What’s Your Brand Personality?

Introducing Branding Part One

One of the hardest realities of being a parent is the realisation that our children may hold different opinions than us. Why are you wearing that? How can you go there? I don’t like who you’re seeing! How can you waste your money on that!? Once you can accept that what’s right for them is not necessarily what’s right for you, your relationship will step to a new level of maturity, your advice and guidance will become more meaningful, less destructive and better followed.

So too with our corporate children – our brands. What should they wear, how should they speak, where should they hang out? Determining brand personality is one of the hardest decisions to make, especially if until now, the brand has really been you. It’s time to let our brands stand alone and make their way in the world without us, but like any good parent we want them to be as well prepared as possible and confident enough to stand out from the crowd.

Let’s first consider some fundamentals: why do we need brands? Are brands just for the Cokes and Levis of the world? The sizzle is great when we can get around to it, but first I want to concentrate on the steak!

Most successful companies have a Business Plan. We know to the dollar what it costs to satisfy client need and what product or service we need to supply. What a brand does is give personality to that offer, and personality is all-important. From all of humanity we choose our circle of friends, from them we know who will be best man at our wedding and who we’d want at our back when the going gets tough. For our great friends we forgive them their sins, overlook their faults and support them through their tough times. This is the essence of Brand Loyalty. To achieve this we need a Brand Plan to sit along side our Business Plan.

Your brand is one of the most valuable assets to your business. It is only the Brand that raises products from me-too status. Branding transcends logic, overlooks features and speaks to consumers at an emotional level. Marketers speak of tribal branding, brand identification and virtual brand communities. In essence all good brands do the same thing, they clearly communicate to their customers how to experience the product and the emotional relationship that is expected.

When constructing the Brand Plan you will have to make difficult choices. How do I appeal to my core audience without alienating everyone else? What does my product stand for and what sets it apart from the rest. A carefully conducted Brand Audit will establish what is best for the product and the company. It will plan the steps to achieving a brand position that will encapsulate your corporate beliefs and heritage, speak to your target market and most especially raise your product from the herd.

In my next article we discuss how to use the Brand Plan to focus all customer communication, and get your clients calling their children after your products.

Andrew Wylie
Pandemonium Creative
www.pandemoniumcreative.com.au
andrew@pandemoniumcreative.com.au

        

Don’t Forget to Pack Your Sales Strategy When Heading Offshore

Acquiring new customers overseas is actually easier than you think, however, it does take planning and some effort. Foreign and domestic markets have one thing in common; you don’t sell to companies, you sell and do business with individuals. Focus on building and establishing solid relationships.
So, before you jump on that plane and head oversees, here are five strategic issues you should bed down:

1. Identify your ideal customer
Who would you like as a customer? Selecting and developing opportunities in foreign markets requires direction and purpose.

There are three techniques to finding your ideal customer:
1. Demographics – This refers to location, sales, number of employees, and types of industry
2. Psychographics – What is their attitude, culture and beliefs, and do they match your company’s own views?
3. Triggering factors – Are they doing well, satisfied with their current suppliers etc.
The good news is that this information is readily available in the public domain, publications such as Dun & Bradstreet, Hoovers and Infotrac are good places to start, and these publications are readily available at any good library. You should be able to create a solid list of names in about an hour.

2. Learn how to sell well
It may not be your primary role but it is something that you must learn how to do. Don’t let the word sell scare you, it’s simply about building relationships with individuals by helping people with a need or problem that your product or service can solve.

This skill is often neglected; with many potential exporters having to relying on others this can be very costly. The basic skills needed in this area are:

• The ability to build rapport
• Listening
• Asking insightful questions
• Presenting your story
• Presenting to groups
• Negotiation ( very valuable)
• Relationship management

Bill Gates - Microsoft, Geoff Dixon-Qantas, Richard Branson – Virgin are examples of successful global business executives who are good salespeople. Don’t let the size of these companies scare you as each of these organizations started as a small businesses.

3. Branding and positioning (what makes you different from everyone else?)
What is your unique selling proposition? You must be able to stand out in a crowded market place and offer something different from your competitors, if not then they have no reason to do business with you.

Here are some examples of excellent branding:
MYOB – “The easy business software”
Total Self Storage – “One call for a worry free move”
Lube Mobile “Honest Friendly Reliable”

Start by asking your customers why they use you, what was life like before your came along? There words will often provide the key phrases for your branding statement.

4. Knowing where to fish
Who are the main players and competitors for your products or services? It does not matter what country you decide to investigate the good news is that there are probably only a handful of main players and several smaller ones. Know the lay of the land and seek them out.

Example: in the Australian market:
There are 3 big auto manufactures, 3 airlines, 2 daily newspapers in each major capital city, 2 local papers in each city, 2 telecommunications company, 4 mobile phone companies and 3 commercial television stations.

It’s very easy to obtain the names of these players and with a little more work you can identify the industry association or body they belong to. This applies to all markets around the world and industry sectors; break it down and determine who the main players are. This is where you start fishing.

5. Develop your strategy by asking the right questions.
When you’re entering a new market it can often be a case of “you don’t know what you don’t know.” One way to overcome is to call upon a researcher’s six best friends:
“Who, what, where, when, how and why”

They will not let you down. Hear are a few examples of the type of questions to ask when conducting your initial research:
o What services do they expect?
o What are the important buying criteria?
o How do customers buy?
o How do customers use the product?
o Where do they seek information about the product?
o Where do they buy the product?
o When do they buy?
o Who buys from our competition?
The key to finding opportunities overseas is to turn on your radar, by asking insightful questions.

There are wonderful opportunities available for anyone wanting to acquire new business overseas. The ideas that I have outlined are low cost and easy to implement. Don’t engage in extensive research until you have done the basics which you can do from your office. It’s a big world out there! Pick your targets and have some fun!

Clifton Warren
Peformance Improvement International
Email: Clifton@pii1.com
Web: www.pii1.com

        

Online Advertising Revenue Models x4

With the rise of online advertising (now worth 10% of the $10 billion Australian advertising market), we discuss strategies your website can employ to earn money through online advertising.

3 Fundamentals of Online Advertising

First a refresher. There are 3 basic ways to advertise on a site: 1) Cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM), 2) Cost per Click (CPC) and 3) Sponsorship

Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM): This is the amount charged to an advertiser per 1000 views of an ad. Rates generally range from $30-$50 per 1000 impressions.

Cost per Click (CPC): This is when charges are only accrued when a user click on the ad which takes them to your website. Rates for these generally range from a few cents to a couple of dollars. This sort of advertising is popular with search engine companies.

Sponsorship: This is generally based on a finite time-period (e.g.. for a fantasy sports competition) or for a specific event (e.g. an email campaign to your customers). Generally, these are secured through your existing business relationships or managed via a PR/advertising team.

(UPDATE: Google have just announced a trial where advertisers only pay when a specific action is undertaken online. For example, you only pay when a customer who clicked on your ad then goes and purchases a product or submits a contact request. Read here for more details.)

4 Online Advertising Revenue Models

1. Share Advertising Revenue with your Contributors

The big trend that is generating a lot of interest is consumer generated media served from a central, well-branded website. Think YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Flickr. These are sites that de-centralise (some say democratise) the process of creating content and placing the power back into the hands of the individual. This process is important because it is incredibly popular. Being popular means happy advertisers.

But what of smaller, niche sites such as blogs and forums? How can they compete with the big boys? As we have mentioned previously in our technology reviews, content is king. Focus on getting the right content for your audience. High quality content gets you loyal visitors. A niche market means that advertisers can target their message carefully. Focus on getting high quality content for a niche audience and advertising will follow.

So it begs the question – “How do I get great content?” One way is to pay experts to write about their industry, or build a great brand (see our article from Pandemonium for tips) that attracts experts. The other option, which offers some promise, is sharing advertising revenue with your writers. This is where YouTube, MySpace and blogs will head in the future.

Sharing advertising revenue with your writers/contributors works like this. Assume you have advertisement running on your website and you are using a cost per 1000 impression (CPM) model (See earlier discussion on CPM). Now, when a visitor reads, watches or listens a contributors’ content, the ad is displayed next to it. In normal run of events 100% of the ad revenue from that ad goes to the website operator. In the ad revenue share model, a cut (say 20%) will go to the contributor.

The great thing about this model is that it is self-correcting. A popular contributor will be encouraged to continue submiting more content because they are getting rewarded. A less popular contributor will be discouraged as they are not relating to the audience. Thus, the “cream rises to the top.” and thus improves your website’s popularity with your audience.

2. Podcasts

Advertising strategies for podcasts are more or less borrowed from their traditional media counterparts, radio and TV. Typically, short ads (less than 30 secs) are inserted into the start of a podcast. Again, subscriptions to podcasts can be tracked although it is a little harder to actually know how many people listened to it (SONAR recently released a media player that can track this sort of information).

3. Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) gives users the power to subscribe to a website’s news, new articles and new content. For example, this blog has an RSS feed. RSS feeds can be sent to a dedicated RSS Feeder (such as FeedDemon) or viewed on your personal Yahoo/Google homepage. It’s a great way to keep in touch across a number of websites without actually having to visit them - which is why they are very popular. Now this could be a website operator’s worst nightmare as the number of visits to your page could be threatened by this technology. However, RSS feeds can have advertisements embedded within each feed, thus providing a extra source of revenue. New ad service companies, such as FeedBurner, help website operators to embed advertisements in their feeds.

4. Google Adsense vs Yahoo! Publisher

One cannot talk about online advertising without discussing what the big players, Google and Yahoo! are up to. For the uninitiated, Google have a system to help customers earn revenue on their website, called AdSense. Google AdSense automatically serves advertisements (by you placing a small bit of code on your website) and will automatically display ads that are relevant to your website. When a user clicks on an ad, you get a share of revenue and Google gets a share.

The online world has been waiting for Yahoo!’s response to AdSense. Yahoo! offers an invite-only, BETA system called Publisher Network.

It is worth considering Google or Yahoo! Services to manage your advertising on your site. It’s very easy to set up either service and requires little management overhead.

Last Word

Using a mix of the above online revenue models can boast your site’s earning potential. But as with any media, it is important to understand who visits your site. How many unique visitors per week? What locations (country, state, city) do your visitors come from? What are the general demographics of your visitors? These are the basic questions that any advertiser will want to know. Create a media pack with all of your demographic information, rates and technical (size, format etc.) specifications. Make it as easy as possible for an advertiser to say “Yes” to advertising on your website.

        

US Government Technology Procurement

Did you know that in 2006, the US Government spent US$51,772,014,776 on technology products and services from the top 100 government technology contractors?

One aspect of the US economy technology businesses should know about and understand well is the US Government’s $200 billion market. Since the enactment of the United States Free Trade Agreement many businesses are now doing their own due diligence on US market dynamics.

Below you will find a general overview of the US Government’s spending on technology (in 10 sectors) and trends of the top 100 government technology contractors in 2004, 2005 and 2006. This data may be useful to identify prospective partnering opportunities in the competitive US Government procurement eco-system.

Please click the links below for a brief overview of the spending behavior across 10 tech sectors:

• Overview of the 10 tech sectors

• Communications Equipment

• Defence

• Engineering

• Hardware

• Services

• Resellers

• Satellite

• Software

• System Integrators

• Telecom

If you would like information on how you can obtain the full report, please contact us at info@jdrlegal.com.au.

        

Podcast: Licensing Structures

This podcast covers strategies on how to structure your licensing agreements.

Download the MP3 here. (Duration: 13:39)

        

Podcast: Using Escrow

This podcast covers some tips on using escrow agents to disclose your Intellectual Property.

Download the MP3 here. (Duration: 2:19)

        

Recent Legislative and Case Law Developments - Australia

A range of changes to the Australian Copyright Act came into force on a range of dates between 11 December 2006 and 8 January 2007.

• Protection for users has been given where use of copyright material is a fair dealing for the purpose of parody or satire;
• New sections 43C, 47J and 110AA permit copying and storage to different platforms for one’s own use – these exceptions are to be reviewed by 31 March 2008;
• A new section 109A permits domestic copying of sound recordings for the purpose of â€�format shifting’;
• Remedies have been enhanced to permit copyright owners to take civil action against commercial-scale electronic infringements, including the commercial facilitation of peer-to-peer file sharing and provision of hypertext links or downloads;
• The prohibition on circumvention of access controls has been strengthened both as to civil remedies and criminal penalties but the requirement that the access control represent a â€�technological protection measure’ against copyright infringement remains;
• Archives and libraries, schools and organizations for people with disabilities have been given further protection from copyright infringement where copying takes place for their legitimate purposes.

        

Recent Legislative and Case Law Developments - USA

The US Court of Appeals in the case Brooks-Ngwenya v Thompson and others (7^th Cir., 17 October 2006) denied relief to a person who claimed to be the copyright owner of certain material and that another party was using the material without her consent. Her claim was denied on the basis that the person claiming infringement had not registered the copyright in the material with the Library of Congress in the US.

Copyright is protected by federal law in the US, which requires the owner of the copyright to have registered the copyright with the Library of Congress in order to bring a claim for copyright infringement in US federal courts.

The US federal court is the only legal arena in which copyright matters are determined in the US.

Perhaps it’s time for creative talent, entrepreneurs and SMEs trading into the US to get Uncle Sam’s copyright stamp of approval…