Every person in your organization is telling your story. Paid, volunteer, happy or disgruntled, everyone matters when it comes to your brand’s perception. People talk about brand management like it’s something a highly paid executive carefully orchestrates from the company’s headquarters. But more often than not, managing a brand’s perception is left to those at…
The question is almost always the same: how can I improve my __? Whether the question refers to a skill, a product, an experience, it’s ultimate about a brand. How can I improve my brand, then becomes the question. There are corporate, product and individual brands. A brand represents a promise that it makes in…
In the new world of marketing and advertising, it’s not as much about your message as it is about engaging your audience in a dialogue about your message. Long ago marketing was all about exposing a product to the public. As competition grew and more products and services continued to vie for our attention, exposing…
Your organization’s brand is more important than you might realize. Branding is not the “voodoo of marketers” but the sum total impression of everything you are as an organization. In a nutshell it is the essence of who you are organizationally. Communicating it properly is essential; not doing so can be disastrous. Here are the…
The larger an organization grows, the more its brand message and promise gets delivered by their lowest paid employee: the front liner. Whether your business is retail, food services, theme parks, or a church, those first interactions with a customer usually happen with the lowest paid person in that organization. These are part-time sales people,…
I was listening to a discussion today about people’s online identity. Years ago it was taboo, and even considered unsafe to have your own name in forums and chat rooms–the precursors of today’s social media. And a lot of people still create user names that allow them to be anonymous. I’m looking at my Twitter…
Sometimes your best PR and marketing campaign is not telling everyone of about your “new and improved” product, which, by the way, are the two most over used and no longer effective words in marketing. People don’t really believe that the new and improved is necessarily better than the old. Think about it. What’s your…
“We are afraid of wasting money on social media. What’s our ROI (return on investment?)” said a potential client recently. I understand the hesitance, especially from organizations that have successfully fundraised, or sold goods, for decades through more traditional means such as events and direct mail. I understand their concern. It’s a legitimate one. What…
A logo is a visual representation of an entity, may it be a business, a church, an organization or an individual (remember when Prince dropped his name and wanted to be know by his logo?). My company, The A Group, has created hundreds of logos over the past several years. The process has been as…
“We are good at copying but not good at being authentic.” Those were difficult words for a pastor to say, but both he and I knew they were true. As we talked, he told me he had visited enough congregations to know how churches freely “borrowed” others’ identity. I ran into that problem early on…