address can be put on block list.

3. Either outsource your email campaign job to professional outfit or if you are doing it inhouse you can use many email marketing software's. There many software's & web based sites that help in carrying out email campaign. Look for software that allow you to personalize the message and has the ability to work on databases. List Cleaning, Duplicate removing, taking unsubscribe/subscribe request automatically, Auto responder to unsubscribe/subscribe request. Reports availability as to how many were delivered and how many had been opened. There is a wide variety of email marketing software's available. Gammadyne mailer is my recommended software for email marketing.


There are many technical nitty gritties that you need to really understand about email marketing this was just some basics . New technologies have come up for email validation such SPI, Domainkey , SenderID . It is really interesting how this technology has evolved and how important tool has it become. Looking at the changes happening I guess soon there would be video email in which commercial can be inserted in between the messages. ;-)

beginners in Email marketing can start by reading this http://www.clickz.com/resources/email_reference/getting_started/

A Wife is a wife, no matter who you are!!

Cheers ..thanks to Sathi for this

Sales Vs Marketing

From a view point of a normal guy not involved in sales or marketing , sales & marketing are considered as one function. But the deeper you go in this field you will realize how different this two functions are and how bitter these personnel can become on each other even though they serve a common purpose to the organization .

Every Sales man hates the marketing guy because the guy in marketing sitting in the office gives him a useless leads and always ask to follow up on a non-consequential customers.

• He is not involved in the reality of the situation how the sales actually happens, all he think is that creating beautiful brochures and creating a prospect list would result in a sale.
• Sales is actually doing the hardwork of meeting people and convincing them , it requires convincing ability, good presentation skills and lot of going around and a minimal of ego.
• Listening to all the criticism for the company even though its not their fault and bearing the brunt of all people- the customers, the management, & the so called helping hand called marketing.
• Marketing is field where the people who are the bosses favourite get recruited in that position. In sales the result are in black and white..Whether you achieve the target or you have not achieved your target. The bosses are only looking at the sales figure.
  

hmmm...Well this is what I used to think I was in sales and most of the sales professionals would agree that they do tend to think like that. Well lets see what does the marketing guy thinks

Marketing people think that with proper planning and execution major sales could be achieved.

What makes the sales happen is
1. proper information and
2. good response and
3. a good brand image.

• Inspite of providing such a good brand the sales people are coming out with excuses of not making a sale saying that our products are priced higher, or that our service is not to the standard .
  
• These sales guys are not planning their visit properly, most of the time wasting their time with the existing clients sitting in their office for a cup of coffee or tea.
  
• They don't think the customer might not give an order now but a major deal will come through in 2- 3 months. Every time the lead is given, they half heartedly goes to the customer and respond that they don't have any requirement. So that the sales credit doesn't go the marketing guys.
  
• They only close deals which they have generated the leads on. They expect the lead given to them to turn into sales in the first visit. Inspite of doing so much campaign and getting good leads the sales people response is always lackluster.
  
• They think reporting is waste of time, they don't understand the importance of database.

Hmm well it can go on and on like this. ..So you see if the sales guy says go east the marketing guy would say go west or vice versa. Normally very few firm rarely have marketing in place what they do is sales and the sales supervisor or manager himself is involved in marketing. Firms which have been able to synthesis sales & marketing guys they will achieve tremendous results.

Sales is the today guy, his main concern is achieving his sales target for the day or for the week or for the month. Marketing is the guy who think about the future and they way the sales would happen in the near future, the market share, the brand development, the customer. So there is always a conflict between generations and conflicts will always exists between Sales & Marketing.

Technically speaking... most of you would know that sales is the actuall process that happens when the product is bought. Sales guys are there to make more transactions possible. Marketing is the process the preceeds sales and is present after sales. The product awareness to image building so more guys come to sales is what the purpose of marketing is.

Here are some tips to get a common ground between sales & marketing so that complement each other , instead of playing a blame game.

1. Get them together, place the sitting arrangement together. Don't make the sales & marketing team sit separately

2. Conduct Monthly informal presentation by each of the department on the difficulties being faced by them or ways to improve the functioning.

3. Create a cross functional team for each product, a marketing guy, a sales guy and a technical guy to be responsible for a particular product (if possible...depends on the hierarchy and current organization structure).

4. Make the dialogue and interaction active between these two functions...Weekly review meets to be held along with marketing & sales team.

5. Tie the benefit of sales to both the teams.

To sum it up make it possible for the salesman to view the point of the marketing guy and vice versa. Many companies think training are waste of time but actually they really help in building a spirit of comradeship between each other.

Ok guys that's it for today cya later