Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The brands that crush their competition are those who understanding that strategic branding goes much deeper than pretty visuals and responsive code. Branding is layered, sculpted, and tested.

To create a layered, brilliant, and competition-killing brand, three things must align.

1. Understanding of your brand (internal beliefs and communications)
2. Understanding of your best potential audience(s)
3. Understanding and differentiating from your competition

Combined, these elements create brand magic. To see these three things in action, keep on reading. Below I’ve curated some brilliant companies that are great at differentiating themselves from their competition....

In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts have had very little payoff.

As a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?

To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call crowdculture. Crowdculture changes the rules of branding—which techniques work and which do not. If we understand crowdculture, then, we can figure out why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding methods are empowered by social media....

Bob ‘The Ad Contrarian’ Hoffman opened the 2014 ITV Spotlight Lecture last March – a debate on the failed predictions of advertising experts over the past decade, with particular focus on the social media marketing of brands, to wit:

...there are people in our business who believe that consumers are ‘in love’ with brands. They believe consumers want to have ‘relationships’ with brands. they want to have ‘brand experiences’ and be ‘personally engaged with brands’.

These people actually believe this. You go to their Twitter profile: ‘I’m passionate about brands!’ You’re what? Dude, get a fucking girlfriend.

You’ll like Bob....

The changing way in which customers review products can be great for business ... or terrible.

You ask a friend where she got her new Macbook Air and she gushes about the selection and service at her local electronics store so much that you decide to check it out next time you're in her neighborhood. Your boss can't decide where to go out to dinner, so you pull up Yelp on your phone and find a nearby restaurant with the highest ratings. Whether you're aware of it or not, both you and the businesses you patronize benefit from brand advocacy.

Brand advocacy is the latest reincarnation of a concept that most of us are quite familiar with: word–of–mouth advertising, individual recommendations, vouching and the like. It relies on advocates promoting brands via personal marketing, which can be as simple as telling a friend verbally or posting on Facebook.

This method is incredibly effective because of a simple – and very, very human – concept: trust. We trust our friends, the Yelp community, particular bloggers or Twitter personalities who share their preferences and influence our decisions accordingly. From the consumer’s perspective, personal testimony is vastly more relatable than pure numbers, and we value reviews over ratings. How often have you looked at a Yelp or Amazon entry without reading the reviews?...