No way!
Yet hundreds
of companies have blown through more than a billion dollars
on TV ads during the Super Bowl and other major events trying
to build a brand image.
I attended
a top-level seminar on branding and a venture capitalist on
the panel said a consumer company must spend $50 million dollars
to build a brand identity today.
However,
in my seminar on branding at Stanford, I asked the participants
- all brand managers at major companies, to name 10 search engines,
10 consumer web sites, 3 pet supplies sites and 10 business-to-business
web sites.
No one could!
And these
are the very people who are in the industry, and are exposed
to the millions of dollars of advertising to create brands!
What does
this mean?
Buying your
way to brand awareness does not work!
The net
is littered with those failures: Dr. Koop, Priceline's grocery
service and Boo.com stand out as highly publicized failures.
So, as a
small company, you don't have to worry about not have a treasure
chest full of cash to buy a reputation - because it doesn't
work!
How do you
create a great brand? That's where brand assets come in to play.
Brand assets are your slogans, advertising, publicity, promotions,
characters, spokes people, as well as your customer service
and sales people! These tools help create a meaningful identity
that creates an emotional bond with your audience that compels
them to take action - and provides the logic that justifies
their choices.
The Internet
has a treasure chest of tools to create brand awareness, brand
identity and brand loyalty including your e-mail address, website
name, signature file. You also need to transmit your own personality
and identity to create trust.
When you
build trust, you build a great brand. If you can do that, then
you will build sales and create customers for life!
Daniel Janal
is an internationally-recognized speaker, Internet marketer and
best-selling author of Branding on the Internet. http://www.roibot.com/tk_bn.cgi?bnaa
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