The Importance of Branding

The word brand originally referred to burning and it was associated with the process of marking an animal with a unique symbol so that the owner could identify it as part of his/her herd (in the days of the cowboys in the Wild West). The practice involved heating in a fire a branding iron that was fashioned into a symbol, which would then be pressed against the hide of an animal and leaving a permanent scar on the body.
The term brand in our hi-tech society has a wider meaning; it is the identity of a specific product, service or business and is being used extensively in marketing. It can take many forms, including name, sign, symbol, color combination and slogan. The highest level of success in branding is to create an image that is instantly recognizable and is associated with a company, product or service. This takes a considerable amount of investments of time and money. Companies that have achieved this include for example McDonalds (with its Golden Arches), Microsoft for software (name and font), Google for search engine (name and font), and Facebook and Twitter for social networking (name and font).
During the past decade, there has been a rapid increase in the number of people using web based social media for networking and “marketing”. This rapidly growing phenomenon created relatively new buzzwords such as viral marketing and viral advertising; they refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.
A particularly unique aspect of viral marketing is the effective use of branding through social media such as Facebook (over 400 million active users) and Twitter (over 70 million visitors). However, the challenge is to get visitors who see your message to actually read it. Long “selling” messages on Facebook are likely to be overlooked by your FB friends unless some intriguing branding is included in the first 3-4 words. On Twitter, the importance of branding is even more critical due to the 140 character limitation on messages. The next step after getting attention with branding is to take the “looker” to a web site and attract them to become “buyers”. This can result in another show stopper because the first page on a website is often a general description of the company and it may take one or more clicks to get to the item that caught the attention of the looker in the first place. This problem may be solved by creating a link from the social media to a blog site where the item of interest is briefly described and/or illustrated with descriptive imaging or linked to a website where the item for sale can be purchased such as Amazon.com
Such a marketing approach is being used effectively to promote the sale of books and consulting services by experts such as Peggy McColl, a New York Times best-selling author, author of Viral Explosions and internationally recognized expert on marketing; see:
http://blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com/2010/07/peggy-mccoll-viral-explosion-blog.html
Roslyn Franken, co-author of Death Can Wait and author of “The A list: 9 Guiding Principles of Healthy Eating and Positive Living” is also using this approach effectively for book sales and for consulting assignments: http://roslynfranken.blogspot.com/
I am also using this approach to communicate to Facebook and Twitter friends my activities, my stories that are being published in CanAsian Times, and the promotion of my book “Dare to Take the Next Step” that is sold on Amazon.com as Print on Demand and on Diesel as eBook: http://frankhegyi.blogspot.com/ In all instances, branding was found to be a critical ingredient of success.