Brand Awareness
Wake up! Your brand isn't your savior, and all the goofy ads in the world won't save your company. What can? Well...have you given good business a try?
Brand. The hip, catch-all word of the New Economy. It suggested
all a company needed to succeed was awareness. Image, as they say,
was everything.
Pat Harpell saw it up close as the CEO of Harpell Inc., an
integrated marketing firm in Maynard, Massachusetts. Over the past
few years, many entrepreneurs have called on her to create branding
programs, and she could see that old-fashioned branding strategies
had gone astray. "That's not a branding program;
that's a logo," she says. "Basic business principles
fell apart."
Branding turned into
a game of being seen for the sake of being seen, without giving
consumers a reason to buy.
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What ultimately fell apart was the connection between companies
and consumers. Branding turned into a game of being seen for the
sake of being seen, without giving consumers a reason to buy.
"There's been a tremendous abuse of branding," says
Jeff Dufresne, managing director of BrandStorm, a brand consulting
group in Cincinnati. "I think people got confused and thought
branding was just throwing some ill-conceived advertising out there
to gain awareness."
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With the dotcom fallout, companies are relearning the basic
lessons of what makes a successful brand-mainly, that you can't
live on image alone. Eyeballs don't equal sales, and logos
don't create loyalty. Consumers want to know what you're
all about and why they should trust you enough to purchase your
product. This will never change, no matter how much technology
alters our lives.
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