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Beyond Brand Building: When You Are Your Brand

These four companies manifest their brands in a way that is indistinguishable from their products or business activities. We are seeing a shift in what it means to be a brand and how to build your brand. From about 2007 or 2008 -- alongside the rise of social media as a mainstream technology -- we cultivated a mindset around building our  personal brands  (where the winners were the ones shouting the loudest). This in turn led us to reimagine business brands where the focus was on humanizing those brands. Brands evolved beyond the words and visuals to describe them and manifested more as “what we do, is our brand.” In recent times, this evolution has continued as brand building has focused on greater authenticity, transparency and empathy. This evolution has been  inspired   by consumers who have become more demanding of the businesses that supply them of products and services. Gone are the days where branding was considered a marketing activity purely for the benefit of th

5 Strategies for Creating Epic Content Marketing on a Tight Budget

Even when you know what you're doing, content marketing can be a daunting task. Still, it can and does pay off. What's the best way to promote your brand? “It’s easy,” everyone says. “Just create amazing content.” But, the truth is,  even if you know what you’re doing , content marketing can be a daunting task.  Still, it can and does pay off .  Distribion used content to increase its blog traffic  by 2,000 percent  and boost revenue by 40 percent. And that company is not alone. Qualtrics generated 2500-plus leads at less than  $1.30 cost per conversion , and Kraft says its content marketing ROI is  up to four times higher  than any other advertising technique it offers. Read the following tips to learn how to make even a small budget reap big rewards for your company’s  content marketing . 1. Identify the most effective content type for your business. There are a lot of different types of content that the market wants you to produce. These include, bl

5 Steps for Making Your Brand Identity More Consistent

Use these steps to get your branding identity back on course to projecting a clear and concise message. With so much content flowing through an organization, from ad campaigns and branded marketing materials to digital media content and social media updates, it’s easy to see how a company could get a little lost while trying to maintain a consistent brand identity. Multiple people creating many branded elements can make it difficult to keep things aligned. For both big corporations and small business, it can be easy to veer off course, sometimes without even realizing it. The lack of consistency may not be noticeable at first, but failing to identify and stick to a consistent brand identity can eventually have a negative impact. The brand can become disjointed, unreliable and divided so much that it confuses customers, clients, employees, and even the executive team. So, if you feel like you’re starting lose the identify of your brand throughout your organization, use

The Ways Your Brain Manages Overload, and How to Improve Them

Information overload is   everywhere , from non-stop news to rat-a-tat email inboxes. At the receiving end of this deluge of verbiage is   thehuman brain — your   brain— metaphorically endowed with a vacuum cleaner that   sucksup information;  a container for   short-termmemory;  a blender for   integratinginformation;  a memory bank for storing   long-term information;  a garbage disposal for   getting rid of information;  and a   recycling machine   extraordinaire. Using each of these functions effectively is critical if one wants to manage information overload ̶ simply using your brain for crossing items off your to-do list is poor use of a very sophisticated machine. Yet few people build the habits and lifestyles that allow for their brains to function at their best. At the core of managing information overload is the ability to know which function to use, and how and when to use it. The six principles below can serve as a guide to the proper brain hygiene for managing infor

Great Businesses Scale Their Learning, Not Just Their Operations

Ronald Coase nailed it back in 1937 when he identified scalable efficiency as the key driver of the growth of large institutions. It’s far easier and cheaper to coordinate the activities of a large number of people if they’re within one institution rather than spread out across many independent organizations. But here’s the challenge. Scalable efficiency works best in stable environments that are not evolving rapidly. It also assumes that the constituencies served by these institutions will settle for standardized products and services that meet the lowest common denominator of need. Today we live in a world that is increasingly shaped by exponentially improving digital technologies that are accelerating change, increasing uncertainty, and driving performance pressure on a global scale. Consumers are less and less willing to settle for the standardized offerings that drove the success of large institutions in the past.   Ourresearch   into the long-term decline of return on a

4 Ways to Boost Your Social Media Creativity Game

You don't have to be Tinder to light a fire under your customer base, with word-of-mouth marketing tactics. Leave it to a dating app to demonstrate the instant success a creative social media marketing approach can bring to a new business. Tinder -- the location-based dating service that facilitates matchups between interested parties -- used a tactic best described as word-of-mouth advertising in a digital format To successfuly launch its app. In a recent   podcast , Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad revealed that the company grew by 50 percent the day after it texted 500 individuals a link to its app. That tactic and other word-of-mouth campaigns grew Tinder's customer base from 20,000 to 500,000 users in less than a month. Clearly, entrepreneurs hoping to quickly reach and grow their own customer bases must embrace social media in all its forms. Social media's free word-of-mouth nature can attract and engage potential customers at a stage in the compan