Wednesday 5 February 2014

Brand Management - Meaning and Important Concepts

Brand management begins with having a thorough knowledge of the term “brand”. It includes developing a promise, making that promise and maintaining it. It means defining the brand, positioning the brand, and delivering the brand. Brand management is nothing but an art of creating and sustaining the brand. Branding makes customers committed to your business. A strong brand differentiates your products from the competitors. It gives a quality image to your business.

Brand management includes managing the tangible and intangible characteristics of brand. In case of product brands, the tangibles include the product itself, price, packaging, etc. While in case of service brands, the tangibles include the customers’ experience. The intangibles include emotional connections with the product / service.
Branding is assembling of various marketing mix medium into a whole so as to give you an identity. It is nothing but capturing your customers mind with your brand name. It gives an image of an experienced, huge and reliable business.
It is all about capturing the niche market for your product / service and about creating a confidence in the current and prospective customers’ minds that you are the unique solution to their problem.
The aim of branding is to convey brand message vividly, create customer loyalty, persuade the buyer for the product, and establish an emotional connectivity with the customers. Branding forms customer perceptions about the product. It should raise customer expectations about the product. The primary aim of branding is to create differentiation.
Strong brands reduce customers’ perceived monetary, social and safety risks in buying goods/services. The customers can better imagine the intangible goods with the help of brand name. Strong brand organizations have a high market share. The brand should be given good support so that it can sustain itself in long run. It is essential to manage all brands and build brand equity over a period of time. Here comes importance and usefulness of brand management. Brand management helps in building a corporate image. A brand manager has to oversee overall brand performance. A successful brand can only be created if the brand management system is competent.

Following are the important concepts of brand management:
  • Definition of Brand
  • Brand Name
  • Brand Attributes
  • Brand Positioning
  • Brand Identity
  • Sources of Brand Identity
  • Brand Image
  • Brand Identity vs Brand Image
  • Brand Personality
  • Brand Awareness
  • Brand Loyalty
  • Brand Association
  • Building a Brand
  • Brand Equity
  • Brand Equity & Customer Equity
  • Brand Extension
  • Co-branding

Arine Solutions : Why Reputation Management Should Be Your Top Marketing Priority?

bigstock businessman departing 15668462 Why Reputation Management Should Be Your Top Marketing Priority



You’ve spent years building your business. You’ve invested time, sweat, and tears. You’ve missed dance recitals and soccer games as you’ve toiled to create it. You finally feel as though you can relax… until the day when the phone calls stop, the new customers vanish, and you can’t understand why.
You’re still providing excellent service and your existing customers love you, but your business is struggling. Finally, you learn from an existing customer that your company has some very negative reviews posted online. It dawns on you that your online reputation is presenting a twisted perception of reality that is really killing your business.
Sound like the plot of a B-movie drama? Unfortunately, it’s true for hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses across the country.

Local Business Reviews = Reputation

What people say about your company online has become the single most important reflection of your company’s quality, reliability, and skill. It doesn’t matter if you’re a dentist, a plastic surgeon, a carpet cleaner, or a painter. In Nielsen’s most recent Global Trust in Advertising study, 70% of global consumers indicated they trust online reviews from strangers when making purchasing decisions.

Improving Your Reputation is Your #1 Marketing Priority

Your number one marketing priority should be developing a 5-star online reputation. Why? All your other marketing efforts, whether they be online such as SEO, social media, PPC, or offline such as direct mail, magazines, radio, or TV, will ultimately lead the consumer to learn more about you online. There, your less than sterling or non-existent reputation drives them away.
Most business owners fail to realize is that what consumers want is information that will help them feel confident they’re making the best, most well-reasoned purchase. Today, quite a bit of that confidence comes in the form of online reviews reflecting others’ experiences.

The 3Rs and 2Qs of Local Reviews and Reputation

When it comes to taking an active role in developing, building, and protecting your online reputation, you need to keep five points in mind:
  1. Range – While it might seem as though getting a few positive reviews on Google+ or Yelp is all that’s needed, we advocate a wide-ranging approach to online review management. Just visit this Facebook page, We Hate Yelp, or read this thread on Google, and you’ll understand why. Your business is too important to you and your loved ones to let its success be dictated by one or two companies with no vested interest.
  2. Real – Make sure real client reviews are getting posted. It’s tempting to game the system and pen some glowing reviews, however, it’s not only unethical, you’ll undoubtedly get caught, and that can have some unintended consequences. Encourage your customers to be as specific as possible. A hallmark of fake reviews is vagueness.
  3. Recent – It appears that more recent reviews weigh more heavily by the search engines in terms of ranking. For this reason alone, creating a steady stream of new, positive reviews makes sense. Additionally, the fact that more recent reviews pack more powerful social proof with potential customers than older reviews, and you simply must put systems in place to continually gather reviews.
  4. Quantity – Ask yourself: If one dentist has 25 reviews with a 4-star average and the next best has one 5-star review, who are you going to call? Reliability is proven with consistency, particularly where reviews are concerned.
  5. Quality – This one is pretty obvious: The higher your reviews, the better your status will be – within reason. A business with nothing but 5-star ratings can look suspicious but, in general, the more favorable your reviews, the better.

Make Reviews Part of a Comprehensive Reputation Marketing Strategy

While review and reputation building arguably may be the single most important online marketing tactic for local businesses in 2013 and beyond, the most successful businesses won’t stop there. Since reviews are most prominently displayed in conjunction with the hyper-local maps of search engines, they don’t generate many leads outside this area.
For the vast majority of businesses serving multiple cities from a single location, reviews should be just one building block in a larger reputation marketing strategy. That strategy should employ SEO to ensure the company’s website ranks near the top in all the cities they serve for their most important buying phrases. The good news is there’s a positive, synergistic relationship between a strong review presence, well-optimized local pages, and an authoritative website.
With the dominance mobile devices display in local purchasing, companies should make sure their websites not only rank highly, but are also mobile-friendly with click-to-call, click-to-map, and other navigable engagement features. You want to remove as much friction as possible between your customer’s need and his ability to contact you.

One Hidden – but Powerful – Benefit of Positive Reviews

Clearly, your business needs to put a review-gathering, reputation marketing culture, and process in place. The investment you make will return outsized profits from the new customers you’ll attract. But there is one other “hidden” benefit that an outstanding online reputation will bring: pricing power.
For years, nearly every business has struggled to defend its price in a world of “me too” competitors. Imagine how easy it will be to respond to “Why should I pay more for your service?” when you can simply reply, “Have you taken a look online to see what our customers say?”
Companies need to leverage the power a 5-star reputation brings. You’ve worked hard to establish your business and sacrificed plenty along the way. Are you willing to let that hard work get flushed down the drain because of a single disgruntled customer or competitor?
Develop a system to ensure your biggest fans are louder than your biggest enemies; the payoff is worth it.

For more details visit our website http://www.arinesolutions.com
Our facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/ArineSolutions
Our LinkedIn Page : http://www.linkedin.com/company/arine-solutions
Our Twitter Page : https://twitter.com/ArineSolutions
Our Google+ Page : https://plus.google.com/+Arinesolutions

Why online reputation management is important?


Learn about protecting your company’s reputation with online reputation management tactics.

By Arine Solutions

When it comes to building positive awareness about a brand, it takes a lot of time and effort to build and maintain a company’s online reputation. Just like in the physical world, a reputation is all a business really has.

But what is an online reputation? Furthermore, why is online reputation management important?
Wikipedia.com defines reputation management as “the process of tracking an entity's actions and other entities' opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop…..”

When theses actions and opinions are expressed in an environment such as the internet, where content can be posted anonymously to a large audience, the results can really hurt ones online reputation.
Nowadays, when people use the internet, whether it is informational or transactional in nature, they use one of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, or MSN. They rely on the content they find as the most relevant content the internet has to offer. More specifically, they rely on the content they find on the first page of that search engine.

Online reputation management is essential nowadays. More and more companies are participating in online marketing strategies in the hopes of protecting their company reputation from negative bloggers, ranking postings, and even defamatory content submitted anonymously from business competitors. Data from a recent survey of 300 consumers from the Society of New Communications Research stated that “74% (of consumers) choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online.” This statistical data supports what many individuals and companies had to find out the hard way, for most people, the information they read online directly correlates with the opinions they form (and often the purchases they make).

Defamatory content can, if properly optimized, make its way to the top of the search engine results and ruin its subject, be that a Fortune 500 company or a single person. Search engines rank by relevancy and not by quality. Therefore, lies and misinformation can be spread just as easily as honest concern or complaint.

This is why online reputation management is important. It serves as a defense to negative and defamatory content against your company. In the past few years a number of companies have been built with the sole purpose of online reputation management.  The general idea of which is to control what the potential customers see.

There are many SEO marketing strategies that suggest how you can manage your online reputation by filling up the front page of the search results with fresh content, moving all the negative content to other pages. Some of these online reputation management tactics are: creating your own website (or multiple sites), blogging, press releases, creating a squidoo lens, submitting videos to youtube.com, and creating social network profiles such as facebook.com, myspace.com, linkedin.com , and zoominfo.com that can show up in the search results. Then you must engage in a link building strategy to assure these sites will rank well on the search engines to move the negative feedback to other result pages. These blogs, social profiles and articles provide new, and hopefully more accurate, accounts of a story than previously reported. This content, along with the SEO marketing strategies discussed, can help shape public opinion through the internet and assist in protecting your company’s reputation.
An example of this would be a consumer complaining on numerous websites about a bad experience with a product. Let’s say you are a medium sized company that sells children’s toys, and a consumer bought a toy for their kid’s birthday present, and the toy broke after only being used once.  If that consumer decides to express their concern online, and write negative reviews about your toys on numerous sites, you company could be negatively affected.  But, if that company was actively protecting their company reputation by engaging in online reputation management, they could provide fresh content to the search engines with positive customer reviews, information about the company, and why people should purchase toys from your company. Providing this alternate viewpoint would help the company’s image.

Why is online Reputation management important? It provides marketing stability, protects against unchecked defamation, and most importantly, allows a company to “put its best face forward” in the online world.


For more details visit our website http://www.arinesolutions.com
Our facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/ArineSolutions
Our LinkedIn Page : http://www.linkedin.com/company/arine-solutions
Our Twitter Page : https://twitter.com/ArineSolutions
Our Google+ Page : https://plus.google.com/+Arinesolutions