Make your brand great
Is your brand great? Cool is the best compliment your company or product can receive from your buying public. To be cool is to be special, superior, and of higher value than the competition, which is why coolness is such a coveted marketing goal. And before you reject the idea that your business, product, or brand doesn’t have to be great, think again. To be cool is to wish and to be desired is exactly the goal of all marketing communication. Sure you want sales, but first you have to be great.
You have to be cool
Being cool is definitely not the same as being fashionable. Fashion is too fleeting a goal to invest in. Where fashion is a mere passing fad; cool is a declaration of character.
The recent end of American Idol and the pop culture sideshow perfectly illustrates what I’m talking about. Lady Gaga, the queen of fashion, gave a performance that may have captivated her twelve-year-old fans, but it will surely be regarded in the future as a vulgar, extravagant and bizarre circus act; while seniors Tony Bennett, Tom Jones, and Steven Tyler offered remarkable displays of class, coolness, and stamina despite their apparent decline in vocal skills. You won’t see the lineup of fans to see Gaga fall off a cliff in her underwear when she’s collecting her old-age pension.
If you run an internet business you know you have to be pop culture savvy, which is not always the easiest thing to do when things change so fast, another reason why the goal should be “cool” no ” modern”. When companies make the mistake of confusing cool with fashion, they are looking for trouble, unfortunately being cool is the antithesis of most business mindsets. But if you have the “balls” you can make your business great.
What is cool?
To be cool is to have confidence in your decision to be different, to ‘zig’ when everyone else ‘zag’ and stay the course when everyone tells you you’re crazy. Apple Computer is probably the most successful story in business today. This is a company that experts have left for dead more times than Elvis has been seen gobbling up fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. This company sells expensive products at higher margins than any other, makes a lot of money, and its stock price has skyrocketed in an economy where all companies seem to want to compete with Walmart and be on Facebook. Apple is the company that earned a reputation for the “Think Different” idea, and that’s the essence of cool.
For anyone who knows anything about branding, taking the way of the rebel is the best way to establish your brand’s personality, and without a unique marketing identity, you have no chance of becoming the next big thing. And if you think that Lady Gaga is an example of something new or different, you are wrong; she’s nothing more than a shock pop retread from Madonna. The opportunities are there for you to take advantage of a business community that is too scared to be different or unsophisticated to recognize the difference between modern and modern.
How to make your brand great
Every business needs to advertise, but advertisements aren’t great. Fortunately, the Internet provides businesses with the opportunity to run advertisements that are not advertisements, but content in the form of branded entertainment.
Branded Entertainment provides the vehicle for companies to create a personality and establish their great credentials. Branded Entertainment is the future of web advertising. Here’s how you can attract and hold attention while subtly delivering your message in content – it’s a “spoonful of sugar gets the drug down” approach.
You have to improve your game
The Web is nothing more than a communication platform that is rapidly converging with the 500-channel television environment. Technologies like the iPad combined with the Sling Box mean that people can watch TV and the Internet anywhere, anytime. The problem is the programming, there is not enough and the television stations with their bloated bureaucracies and budgets are limited in what they can offer. The void will be filled by savvy Internet companies that are willing to invest in Internet programming distribution using branded entertainment and product placement as a means to generate sales.
The caveat is clear: shit won’t fly, not if you want to be cool, and being cool means being desirable. Businesses have to get their bottoms out, get their heads out of the sand, and improve their game.
Creative programming that informs, enlightens and entertains is where web advertising is headed, and the train has already left the station. Therefore, it is better for businesses, especially small and medium-sized businesses, to jump on board or they will be left behind. The internet’s ability to even the commercial playing field will be lost in a misguided barrage of advice from Facebook and Twitter that, if taken, will only dilute your website’s ability to communicate your marketing message in a controlled branding environment.
Inform, enlighten, entertain
Like it or not, your website is your primary media channel and if you don’t treat it as such, you will never reach your audience in a way that changes attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors, particularly behavior that results in sales.
From the first commercial use of the Internet, it has been dominated by vehicles dedicated to “reach”: from Archie to Google, from MySpace to Facebook, from Gmail to Twitter, every new big business is about reaching an audience. Sure, reaching an audience is important, but reaching an audience alone does not satisfy the wants or needs of the sales business.
Dr. Max Sutherland, in his article “When Ads Fail, How to Diagnose Why”, explains the concepts of reach and recognition as a means of judging the effectiveness of advertising. The bottom line is simple, if you don’t impress your audience, you will never achieve a brand connection and never generate a brand memory.
The road to great brand desirability can take a number of forms, but they all have three things in common: You need to inform, enlighten, and entertain in a memorable way to establish the connection and memory that leads to sales.