Branding is far wider then business identity and involves actual user experience of your organization brand, products, services, personnel, support etc. When user experience is taken into account, branding and marketing strategy will help develop business.
What are top branding challenges organizations face today?
Catching up with technology
Many organizations continue allocating smaller share to digital media despite changes in trends, user behavior and different requirements then 10 years ago. Understanding how users interact with brands today is critical in developing overall communication strategy. Same approach that worked over past 25 years will not work, should be modified to utilize current trends, build and leverage additional exposure through social media.
Not knowing user habits and behavior
Lack of user behavioral statistics and not knowing how users interact with products or services results in incorrect focus of marketing budgets. A detailed cost-per-lead analysis should be performed to understand true cost of lead acquisition in offline and online media. Comprehensive marketing strategy should be used maximizing brand exposure yet emphasis on most cost effective strategy.
Ad-hoc approach
Not enough planning results in hastily made decisions that are in fact most critical in nature. Fragmentation and lack of uniformity makes harder to maintain uniformity and consistency in branding.
Lack of corporate discipline
In today’s companies, it is often hard to oversee and maintain common understanding of existing on new branding standards. Resulting differences again lead to inconsistency in branding, strategy and corporate marketing. Better internal communication and enforcing common approach allows for better and faster adoption of new technologies, standards.
Lack of vision
Having marketing plan is not enough; it is important to have vision on how to develop business or organization two, three, five or more years from now.
Not knowing competition’s branding strategy
It is just as important to know and research competition as is customers. Starting with in-depth business optimization analysis, organizations should develop wider picture of how particular competition in their field covers multiple strategies of lead generation. Understanding of many factors is critical and helps to develop a winning strategy.
More informed organizations are, more power they have. Big Data is a word for 2012 and 2013 for a reason. Statistical information tells a story and allows to improve brands and make smarter business decisions.