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Business Help: Branding is better than a Lead?

If you’ve ever paid to have someone create advertising for you, you know better than most how easy it is to get caught up in the “branding” trap.

Most ad agencies and designers help you fall into this trap, by telling you the most important thing you can do as a business owner is to create a brand.

But what is a brand?

Chances are, if you asked 100 different ad people what their definition of a brand was, you would get 100 different answers.

At ActionCOACH, we believe the best ads aren’t the best looking, the prettiest, or the best designed.

The best ads are those ads that generate qualified leads.

So the next time you get the “pitch” from an advertising agency or media outlet looking to part you and your marketing “investment,” ask them a simple question.

“How many leads can I expect to generate from this campaign?”

Most simply won’t be able to give you a good answer, because they’ve never actually created an ad that has ever sold anything.

So before you spend any more precious resources on advertising that doesn’t work, arm yourself with strategies and information based on advertising that does work.

And in this case, that means advertising that generates qualified leads for your business.

Discover for yourself what some of those strategies are. Look at the classic advertising and marketing literature of Claude Hopkins or John Caples or even David Ogilvy.

Then talk with a local ActionCOACH Business Coach who can guide you and your marketing “investment” to effective, proven and profitable results.

Branding- Don’t destroy your niche

Building a brand is what any business wants to do. From Coca- Cola to McDonalds, every major business success has a brand recognizable to its customers. Of course, there are times when trusted brands need a makeover, but what happens when the makeover goes too far?

The University of Sydney is currently going through just such a situation.

Looking to upgrade their look and stay competitive with other top universities around the world, the university appointed a management branding committee to upgrade the university’s appeal. One of the first things the committee did was insist that each department within the university lose its unique identity.

No longer would each department use its own letterhead. A fortune was spent on replacing department letterheads with the new standard university letterhead featuring the new, unpopular insignia.

Departments were also subject to increased paperwork, higher costs and little accountability for those costs thanks to other branding recommendations.

Handbooks were issued explaining how faculty and other staff should speak to students, a useless expenditure for a university that has been able to speak to students for more than 150 years without help from a management handbook. More importantly, class size rose and educational quality has gone down accordingly.

Ranked as one of the top universities in the world, The University of Sydney did not need to undergo a major change to its brand to service its community and students as it had always done.

The university had a major flaw in its vision. Rather than looking at ways to lower costs for students, who have seen tuition rise exponentially, the University made a decision to try to fix something that was already working, their brand.

Was the brand really the problem? It wasn’t before, but it is now, as the university losses part of its historic appeal and pays for the right to do so in the process.

This is an important lesson for business owners to understand. Remember, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Always test and measure any marketing campaign before you start. Don’t dive into a strategy that will cost you money, productivity, quality and, possibly customers, like the University of Sydney did.