Think about your brand and marketing messaging as an outside-in rather than an inside-out approach.

Traditionally marketers developed their messages internally. Brand and marketing messaging, advertising headlines were developed by a collaborative effort between advertising and PR agencies and company’s management, board of directors and VCs and sometimes with the guidance of a brand consultant. Depending on company’s budget and timeline, the messages were sometimes tested with the market through conducting focus groups and often directly pushed to the market.

With the rise of Enterprise 2.0 through the power of social media networks, blogs and discussion forums customers are available and closer than you think. They are already discussing and evaluating your brands. What better way, than to listen to your audience, engage with them and let them assist you in developing your brand and marketing messages.

The internet has given people access to excessive amount of information. Therefore, opinions are formed and choices are made differently. Brand recognition and leadership are both earned rather than paid for by traditional means of marketing and advertising and marketers are no longer in charge.

Brands, products and trends are controlled by media contributors and online influencers such as bloggers, reviewers and digital creators. They are the ones that lead conversations and shape opinions.

It’s all about experts and individual influencers; people that know more and more about less and less. These are the influencers that capture the attention of audiences and spark conversation on the web about issues, brands and products that are of importance to them. This is what is shaping the future of business and our economy.

What to do?

Branding, marketing and advertising today is all about specializing within a niche market and providing services and “tailored content” to those niches. Marketers, whom I tend to refer as “communication professionals” need to identify those niches for their brands and qualify them. Once these niches are qualified then they need to acknowledge and find media contributors and online influencers for those specific niches and work on ways to collaborate with them.

I will expand further on ways to collaborate with online influencers in my future posts.

I am not even sure why startup branding is a question but just to put it in perspective, I would like to ask, “Would you bring a child into the world and then let him or her go into the world without a name?” That’s how bad it is if you launch a startup and don’t brand it.

I like to think of a startups as children that are brought to life by their parents (founders of the startup). That child will have a name and an identity. He/she will be recognized and dealt with based on his/her way of thinking, talking and for those of us that are visual the way he/she dresses. Startups are very much the same way.

I have heard many debates in regards to branding startups. I have heard questions such as “If and when do we need to brand a startup?” and answers such as “Branding is for Coke and Nike” and “look at this site there’s no logo, no company colors, no pre-determined image or purpose and look at how successful they are.”

Another one asks, “Is it more important for a startup to spend their budget in branding or lead generation and if you have a limited budget which is more important?” and again people mainly consider lead generation as the main priority and make comments such as “Without generating dollars your startup cannot continue therefore put your money in lead generation and don’t worry about branding your startup.”

I know I sound like a broken record but I like to define what brand really means before I get into my opinion of startup branding. A brand is the perception and the emotion that your product or service evokes in your customer’s heart and mind. Therefore we understand that no matter what you do, whether your message and image is professionally designed and developed or not, that is going to be your brand. Whatever your audience hears and sees first, its your brand and its going to register in their mind as your brand.

If you have a plain font as your logo and your message is off target, that is going to be your brand and after a while there will be equity in that brand. You can always change and modify your brand message and image but keep in mind that the sooner you can zero in on your brand, the better it is.

I recommend starting the branding process of your startup following these simple steps:

Step 1- Define your brand message as this is your voice.

Step 2- Design your brand identity including logo, colors, fonts and graphics/imagery that would convey and support your brand message, that is your brand’s image.

Step 3- Go out to the world and publicize yourself, scream as much and as loud as you want.

In my last post I mentioned that in tough economic times you must consider how the market is treating your customers and adjust your business model accordingly. Sometimes, during economic pressure, customers seek endlessly for better value in your product and therefore they expect your product offered at less cost. There are many different ways to deliver based on that demand and one of them is a business practice called the “Cannibalization” of your brand. It sounds odd and strange but interestingly enough, it works.

Cannibalizing your brand is when you reduce your own sales by introducing a better but similar product at a lower cost, in order to preserve or increase the market share. It is very important to understand that you must run the numbers to determine whether cannibalization simply to maintain market share makes sense. Your new sales has to generate enough revenue that at least covers the cost of cannibalization. There is an exception to this rule and that is, sometimes you have to eat the cost of cannibalization simply to maintain market share.

As a cure to fight the recession or as some people prefer to call it just a down turn of the economy, a lot of the giant brands are considering this business practice.
I am not sure if you read this but Marc Gunther of Huffington Post a few months back reported on Starbuck considering an “un-branding” campaign.
And as a part of that effort, they have started by renaming one of their stores in Seattle to “15th Ave E Coffee & Tea”. Now this decision by Starbucks can not be entirely blamed on the impact of the economy and declining sales, other factors such as acquisition of monopolization of the market had also something to do with it but the overall concept of cannibalization of the brand is something that has become more and more common during these tough economic times.

When we look at Apple and the launch of their iPhone, we can clearly see that along with the iPhone’s launch the sales of traditional iPods declined. Amazon is also reinventing the book industry with its launch of Kindle. They are going after the same concept of cannibalization. Their sales of books and publications are going to follow the rest of the paper based mediums and media but they are hoping they will maintain market share with Kindle.

When should I consider cannibalizing my own brand, you ask? Well, here are a few suggestions:

1) Conduct focus groups asking existing customers/potential customers to review your product and brand marketing communication materials such as your website, print material and advertisements in order to gain feedback.

2) Talk to your past and current clients and find out if there are areas in their business that needs improvement and if you might be able to help them.

3) Survey your target market. Start by asking your target market questions about what they are struggling with and how you can improve your product.

4) Attend forums and networking groups within your industry and keep abreast of the latest in your market.

5) Improve your processes, increase productivity and deliver better quality customer service.

Finally, I like to leave you with this thought. I have heard people say that if you don’t cannibalize your own brand and market when deemed necessary, someone else will. I will leave this one to the readers to chew on.

I understand that you are accountable and your company has to show cash flow and be profitable. It’s also clear that expense/cost cutting as well as budget reduction during a recession is one of the best ways to cope with the down turn of the economy in order to show profitability.

Due to the fact that marketing is more of a long term commitment and results from marketing efforts can only be measured in the long run, companies consider marketing as an expense and a cost rather than an investment. Marketing budgets are one of the first to be evaluated and reduced.

During a recession it’s not the time to reduce marketing budgets. It’s a time to get ahead of your competitors by carefully investing in your marketing. Marketing is always a long term plan and investing in marketing should not be considered an expense, more so an investment. A study has shown that companies that increased their advertising and marketing expenditure during the 1981-82 recession significantly grew their sales in comparison to those that reduced and eliminated their marketing and advertising budgets.

During times of catastrophe and recession customers look for trust. They look for brands that they can trust and we all know that brands are all about trust. If the customers feel and see that a brand is here today and gone tomorrow, then this shows that the brand is all about its own personal gain and not concerned about the customers’ needs. They will lose their trust in the brand itself and of course, once customers lose trust, the end is nigh.

Companies need to balance their short term considerations of strategies to cope with the economy and recession with the long term goals of strengthening their brand and creating brand equity.

Also, during recession it’s not the time to get experimental with your brand. It’s the time to focus on the core strengths of your brand and such strength comes from two things:

1-     Unique and favorable associations that customers have of your brand.

2-     Knowledge and awareness of your brand.

Both of these strengths can only be emphasized with gaining trust in your brand.