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Brand Ideals, Jim Stengel, Mark Traphagen, SEO & Startups

Brand Ideals, Jim Stengel, Mark Traphagen, SEO & Startups | Startup Revolution | Scoop.it
From plus.google.com - May 19, 2015 8:07 AM

Brand Ideals
Learning your company's "brand ideals" may be the most important branding work few startups accomplish. SEO and content take a backseat to widget development for most startups. 

Yet isn't the most important question WHERE are the points of connection with potential customers and/or investors? The latter, investors, receive plenty of attention when they are easy. Investors want CONSUMERS and lots of 'em.

So the best way to connect with investors is to connect with consumers and the best way to connect with consumers is to know, articualte and share your "brand ideals":

 * Eliciting Joy: Activating experiences of happiness, wonder, and limitless possibility.
* Enabling Connection: Enhancing the ability of people to connect with each other and the world in meaningful ways.
* Inspiring Exploration: Helping people explore new horizons and new experiences.
* Evoking Pride: Giving people increased confidence, strength, security, and vitality.
* Impacting Society: Affecting society broadly, including by challenging the status quo and redefining categories.  

Those "brand ideals" come from Grow: How Ideals Power Profits At The World's Largest Companies by Jim Stengel and is a must read for any startup entrepreneur who wants investors....after they've won the hearts and minds of consumers. 

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Rescooped by Martin (Marty) Smith from Expertiential Design
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Branding For Startups: Win Hearts, Minds, Loyalty

Branding For Startups: Win Hearts, Minds, Loyalty | Startup Revolution | Scoop.it
From www.cx-journey.com - November 14, 2014 12:22 PM

Marty Note
The linked post is important, but not for the reasons they think. The post mentions the factoid that most people wouldn't mind if 73% of brands disappeared. The post discusses brands like Tom's who wins hearts and minds with cause marketing.

We love Tom's too. Yes, what you do with customer money is important these days. We prefer the Cone Communications (http://www.conecomm.com/ ) "social good" study that shows a growing trend. Consumers what to know how your STUFF helps change the world.

People don't BUY brands they JOIN them.
Faith Popcorn

Marketing guru Faith Popcorn's quote is a favorite. We would reposition the linked post toward the more important question - how is your brand creating sustainable community. Since most of http://www.Curagami.com customers are online merchants we would write the goal as, "How is your brand creating sustainable ONLINE community".

Online community is the secret to branding and engagement over time. We think of loyalty with two dimensions:

* Engagement over TIME (joining and visiting).

* Advocacy (willing to share with friends).

Every visitor can achieve #1, but a tiny % of your website's traffic will ever do #1 due to the 1:9:90 Rule. The 1:9:90 Rule explains the strange math of website visitors:

1% Contributors - 1% of your traffic will contribute content such as comments, reviews and the social shares such User Generated Content (UGC) generate.
9% Supporters - this group loves to share your content especially if it came from the 1%ers.
90% Readers - More important than their label makes them sound, Readders are the core of your visitors and so essential to SEO and your expanding web universe.

The trick to web marketing few discuss is converting that tribe of Contributors, Supporters and Readers into a sustainable online community. Branding creates the shorthand your Contributors and Supports use to ADVOCATE.

When you market by proxy, you are using Contributors and Supporters to reach their friends, you must encapsulate deep meaning into shareable "Made To Stick" bits and bytes. Your advocates can't share if your message is too complicated, so boil it down, mix it up and test, test and test some more. In there somewhere is the strange alchemy your brand needs to compel action (joining and advocating) and so win hearts, minds and loyalty.

BTW, I bent this post toward startups because every startup is tabula rasa when it comes to branding. Startups are blank slates written on by every piece of content, social share and tool created. We don't brand in order to create loyalty we win hearts, minds and loyalty in order to create brands and First Rule of Branding is what the linked post has backwards.



Via Eric_Determined / Eric Silverstein, Michael Allenberg
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Eric_Determined / Eric Silverstein's curator insight, November 7, 2014 2:07 PM

According to a survey, most people would not care if 73% of the brands would disappear!?


Share your latest experience on what your favorite brands are doing to earn your Loyalty, and ultimately your Advocacy?


It does start with earning your #trust.


Great insight @annettefranz @SDLjames with strong value connections @TOMS @USAA
Ahmed Alkandari's curator insight, November 15, 2014 9:01 PM

"Most people worldwide would not care if more than 73% of brand disappeared." So, are companies wasting their money on advertisements and marketing; since, most people won't care about weather the brand will disappeared or not?! People who have brand loyalty are supposed to care if the brand they are loyal to will be available or not on the future. Also would these people considered faithful to their brand if they don't care?

What are brands might been doing wrong with customers?

don't focus on the customersare not providing value relative to priceare not providing value relative to the competition/alternativeshave broken customers' trustdon't deliver on their promisesdon't care about customersdon't meet customer expectationsare not innovative (think "same old same old")deliver a fragmented or poor experience

With all of these point, the relationship between them and their customers will be broken. Therefore, companies should focus more on their customers and design a good customer experience. Companies shouldn't only care about making money, they should also care and focus about being a part of something that matters to people and mean something to them.

 

Most of the article was asking questions and some questions didn't have answers in the article, they are open for general thinking and answering. It's interesting about how most people won't care if a brand disappeared on the future; for me I would! Of course life won't stop and new brands will enter the market. However, Some brands people got used to it and can's change that easily; the example of Apple. I also found it important about what they mentioned for customers relationship with the company. In my opinion, companies that focuses more on their relationship with their customers and making sure to build an experience with their customers are more successful than companies that focusses on making profits and increase their revenue. I a customer became loyal to a company and he had an experience with that company, he won't mind paying more on that company's goods. The reason is that the company had built a trust and an experience to that customer so he will be faithful and he would care about the brand and the company.
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