Some people may not have thought of their country as a brand before, but when you think about it every country has a brand identity. This can take the form of identity elements like flags, costumes, uniforms etc. and products like food and drink, sports and so on. What does France mean to you, food, cheese, wine, the language maybe?
Anyway countries do have identities and associated attributes, and apparently the American brand is having an image problem that some ad execs want to try and change. Hmmm, well a slick ad campaign is one way to go, maybe a new spokes model or celebrity endorsement will help. I wonder how much PR and advertising can offset the negative perception that comes from unilateral military action, an administration that insults other countries, and an increasing reputation for misconduct by business leadership.
Ad execs, marketers seek to revamp U.S. image abroad.
“America is a good brand, but a brand that is losing friends around the world. We believe this is a business issue,” Reinhard said during the Association of National Advertisers conference in Dana Point, California, this weekend.
I think CRM is interesting to me because it provides a rich source of examples of misplaced technology investment. No doubt it can be a useful tool but unless you have aligned your business goals with your customers needs your CRM system will let you down.
“In a Bain & Co. study, 20 percent of the 451 senior executives polled said that their companies’ CRM initiatives had failed to deliver profitable growth and had damaged long-term customer relationships.”
I’m sorry, did they say damaged customer relationships? My irony meter is off the scale right now.
Here’s an article from HBS working knowledge that I find interesteing Donít Get Buried in Customer DataóUse It. The take away for me is not so much about leveraging the customer data, but how an intense focus on the customer can help organizations understand and manage the right data, the data that will help the organization make a difference to the customers.
Well I do love the title of this article; Branding: The Concept That Ate the Ad Industry.
But what this article is saying is that you cannot just build a brand through communication, it must have substance, and coherence across communication channels.
For positive branding to occur, a company must consider every way it touches prospective and current customersóincluding advertising, public relations, and customer service. All elements of a companyís marketing must mesh seamlessly for a new or reinvigorated brand to break through the clutter.
Advertising isn’t going to get eaten but whatever you promise through your advertising must be delivered on throughout the customer experience.
The advertising/communication heavy approach to branding is a hangover from the last 40 years of branding FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods). The goal was to differentiate products on shelves, soft drinks, cereals etc.
Very few companies are just differentiating products on shelves any more; the customer experience goes beyond popping the can. Now companies are providing a blend of products, services, and experiences across diverse communication channels.
This is kind of related to my previous post about brand behaviour.
Howard Dean, a wireless, blogging, meet-up, p2p kind of guy.
Some people refer to this kind of stuff as viral marketing, but I believe it’s more about co-creating value. It’s an organic guerrilla CRM system that is self sustaining.
manageing the customer/user experience on the web is a very complex problem. The complexity comes from the numerous groups of customers at different lifecycle stages with diverse needs and wants and a group of internal stakeholders with conflicting requirements.
This problem becomes even more complex when you are a large enterprise, with multiple web sites for different purposes or different audiences. It would not be unusual for an organization to have different web sites for employees, customers, and business partners. Some may even have a number of different brands with different web presences.
An interesting case study was published by Eliot Philips, from Lippincott Mercer called From chaos to constellation: Creating better brand alignment on the web
My personal experience with this is the citibank log in page, click on the navigation that says “sign on” and you get presented with this:
click for larger version
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