How does a brand become trusted?
Many advertising agencies and the old media sales representatives will talk about the importance of brand advertising. They will produce a spiel that goes along that ‘it is necessary for a business to establish it’s brand in the market place. They will state that brand advertising is more important than direct response marketing.
Recently there has been a survey in Australia of the most trusted brands. The top brand was Australia Post. The second was Toyota with third going to Cadbury.
To my knowledge Australia Post and Toyota do not undertake brand advertising. They are always advertising and marketing a product or service. Toyota are always marketing a car; Australia Post are always advertising and marketing one of their services.
This seems to highlight the ploy that brand advertising is actually a waste of money and small business in particular need to be careful not to get caught in the trap of doing any marketing that would just purely be focussed on brand only.
The next important aspect of this is that these brands deliver on their promise.They inform their customers what they will be getting and then deliver it, consistently. It is this delivering on what they promise is the reason why these brands are the most trusted in Australia.
Obviously the big 4 banks do a lot of TV marketing, but because the belief is because they are not delivering on their promise, they do not make it into the top 10 most trusted brands in Australia.
This survey highlights the fact that a business must be focussed :-
- on delivering on its promise, delivering on its service and product in an exceptional consistent way
- if it does any marketing and advertising at all it must always be promoting a product or service, the brand development will follow from that.
Your brand will be trust not because of advertising but because you deliver on your promise.
How brand savvy are our children?
This was an interesting video on how brand savvy our children are. The children in this video on NBC were 8 to 12 years of age. They were able to identify the brands by smell, sound etc. They also had very definite opinions on what the brands stood for. Advertising and marketing are having very significant impacts.
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Think about what this means to your business? Even if your product is not aimed at that age bracket children and people are foring opinions about the brand well before they are necessarily looking for that product.
Not all clients are good clients even in tough times.
In these times there is a massive temptation for some businesses to chase after all types of clients. Most service businesses feel the need to take on all potential clients when times are tougher. But this is wrong at the best of times but in a harder economic climate it can be the deathknell for a business.
The temptation is because it seems like all revenue is good revenue. If you couple this temptation with the urge to discount prices it will ensure trouble for business. Don’t sacrifice your long term brand for short term revenue.
Let me explain…
In a service business we can not be all things to all people. We must determine exactly what services we want to provide, to what specific client do we want to serve. Other clients than those we have specifically identified e not good clients becasue one or more of the following reasons:- less profit, more hassle, upset the existing systems. So in the tougher times the lure of the extra revenue is high but that will lead to having to deal with clients that the systems are not set up, dealing with low profit client, dealing with hger maintenance clients, having your team on a treadmill dealing with these marginal clients.
The worst possible outcome is that by taking on some of these marginal clients your service to the good clients is affected negatively to the point that you may lose some of these good clients.
So please remember that your long term brand (profit / business) is worth more than any short term revenue.
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