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30 Seconds To a Better Brand

October 20th, 2008 @ 12:52 pm

2 Comments

Categories: Work Life

Tags: Brand, Branding, Marketing, Michael Fitzgerald

I just took a 30-second branding quiz.  While silly, mocking and in poor taste (in other words, don’t try this at work), a piece of its advice was useful: it would help me immensely to have my personal brand, or better yet, my avatar, blown-up in a video game.  Especially if that were the goal of the game.  Editors everywhere would ask me to write about that and pay very high word rates, I’m sure.

More seriously, it was 30 worthwhile seconds if you:

  • Feel like your branding experts are stuffy and wish you could say so;
  • Hope to inspire some anarchic re-thinking of your brand strategy;
  • Want to see a reasonably effective use of automated humor to push a product.

Here are my full results:

Your brand should be repositioned as a category standard.  Your attributes are enviable, yet exemplary; fast, yet slow; discovered, yet unkown. There’s a comprehensive branding strategy waiting just for you, but it will cost the salaries of a few hundred of your middle managers. They’ll understand.

Your brand strategy should be to provide multi-layer experience opportunities at various customer  touchpoints to maximize the essence of your unique value proposition. Buzz marketing is the way to go, especially if you can get college students to associate your brand with 11:24 pm.

Stay true to your brand convictions. Red says ‘look at me,’ so use it exclusively, even if it means placing red text on a red background. Make your CEO start a blog and post something every 10 minutes. If you have trucks, convert them to run on cologne. Pay to get your product blown up in a video game.

It then goes on to make a pitch for a book on branding.

Know of a good business read you'd like to share with your fellow BNET readers?

 
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  •  
    1

    ennyman

    10/21/08 | Report as spam

    RE: 30 Seconds To a Better Brand

    OK, I took the quiz... not all of it was relevant... yes, it was intended to hook you to read the pitch for the book.

    I then went to amazon to read the reviews for the book. Three were five stars. This was was a pan. I quote a short snippet: "The writer doesn't like branding, or at least what he thinks people think branding is. I'm really not sure what his point was, as he just launched into a series of attacks on dumb, failed campaigns. The cutesy/folksy style fills pages, but encouraged me to skim for nuggets I could use. Or at least recognize. And I came up empty."

    Branding is under attack in part because Capitalism is pretty much out of favor in some sectors. (my speculation) It is also somewhat mischaracterized, just as Quality is misrepresented. Quality does not always mean The Best. Saltine crackers are not the BEST crackers, but their quality control makes them the same every time you open the box. There are tastier crackers out there, more interesting, and more expensive...

    Every ideology is a brand, actually. So... what's his?

  •  
    2

    jonathansalembaskin

    10/21/08 | Report as spam

    RE: 30 Seconds To a Better Brand

    Ideology? Simple: brand is behavior...everything else is lead-up
    or narration. I filled my book with detailed arguments and a
    number of blue-sky ideas. I encourage you to read it. The
    branding widget is a (hopefully) funny diversion.

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