Strategic Marketing Made Simple
Practical tips based on scientific data and real-life examples to help you create a strong brand that drives long-term profits for your startup or small business.
11 Promising Alternative Social Medias to Build Your Brand
Established social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn can be a great vehicle for building your brand. But it can be tough for brands to stand out and amass a following, especially if you are small. Most of the established platforms have shifted to a pay-to-play model…
The Fundamentals Of Brand Trust: Building Trust The Right Way
It’s important for brands to nurture trust, no matter big or small. In fact, it’s easier for small brands and can lead to significant financial benefits. Brand trust is all about credibility and integrity. Once you understand that you can build brand trust more effectively. Trust is important in essentially…
Marketing ROI: When It’s Useful & When It’s Misleading
Marketing ROI appears to be lauded as the go-to metric to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing initiatives. Though definitely useful, marketing ROI can also be misleading and undermine your brand performance in the long run. You need to make sure only to apply marketing ROI when it’s…
4 Consumer Insights That Help SMEs Gain a Competitive Edge
SMEs suffer a disadvantage in the marketplace when competing against large brands. There are, however, several psychological consumer insights that SMEs can use to their advantage. These include personifying the producer, positioning as an underdog, using attractive packaging and crowdfunding their products. Startups and other small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)…
Why Attractive Packaging Design Is Important for Your Brand
Attractive packaging design is important for your brand. It helps you stand out, consumers prefer packaging they feel is aesthetic, it creates certain expectations of quality and has priming effects, and converts at the point of purchase. Attractive packaging stimulates the senses and works on a subconscious level to ease…
Advice To Business Owners: Don’t Ignore Brand Hate
Brand hate is inevitable for every business. As people grow a liking to you, other people start to dislike you. Brand hate is caused by three key emotions: disgust, contempt and anger in different combinations that lead to different behavioral outcomes. Marketing discussion tends to focus on the positive emotional…
What Is Woke Washing And How To Avoid It?
Brands are shifting their attention toward brand activism as sociopolitical issues become more prominent in the social debate. Most of these initiatives, sadly, are inauthentic woke washing. You may have heard of greenwashing, but now there is a fancy new term in town: Woke Washing. As sociopolitical issues earn a…
Why Do People Buy Luxury Goods And Why Are They So Expensive?
People buy luxury goods to gain status and ultimately improve their lives. Luxury brands are expensive because they have to be. If luxury brands were cheap, they would lose their ability to ascribe social status to their buyers. Porsche is the most valuable luxury brand in the world. Brand Finance…
Brand Identity Analysis: A Barnes & Noble Case Study
Brand identity is one of an organization’s most valuable possessions and you should go to great lengths to nurture it. Barnes & Noble is an example of a brand that didn’t. In this post, you will learn how to carry out a brand identity analysis using Barnes & Noble as…
What is a high involvement purchase decision?
Consumers make both low and high involvement purchase decisions. Low involvement decisions are quick and automatic while high involvement decisions take much more effort. A high involvement purchase decision can have low involvement steps and is shaped by a number of personal and situational factors. Consumers make decisions that are…
7 Powerful Benefits Of Brand Communities That Increase Profit
Brand management is moving towards a more open and collaborative approach that embraces brand communities. The benefits of brand communities are many and versatile. Whether through increased consumer satisfaction and fulfillment or direct brand affects, all help in improving the profitability of the organization. Goodbye, ivory towers. Hello, brand communities!…
![What are brand communities? 3 unique qualities [+ examples]](https://brandalfblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/what-are-brand-communities-featured-image.jpg)
What are brand communities? 3 unique qualities [+ examples]
Brand communities are vibrant collections of brand fans that form on its own or are engineered by marketers. All brand communities have rituals and traditions and its members share consciousness and have a sense of moral responsibility to one another. Brand communities provide rich benefits for both consumers and brands.…
Simple brand extension strategy that doesn’t kill authenticity
Brand extension strategy should nurture the perceived authenticity of your brand. Authentic extensions maintain standards and style, honor brand heritage, preserve the brand essence and avoid brand exploitation. Authenticity is one of the most valuable assets of symbolic brands and should be included in a broader extension strategy. When a…
33 everyday words that are in fact brand names
Brands often become so commonplace in culture that their literary expressions make their way into everyday vocabulary and become generic terms. Formally, these are called generic trademarks. This can happen for many reasons but usually a company introduces a product with a distinctive brand name that becomes so popular that…
Is your brand really authentic? Here’s how to find out
As the market is flooded with fake and inauthentic marketing it is now more important to be authentic. Authenticity is a tricky thing to fully grasp. You can measure perceived brand authenticity by asking your customers what they think about the continuity, credibility, integrity and symbolism of your brand. Raise…
How to Effectively Respond to a Social Media Crisis
Brands will sooner or later face some backslash online. If it escalates, it is necessary to know how to respond to a social media crisis. You need to define what constitutes a crisis and then consider from where the crisis originates when crafting your response. Make sure to have a…
The complete history of branding
The history of branding can be traced back to sealing practices in Mesopotamia 7000 BCE. Throughout the ages brands have signaled information and been a source of symbolism all over the world: from Modern day Iraq, to Cyprus, China and the US. Brands have become more sophisticated and the environment…
How brands use co-creation
The Co-Creation Continuum is a good model to gauge how brands use co-creation. It ranges from a sporadic approach that sees co-creation as a tactical market research tool to a systematic implementation of co-creation as a strategic collaborative innovation method. Most brands use co-creation more tactically Brands are a process.…
Case study: Stimulating the customer journey
“If marketing has one goal, it’s to reach consumers at the moments that most influence their decisions.” Court, Elzinga, Mulder & Vetvik[1] in The Consumer Decision Journey Brands need to have knowledge of their touchpoints if they are to be able to influence the moments that matter. Stimulating the customer…
Case Study: Changing public perceptions of insurance
People don’t like insurance companies. They see them as greedy evil sales organizations that care only about their own profits. Some don’t even trust them to pay out claims[1]. This is ironic since paying out claims is the fundamental service these companies offer to customers. It’s sort of like not…