Brand Building

Brand Awareness

3 Building Blocks to Increase Brand Awareness

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The most digitally savvy and coolest Midwest Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

“How do I increase brand awareness?”

This is one of the main marketing challenges we hear when talking to businesses. Not limited to B2C (Business to Consumer) or B2B (Business to Business) companies, they all want to be seen and known in their markets. Of course, this is a means to an end because what they really want is to Grow Their Business. The more people know about them, the more opportunities to sell.

Easy, right?

Before messages are crafted and communication vehicles are launched, the process of increasing brand awareness needs to start somewhere. This is where strategic marketing development starts: 3 key building blocks that should be in place before a dime is spent on online or traditional marketing and advertising begins.

1. Know Thyself

Who are you (brand-wise)?
How is your brand better/different than the competition and why should your target audience care about you? A positioning strategy for your brand is a key building block because it should provide the foundation for all communications. For instance, this 2015 SuperBowl ad for mass-market beer brand Budweiser proudly grabs its rightful “King of Beers” position as a macro beer for the masses by positioning it against tiny micro-brew brands. What’s your brand’s rightful position—are you a macro or a micro…or somewhere in between?

Why does this matter? Understanding your brand position becomes the touchpoint and foundation for all your brand awareness communications.

2. Know Thy Enemy

One thing that helps a brand succeed is defining what it is not. For instance, when this famous ad series started, Apple knew all the right cliche and perception buttons to push to make the PC look like a stodgy, slow, out-of-touch product. Apple comes off the approachable, very easy to use and fun-to-own computer brand. How are you better / different from your enemy?

Why does this matter? Your brand is different and customers love you for it. Fully understanding your competitive difference is the catalyst to understanding what to say to appeal to new customers.

3. Know Thy Audience

A brand can’t be everything to everybody. The tighter the focus on the target audience, the higher the success rate. For instance, A brand that speaks to common ground and sympathy even in the most comically divergent cliche philosophies when it comes to feeding a baby by knowing the market of first-time moms and what they care about. Who is your brand focusing on?

Why does this matter? It’s a big, loud, busy mess out there. A highly focused message that is speaking to the target audience in their language has a better chance of cutting through the clutter to get heard.

 

Start with these top 3 commandments are met, your brand should be set to increase brand awareness. Knowing your brand, your competitive advantage, and your audience means you should know who you need to reach, how you are different from the competition, and what the message is to get grab their attention.

Do you need help in creating a campaign to grow your brand awareness? From working within your budget to driving the plan and reporting ROI, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Launched in 1972, idc-marketing is the most versatile, prominent, and coolest advertising agency in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service firm that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

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2 Key Components of a Strong Brand Positioning Strategy

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The Most Strategic and Motivated Midwset Digital Marketing Firm Offers Tips to Grow Your business

The 2 Key Components of a Strong Brand Positioning Strategy

Why does anyone care about your brand?

That’s the cornerstone question to ask if your goal is to build a strong brand-positioning strategy and grow your company.

At the highest level, that question breaks down to two elements:

  1. Audience
  2. Competition

A brand position must be relevant to the audience.

Relevance   noun rel·e·vance /ˈrel ə v(ə)ns/
The quality of being directly connected with and important to something else.

A brand position must be relevant to the prospect in the way it speaks to what the target audience cares about.

That means taking time to define your audience is the first and most important step in positioning a brand. This goes beyond the top-line demographics that are easy to pick—age, gender, and geographical location. Do the homework, and dig down into what is driving the target audience to the brand category. What is the psychographic makeup of your target audience? What are they thinking about brand positions in this category? In other words, go past the intellectual “features and benefits” that a brand’s service or product can offer and strive for the emotional connection to what the audience wants or needs.

A brand position must be relative to every other competitive option.

Relative   noun rel·a·tive  /ˈrel ə tɪv/
Having a particular quality when compared with something else.

Competition is brutal in every category. Your brand’s target audience has many options when considering to buy a product or service or become a customer. To stand out, a brand needs to own a position within the brand category that clearly defines that brand relative to the other brands out there.

At idc, we spend a lot of time and energy focusing on these two elements—audience and competition—working with companies in determining their brand positions, strengthening their brands, and growing their companies.

Looking to build a strong brand postion in your market or category? From branding to digital to traditional marketing, we are motivated in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the smartest Lafayette, Indiana advertising agency. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

BrandingFirm

3 Things Great Branding Firms Don’t Want You to Do

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Lafayette’s Biggest, Oldest and Hippest Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your business

3 Things Great Branding Firms Don’t Want You to Do

Just as every sports coach wants to see his or her team become champions, every great branding firm wants to see its business clients grow into big, powerful brands.

Inevitably, though, in business—just like in sports—success can change a competitor. It can breed complacency and lull champions into taking for granted that just because “we’re at the top of the mountain, we’ll stay here.”

But the greats never stop competing. And they never lose sight of three big-brand pitfalls that are otherwise bound to happen.

That’s why, at idc when our clients start seeing the top of the mountain, we always warn them. . . .

1. Don’t Tell Your Market What to Do.

Remember when Google told the world that we can no longer use the name Google as a verb unless we’re literally referring to the use of the Google search engine?

In other words, if you say you “Googled it,” when you actually used Yahoo. . . . Well, that’s a problem. And don’t think Google doesn’t know who you are or where you live. As an added plus, here are Ten Things You Didn’t Know Google Now Could Do in an excellent post by @LaurenGoode.

Problem is, for all of Google’s massive influence and power, they cannot transcend the truth that their market is always bigger than they are.

Here’s where Google got it wrong—you can’t fight the market. And when the market uses your name as a generic, replace-all term for your category, maybe instead of fighting it, you find a way to use all the free advertising.

“Can you Xerox® this for me?”
“Go in the medicine cabinet, and get me a Band-Aid.®”
“This blog makes me want to keep a box of Kleenex® handy.”

This means the company owns its category. Why would you want to mess with that?

2. Don’t Put Your Name on Everything.

A great branding firm knows: in a world of ever-expanding multinational companies, the top name may not mean beans to the brand.

Sony made the original walkman. Now, they make the PlayStation and own a movie studio. But did you know Sony owns Sony Biotechnology Inc., which provides quality products and innovative solutions to the global flow cytometry market? I don’t even know what that is. Sony also owns Micronics, Inc., a leading developer of near-patient in vitro diagnostic products for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment monitoring. In many cases, Sony’s name is at the top of its business. Sometimes it’s not.

Contrast that with Procter & Gamble. No one confuses Old Spice® deodorant with Duracell® batteries or Tide® laundry detergent. Each is a strong brand and carries the P&G ownership on the back label—not on the front.

Why not? This makes it easier to sell as a whole business unit. P&G sold off its Pringles® potato chips to Kellogg. Would the Pringles sale have happened if it were trying to move its Procter & Gamble® brand potato chips?

Another branding truth: The stronger the focus, the stronger the brand. If you spread the name out to cover too many products, the name weakens. If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.

3. Don’t Forget—the Customer Is Always Right.

We’ve all had bad customer service. Sometimes you take it, sometimes it drives you to the competitor and sometimes you learn from it.

Some pretty large companies get customer service all wrong. Is your cable company one of them? Is it the cattle-drive and dismissive manner in which some airlines treat you?

When these things happen to us, take a look at the person you are dealing with. They are on the front lines, representing a living, breathing embodiment of that company’s brand.

Regardless, no matter how big you get—remember that the brand that invests in the front lines of its customer relationships will not be the next cable company or airline.

This Also Translates to Staying “Small” If You Want to Grow

By small, I mean humble—no matter how successful you become.

Before your brand gets too big for its britches, look around to make sure you have a strong brand foundation in place for your brand, your focus and your customer service. Otherwise, you risk completely losing your audience.

Looking for a great branding firm to build a strong, competitive brand? From branding to digital to traditional marketing, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the most consistently successful branding firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

Brainstorm-Mktg

3 Smart Steps to Brainstorm Creative Marketing

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The Best, Oldest, and Biggest Full-Service Lafayette, Indiana Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

The 3 Smartest Steps to Brainstorming Creative Marketing

In basketball, a “shooter’s mentality” usually means the player is not going to let missing a shot or two deter them from taking another shot.

Michael Jordan made almost 50% of his shots. That means he missed around 50% too. But he kept shooting. Great shooters do not think about missing. Once the thought of missing shots gets in the player’s head, the chances for success diminish.

“I never looked at the consequences of missing a big shot. Why? Because when you think about the consequences, you always think of a negative result.” ~ Michael Jordan

 This is not a “brick.” This is a “swoosh.” A brick is a shot where the ball makes a huge clang-like noise on the basketball rim and does not go in the basket.

I’ve been lucky enough to be a professional creative my entire career, and as Michael Jordan, I’m sure half my ideas are big ol’ bricks that bounce harmlessly off the rim. Did that stop me from trying again? No. I know those ideas will never see the light of day in a marketing campaign for a client. I just need to work through the bad ideas because sometimes they lead to great ones. And yes, there is always a little self-delusion involved, as you may have observed—I just compared myself to Michael Jordan.

But speaking of him, how many hours in the gym do you think Michael Jordan spent to develop his shooter’s mentality—to develop the confidence that he can make the shot because he has prepared and practiced it for years, leading up to that moment?

Like making a game-winning shot, great creative is not an accident. We find that a few simple steps can lead to great creative marketing, designed to help grow a business.

1. Do your homework.

Know your brand. Know your audience. Know your objectives.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but I’ve seen firsthand marketing created in a vacuum where the creatives brainstorm something witty and award-winningly clever. Then, they create the backstory of how they got there.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. It may be the TV commercial you laughed at but cannot remember the product or service advertised. That typically means the creative team did not align the core message with the brand. This is why I cannot tell most beer commercials apart; most are funny and enjoyable, but the concept seems to be interchangeable between brands.

Even in another language that ad works. But what makes their commercial specifically branded Heineken? If this ad agency got the Bud Light account, would it be any different?

The very word “brainstorm” can imply open-minded, free-thinking to a lot of people, and with that, give them the idea that no rules apply. I have been taught just the opposite: that there is freedom (and success) in rules.

Only when you have studied the demographics, compiled the survey results, looking at the history of the category…basically done your best to absorb every resource available to understand the market and objectives can you develop great contextually relevant, branded creative in a “blue-sky” brainstorming session. When all the homework is complete and the objectives are identified the next step is to…

2. Assemble a great team.

 You will NOT want to interrupt the big, green dude.

No man (or creative) is an island. Like the Marvel Avengers, everyone brings something to the party. This is the “secret sauce” of any great creative team. It helps to have the right mix of idea people and pragmatic or data-driven people. It also might be good to include a ringer, an outsider…maybe a freelance writer or a trusted vendor. We’ve invited improv actors. A sense of humor is always welcome on my team. One thing holds true for everyone in the room…

 

3. Brainstorm in a safe environment

The idea is to generate ideas. We find the best way to accomplish that is to have a balance between yin and yang, up and down, black and white and most importantly, YES and NO.

Poo-poo an idea, and Mr. Crabbie gets thrown at you.

No interrupting (let the idea get out!). No poo-pooing ideas (withhold criticism). No hierarchy in the room (everyone’s idea has equal value).

Yes to quantity (get as many ideas out as possible—this is where a “shooter’s mentality” is a real asset). Yes to welcoming an unusual idea (it may be “out there” but spark a hidden solution). Yes to combining, improving or “building” on an idea (also known as 1 + 1 = 3).

In this type of safe brainstorming environment, marketing professionals, like those at idc, can truly shine. We are prepared for the moment, the clock is running, and we are ready to score the winning shot (or develop that business-building campaign). 40+ years of practicing successful creative marketing have taught this team a thing or two about winning.

Do you have creative marketing questions? From digital to traditional marketing, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

idc-FORBES-OldSchool

Patrick Nycz on Forbes Agency Council Panel: Tips to Refresh Your Brand

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Lafayette Indiana’s Most Creative, Highest-Profile and Oldest Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

Need to See New Ways a Business can Refresh Your Brand?

Members of the Forbes Agency Council share tips to help businesses refresh their brands. PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS.

As a proud member of the Forbes Agency Council, I am regularly invited to participate in expert panels. It’s a great exercise that provides different viewpoints on the same topic.

This panel provides 15 tips for refreshing your business’ brand across platforms.

Here’s my take:

Focus On A New Facet Of Your Story

Refreshing a brand might be as easy as leveraging the original branding investment to find a new story to tell. It’s my experience that good foundational branding not only identifies a position to own relative to the competition and the essence of what makes the brand relevant to the target market(s) but also produces multiple dimensions—or facets—of the brand to be mined to keep messaging fresh. – Patrick Nycz

Find out what other marketing experts think on the topic, check out the full article here.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how marketing can help your company or about idc marketing (or, if you have a product for the food industry, NewPoint), please reach out to the idc marketing team — interested in other marketing tips marketing? Please visit our “How We Think” page or check out my book on food marketing: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the hippest, smartest and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

FormLetter

Is Your Marketing Like a Christmas Form Letter?

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The Coolest, Yet Hottest Lafayette, Indiana Marketing Firm Writes An IDC Christmas Marketing Letter to Santa

I never read Christmas form letters.

Besides the fact that a Christmas form letter is typically the only time I hear from the sender all year (if I have a relationship to the author, I should already know most of the stuff in the letter, right?), most of the reasons are summed up in this awesome and funny post, Every Christmas Letter Ever, by Tim Siedell (@badbanana).

Siedell’s post nails Christmas form letters because they are all about the author and how much better their wonderful life is from ours. Do they think we have been desperately waiting to hear about the lives that they were too busy to tell us about all year? They do not take into consideration how the audience must feel having to slog through the thing desperately looking for some connection to their own lives. Guess what? Stop looking. There is none.

This happens in my world all the time. And because I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about marketing, I can’t help where my brain goes. I see marketing messages all the time that don’t seem to have their audiences in mind. They talk about their company (me) and their great products (my big idea)—just like those awful Christmas form letters. We wrote a blog about this illustrating how to use the IDC brand affinity scorecard to score your message connection to the target audience. It works for Christmas form letters, too. Let’s see if we can use our scorecard to create a better Christmas form letter.

The typical Christmas form letter spot is reserved for the lowest ranking of “1”. It is about “You and Your Idea.” The audience is probably a distant second. A message that fits this spot typically is about how old your company is and how all the bells and whistles your product has, like this Colgate ad:

 

Now the form letter (and the message) can move up a few notches if it has the audience in mind. Maybe the reader somehow shares something the audience might want to know about…let’s say an awesome and easy Christmas punch recipe from Paula Dean. The letter gets elevated to “Others and Things.” Where “others” = Paula Dean and “things” = the punch. In the marketing world, this might look like “4 out of 5 dentists,” which may mean something to the audience and the score can get to 25 or higher.

What if the Christmas form letter was about the audience (people) and what they cared about (their loved ones)? It could include highlights of all the get-togethers the author had with friends and loved ones over the year. It might also contain lots of pictures and mention everyone the author cared about. Then the score jumps very high—it can get up to 100 if it is really about what people and the audience truly care about. A great example of this is an ad like this Apple FaceTime ad (I can see me in this ad…on a business trip seeing and talking to my beautiful wife and our kids back home):

So the question we need to ask is this: Is your marketing message like a typical Christmas form letter, or is your marketing message making a connection with the audience? I know one thing….if more Christmas form letters made me feel connected to the author, I would be reading them.

Do you need “outside-the-box” creative to help grow your brand? For help finding the creative to maximize your marketing investment, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is pretty much the smartest marketing agency in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

photography

Marketing Tips: Brand Photography & Video

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Lafayette’s Oldest, Biggest and Highest-Rated Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your business

Marketing Tips: Brand Photography & Video

Brand Photography and Video: Good photography can provoke powerful emotions. Instagram is filled with big and small brands that are doing some magnificent work building and connecting with their core audience through branded photography. We cannot stress enough the importance of maintaining a photo budget in your annual marketing plan so that you can partner with an art director who understands your brand requirements and a professional photographer with a full studio.

Buzzfeed’s Tasty food videos have fed the desire of foodies to learn new recipes, and these videos are a huge contributing factor in the explosion in popularity of branded food videos proliferating on all social media feeds from YouTube and Facebook to Instagram and Snapchat. Much depends on you presenting an excellent visual for your brand. Work with idc marketing to cultivate and hire great talent to produce your food videos.

Do you need photography or video to help grow your brand? From hiring the perfect phot or video pro for your project to organizing and managing the shoot to maximize your investment, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the highest rated, smartest and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

package

Marketing Tips: Brand Packaging

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The Coolest, Oldest, and Biggest Lafayette Indiana Marketing Firm Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

Marketing Tips: Brand Packaging

Packaging: When shoppers are at the store looking at products, they’re not necessarily making rational decisions. According to a 2016 Journal of Applied Packaging Research study, which is discussed at length in Chapter 9, consumers spend only about three to five seconds examining products on the shelves before purchase. This study also found that even though consumers have generally decided beforehand what kinds of products they want, 28 percent of them make their final decision— brand selection—in the store. Furthermore, the study indicated that 1 out of 10 purchasers may change their brand preferences inside the store.

Instead of thinking their way to the checkout, consumer purchases tend to be instinctive and reactive. They are purchasing instinctively by color, shape, and familiarity of location.

Effective packaging should encompass the entirety of your brand identity so that consumers can see at a glance what the product is and why it’s relevant to them. The product must deliver its brand promise each time, which fosters repeat purchases and encourages brand loyalty.

Do you need consumer brand packaging to help grow your brand? From developing a new branded product package for the Walmart shelf to refreshing a package for growth we are always interested in helping you grow!

Founded in 1972, idc-marketing is the coolest, biggest and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

campaign

Marketing Tips: Brand Marketing Campaign

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The Most Versatile, Oldest, and Biggest Lafayette Indiana Marketing Firm Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

Marketing Tips: Brand Marketing Campaign

Brand Marketing Campaign: By definition, a marketing campaign is a specific and defined series of activities used in marketing a new or changed product or a series of events launched in new marketing channels and methods. These channels include various digital marketing channels and social media, as well as traditional marketing channels such as print and broadcast media. While your company’s mission, message, and visual identity are likely to remain relatively constant over time, lasting up to a decade or longer, the marketing campaigns you develop should be less permanent. Your campaigns should be considered as annual or even seasonal methods of establishing, maintaining, and increasing consumer brand awareness.

For you, campaigns are an opportunity to deliver the essence of your brand message to consumers using different hooks that appeal to their behaviors and preferences at specific moments in time. Campaigns function as ways to invite consumer trial, unveil product innovations, promote deals, and highlight seasonal relevance. And, while marketing campaigns might come and go, they should always be carefully researched, well-executed, time-sensitive, and goal-oriented. Effective campaigns are often what separates growing companies from those with stagnant sales and no growth. Plus, as we heard from buyers in Chapter 3, they want you to help drive your products towards sales. Effective campaigns do that.

Do you need help in creating a brand marketing campaign to grow your brand? From working within your budget to driving the plan and reporting ROI, we are always interested in helping you grow!

Launched in 1972, idc-marketing is the most versatile, most prominent and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

Logo

Marketing Tips: Brand & Logo Design

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Lafayette’s Oldest, Biggest and Smartest Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

Marketing Tip: Brand & Logo Design

Brand & logo design, as defined by the American Marketing Association, is a graphic design that is used as a continuing symbol for a company, organization, or brand. Typically, a logo can be a mark, flag, symbol, or signature that is designed for use across various media. The attributes of an effective logo are much like the aspects of a powerful brand promise. They are …

Unique to your brand. Your logo should be easily identifiable against the competition.

Simple and memorable. Your logo should be easily recognizable. Also, if it’s simple, then it’s easily remembered. Think of the logo for General Mills or Apple. Both are minimalist, but still, possess strong
recognition with consumers. The challenge is that a logo should feature unique characteristics without being overly flashy.

Adaptable. A logo should work in every medium and application. To elaborate, will this logo be effective if it’s printed in a single color, or if it’s as small as a postage stamp or as large as a billboard.

Relevant. Is your logo consistent with your brand? Should you use fun, silly colors, and fonts? Or, should it be more severe and clean-cut? Making a logo compatible with your company aids in brand messaging for consumers and employees.

Sustainable. It’s helpful to design a logo that can endure for years or even decades. If your company ever expands, there’s a good chance your logo will need to evolve. For example, Coca-Cola has retained its
logo for almost a century and a half. Meanwhile, Pepsi has undergone frequent logo changes and iterations. The creation of a timeless logo encourages a nostalgic connection with long-time users and is therefore priceless.

Positioning your logo and determining how much room to leave in the area surrounding it may seem trivial. Still, a logo’s importance illustrates the exactitude and consistency needed during the creation of your brand’s visual identity. Positioning and spacing are essential guidelines to have written out so that designers know exactly how creative they can get, both initially and during brand development.

Are you considering a brand & logo design? From developing a new brand logo to launching a new company, we are always interested in helping you grow!

First introduced in 1972, idc-marketing is the smartest, biggest, and oldest advertising firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.

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