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Brand marketing is the process of ascertaining, developing, and finally bringing a company’s image to the marketplace. It is important to know who will represent your target market. You want to know their age, gender, and location. You also want to know the potential consumer’s spending habits, and if your target market shows brand loyalty or if they can be swayed to another brand by a promotion or special offer.

How to Develop a Unique Brand

Always ask yourself what your brand can provide that no other brand can. Concentrate on your strengths. Remember to ask yourself what a potential consumer wants. Making a consumer believe that your brand is special or unique is an important part of brand marketing.

Why do Businesses Need Brand Marketing?

Businesses need brand marketing because it can increase sales. If a consumer knows your brand and says, “Hey, your company has a reputation for really getting things done,” then your chances of increasing sales are pretty good. You don’t want your brand to ever be forgettable because people will not spend money for “forgettable”.

Businesses also need brand marketing because successful brands will help generate business prospects. It’s just like in high school, the popular people always get their phone calls returned and are asked to go to all the social events. The same is true for recognizable brands. If you’re in the popular crowd, you get business lunch meetings and your phone calls stay at the top of the pile.

Brand Marketing Benefits Your Bottom Line

Brand marketing that is successful will help your business fetch premium fees and pricing for your product or service. If a consumer expects top quality from your brand, he is more willing to pay more for your product or service. This will also give you a leg up over the competition.

Implementing Brand Marketing

* Businesses can implement brand marketing by investing in its’ product, employees, and advertising. All of these factors are important in marketing your brand and serve to increase your brand value.

* Hire a professional graphic designer to design a unique look and feel for your logo, print, and online media. The result should reflect your market and current trends in brand design.

* You always want to be seen as unique in the eyes of potential consumers. They should only want to buy the product or service you offer, from you instead of your competition.

* Advertising should focus on your distinctiveness and consistency of service. This will affect consumer mind set.

* Remember to keep your brand up with the times. Use online advertising with an interactive feature. You want your brand to be seen by as many people as possible.

* Have your employees wear clothing with your brand logo on it. This gets people talking and asking questions about your product.

Brand marketing can prove to be another way for your business to increase revenues.

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Corporate branding is where the corporate name is the brand, and here the products tend to be described more in alpha numeric or letter terms, and not have distinctive brand names. Such is the case with BMW. Corporate branding gives each product the strength of the corporate brand values and positioning, and saves a great deal on advertising and promotional spend. It builds up the strength of the corporate brand and its financial value.

Corporate branding is very appropriate to those companies engaged in service industries, as their products are more intangible in nature. When consumers cannot see the product, the company brand name helps give them an assurance of quality, heritage, and authenticity.

Branding, a term used more and more often in the 90s, is more than just the image of a particular product. Branding is defined by Susan Friedmann, the Tradeshow Coach, as a basic marketing concept that is designed to set your products and services apart from the competition. Ward Randall, managing partner of The Brand Consultancy, a company specializing in brand strategy, management, and positioning, takes the definition a step further, saying, “Brands are all about making promises and keeping them.”

In a competitive marketplace, companies brand their products to help differentiate them from the competition. It would be naive to suggest that product branding in general is wrong or should be avoided, but it is fair to say that software branding is too often executed poorly. The goal of software branding is to associate the brand with the style and quality of the product and its experience. Too often, developers attempt to achieve this by drawing attention to the program itself. The result is to distract users instead of delight them.

It can also go further to product range branding, where a number of products or services in a broad category are grouped together under one brand name and promoted with one basic identity. An example here would be Intel’s Pentium and Celeron ranges of microprocessors. Whilst generating some economies of scale in advertising and promotion, care must be taken to ensure that the extensions do not step away from the central proposition of the main product brand, and that they do not cannibalise its sales.

The task of product branding is to build intangible values and associations around the tangible product in order to differentiate it from physically identical products that are available. Thus, a Nokia-branded cell phone suggests something different to a buyer and owner than a Samsung-branded cell phone, even if the quality level and feature set of the two phones are identical. Or detergent powder branded Tide vs the same powder branded Wheel signal powerful perceptual differences. Emotional benefits, sensory cues and brand personality leveraged in advertising are powerful ways to add layers of emotional meaning and intangible values to the basic product and differentiate it.

House or endorsement branding uses both ideas, and the corporate name is placed alongside the product brand name, as is the case with Nestle’s Milo. This allows the product brand to assume its own identity and positioning, but draw strength from the values of the corporate brand, and give consumers the assurance, in many cases related to quality, of the corporate brand. There are a variety of ways in which this can be achieved, with the corporate brand in lesser or greater prominence. House branding also gives some economies of scale in A&P, and helps with the introduction of new products, where it can be very difficult to break into mature markets without the endorsement of a strong and credible corporate parental brand name. One possible disadvantage is where the product is not favourably received and causes damage to the parental brand name.

Bearing this in mind, it becomes clear why regularly fine-tuning your branding strategy to better suit the desires of your customers is absolutely crucial. This is especially true if your firm is in a particularly competitive market, up against several rival products or services which claim to do what yours does, and possibly even better, through their own branding. It is specifically your branding that will separate your product from the competitors.

Companies sometimes want to reduce the number of brands that they market. This process is known as “Brand rationalization.” Some companies tend to create more brands and product variations within a brand than economies of scale would indicate. Sometimes, they will create a specific service or product brand for each market that they target. In the case of product branding, this may be to gain retail shelf space (and reduce the amount of shelf space allocated to competing brands). A company may decide to rationalize their portfolio of brands from time to time to gain production and marketing efficiency, or to rationalize a brand portfolio as part of corporate restructuring.

In other companies the product manager creates both the MRDs and the PRDs, while the product marketing manager does outbound tasks like giving product demonstrations in trade shows, creating marketing collateral like hot-sheets, beat-sheets, cheat sheets, data sheets, and white papers. This requires the product marketing manager to be skilled not only in competitor analysis, market research, and technical writing, but also in more business oriented activities like conducting ROI and NPV analyses on technology investments, strategizing how the decision criteria of the prospects or customers can be changed so that they buy the company’s product vis-a-vis the competitor’s product, etc.

In smaller high-tech firms or start-ups, product marketing and product management functions can be blurred, and both tasks may be borne by one individual. However, as the company grows someone needs to focus on creating good requirements documents for the engineering team, whereas someone else needs to focus on how to analyze the market, influence the “analysts”, press, etc.

When such clear demarcation becomes visible, the former falls under the domain of product management, and the latter, under product marketing. In Silicon Valley, in particular, product marketing professionals have considerable domain experience in a particular market or technology or both. Some Silicon Valley firms have titles such as Product Marketing Engineer, who tend to be promoted to managers in due course.

Slogans can be just as difficult as names to create. Saying something powerful and original in a small number of words is a tough part of the branding process. In order to generate ideas for slogans to lead your branding, you should always stay focused on the potential customer. What are they looking for in a product such as yours? What values and aspirations do they expect from a firm producing it? Why should they buy your product in particular? What do the products and slogans of your rivals represent? The slogan you choose should attempt to take into account strong answers to each of these questions.

Marketing is the process by which companies satisfy customer wants and needs. This forms the basis of repeat business. A popular definition of marketing is the Four P’s: product, price, promotion and place (distribution). Decisions in these areas cannot be made without a clear idea of the benefits sought by customers and those offered by the product. Branding is a device that telegraphically communicates those benefits to the customer.

Great product names drive strong brands. A great software product name is memorable and concisely conveys the benefit of the product, providing distinction in a crowded market. Hire a branding professional to help you choose the right product name. In the long term, a well-chosen name is far more important to your branding effort than details like logos, color schemes, and control theming.

Introduction - introduce a quality product with the strategy of using the brand as a platform from which to launch future products. A positive evaluation by the consumer is important.

Todd Ash Is An Entrepreneur and A Master Of Network Marketing.To Find Out More About Succeeding Online Click Here To Visit Toddash.com For Free Information

Quickly find corporate branding companies to help with corporate branding, business naming, and company image. Hire one of these company naming services to help establish a new company image or company identity.

Get the word out about your product and brand it. This increases the perceived value because people believe brand name products are better quality. If you want to quickly brand your product, team up with an already branded business and use their name. You could just give them a percentage of your profits.

An even better strategy is to choose a distinctive brand name that is unrelated to your product or service. “Apple” is a good name for a computer company because computers have nothing inherently to do with apples.

You brand as part of your advertising plan, as part of the impression you need to create for your name, product or services. With a good brand image, your product or service becomes associated with quality and value. A good position to be in for any product or service as well as a valuable one in a competitive field.

The process of building your brand is the same whether large or small. It will increase the consistency of your message as you will take control of it. You control the message through marketing, advertising, customer service and all interaction between your company and the market.

Another great advantage of a narrowed focus is the added time you?ll have to market and brand your product or service to a specific demographic. Rather than attempting to grab the attention of the entire general public and to separate your product from the competition, you’ll have a single group of customers to attract. As you solidify your appeal to this core group, word of mouth about your franchise should spread, and your business will grow.

Value-added products need a distinct identity — they need a brand. This publication examines what branding is, why it is important, and the necessary steps to brand your product.

Packaging does a lot more than just grab attention. Packaging tells consumers how to use your product and communicates its features and benefits. And packaging does more than any other marketing element to brand your product and establish its identity and value. Successful marketers realize that an upscale look commands higher profit margins. And consumers are willing to pay higher prices for products that communicate a premium, high-end image.

Branding is one of the most important factors influencing an item’s success or failure in today’s marketplace. A brand is the combination of a name, words, symbols or design that identifies the product and its company and differentiates it from the competition.

Creating a new name for a new product in a category completely new to the company. Example: A Taste of the Kingdom — a branded line of value-added products from family farms in Callaway County, Missouri.

You have to understand what you are promising your clients. Your choice of name can assist in making this clear, but the expectations you set are the key to success in this area.

A good example of a useful site sponsored by a brand is ChangeEverything, a community-powered site by Vancouver, Canada-based credit union Vancity, he said. The site explains that it was designed for people “who want to change themselves, their communities or their world” and it promises not to sell people mortgages and other services.

Sellers concentrate on finding buyers who probably have a need, and creating some means to present their product in a way that well-chosen buyers might understand or recognize a need. In other words, it’s a crap shoot.

You must be able to deliver on your promises, your customer’s experience must match the image built. If you fail to deliver the brand, (your product or company) could suffer irreparable damage.

Todd Ash Is An Entrepreneur and A Master Of Network Marketing.To Find Out More About Succeeding Online Click Here To Visit Toddash.com For Free Information

Authentic personal branding: Most buying decisions are based on trust, confidence, and emotions people have related to a product, service, or person. Branding is more important than marketing and sales. Branding is influencing, by creating a brand identity that associates certain perceptions and feelings with that identity.

Everyone has a Personal Brand but most people are not aware of this and do not manage this strategically, consistently, and effectively. You should take control of your brand and the message it sends and affect how others perceive you. This will help you to actively grow and distinguish yourself as an exceptional professional.

Most traditional personal branding concepts focus mainly on personal marketing, image building, selling, packaging, outward appearances, promoting yourself, and becoming famous, which can turn into an ego trip and let you be perceived as egocentric and selfish. They define personal branding from a personal marketing (selling) point of view. Personal branding is more than just marketing and promoting yourself.

Personal branding is the new holy grail of marketing. Whereas superior skills, great resources and inside knowledge at one time gave you a competitive advantage, now they are merely prerequisites if you even hope to compete in today’s competitive marketplace.

To the chagrin of the purists out there, skills, resources and knowledge have become mere commodities. Because your personal brand is uniquely about you, it will never become a commodity. Personal branding is also critically important because statistics overwhelming show people buy personalities and ideas long before they buy products/services. The trend is unmistakable. Those with the best personal brands win.

Personal branding is also not an option. Everyone has one; your current personal brand is either positive, negative or neutral. The challenge for most professionals is that they lack the discipline necessary to define their personal brands. As a result, their peers select it for them. Unfortunately, the personal brand others select for you will not always be the personal brand you would have selected for yourself.

Love is an important element in this Personal Branding equation. It is about loving yourself (self-love), loving others, and loving what you do. You should love yourself in at least equal measure to others or things. This can be found in most religions: to love others as you love yourself. Without knowing who you are (self-knowledge), it’s very difficult to love yourself and others. You need to make a positive emotional connection with yourself and find yourself interesting first, otherwise others you will not make a positive emotional connection with you and will not find you interesting. With an authentic Personal Brand, your strongest characteristics, attributes, and values can separate you from the crowd. Without this, you look just like everyone else.

It’s a way of clarifying and communicating what makes you different and special and using those qualities to separate from yourself from your peers so that you can greatly expand your success. Personal branding is the strategy behind the world’s most successful people. It is the difference between an ordinary career or business and an exceptional one.

You learn how to apply the principles of personal branding to your own practice so that you stand out among the ever-increasing number of coaches and career management professionals. This enables you differentiate your practice and greatly expand your success.

Branding isn’t just for products, services, and companies any more. There is a new trend called personal branding. Personal branding is essential to career development and is an effective career tool because it helps define who you are, what do you stand for, and what makes you unique, special, and different. Personal branding is also essential to business development. People want to do business with people they know or with whom they feel some sort of connection. If you are a familiar and consistent presence, they will have the sense that they know you and are more receptive to doing business with you.

Traditional personal branding works in the same way as company branding; communicating values, personality, and ability to its audience to produce a positive emotional response. You can shape the market’s perception of your personal brand simply by defining your unique strengths, values, and personality, sharing it with others in an exciting, persuasive manner, and cultivating your brand continuously. It’s something that you can develop and manage, which is essential for future employability and success.

Everyone should take the responsibility to learn, improve, build up their skills and be a strong brand. It’s time to make an effort to discover your genius and authentic dream, imagining and developing yourself as a powerful, consistent, and memorable personal brand. It was branding guru Tom Peters who launched the personal branding movement with an essay published in Fast Company in 1997 under the title “The Brand Called You”.

Your image reflects on your company, friends, and family. You, however, need to be accountable to yourself first. If you’re dancing on the tables at the bar, and worried about getting caught, either you have something personally wrong, or you need to find a different job that accepts your lack of inhibition. If your Facebook photos might get you in trouble, take them down, or decide you want to work at a place where they don’t care about that sort of thing.

Your personal brand is a critical asset in today’s online, virtual, and individual age. Having a good professional reputation is the key to success. Personal branding is becoming increasingly essential to personal success. It’s therefore important to be your own brand in order to be successful in life.

The image of your brand is a perception held in someone else’s mind. Successful personal branding also entails managing this perception effectively. Your personal brand is the expectations, image, and perceptions it creates in the minds of others, when they see or hear your name.

If you ignore this law, you will create mixed signals, and confusion, and all your efforts at branding will go to waste. Because the message you’re actually sending might not be the one you designed, but the one that the public picks up on in your tone and in your attitude and in your actions.

The authentic personal branding concept is durable and less cosmetic than current methods. It places more emphasis on personal development, growth in life and empowerment, and focuses on the human side of branding. Traditional personal branding approaches can turn into an ego trip.

Todd Ash Is An Entrepreneur and A Master Of Network Marketing.To Find Out More About Succeeding Online Click Here To Visit Toddash.com For Free Information

The Internet today is a lot different place than it was years ago. In years past you could put up a landing page and drive traffic and make sales. But today’s Internet is different. This is why self-branding is essential. Let’s look at the ways that people are branding themselves online today.

Self-Branding Through Blogs.

One of the latest ways that people are branding themselves online is through blogs. What is a blog? Well a blog, short for web log, is a website maintained by an individual, with regular entries or commentary about a specific topic. These entries are normally displayed in reverse chronological order. When a blog is properly maintained and constantly updated with up to date valuable information, the owner of the blog can become an authority on a subject and create a loyal following, which can help to build relationships and may lead to sales.

Self-Branding Through Video.

YouTube has totally changed the world of online sales and branding in general. YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload view and share video clips. This is a great way to present your business opportunity to others and it also give you a great way
to brand yourself through video. Creating a channel around your subject matter is a another great way to create a loyal following. Some stats for videos reveals that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day (as of July 2006).

Self-Branding Through Social Networking Sites.

MySpace, since its inception has taken networking online to a whole new level. Before MySpace and social sites like this there was very little ways outside of chat rooms to meet and great others online. MySpace has made it possible to communicate and share ideas at the speed of the Internet. This is where you tell viewers about yourself, your likes and dislikes and what types of business your in. You can then share and network with other people that share like interest.

Self-Branding Through Product or Services.

Creating products or services that help others increase their online potential is another way to branding yourself. These include e-books, websites, application packages, and software. Adding you name to an e-book or a some other product can create a viral type of marketing that is unstoppable with the right content. The same goes for the products and services. With the right product or service that carters to your industry you can find plenty of people that are willing not only to use your product but they will also see you as an authority and check your business at the same time.

Staying Focused.

There are many ways to brand yourself online, these are only a few. What ever you decided to do make sure that you choose one avenue before adding another. Here’s to your self-branding.

Matthew has been helping new Internet Marketers succeed with Syndicate Wealth System. This system helps people to brand themselves while at the same time offer a business opportunity. To see how this system works go to FreeLifeNow.

A spate of recent articles about the Obama brand have, in my view as an expert on marketing, neglected the brand’s strategy and focused its verbal or visual expressions. But far more important is the distinction between the short-term brand, “Candidate Obama,” and the long-term brand, “President Obama.”

So far candidate Obama’s campaign exemplifies perfect wizardry in short term branding. For those who had not yet encountered this terminology, a short term brand is a pre-planned meteoric and relatively short-lived marketing success. “The Da Vinci Code,” is a classic example. Huge success ? but fleeting.

Short term branding entails the kindling of enthusiasm, expertly and speedily, in a selected target group. Its usual purpose is to motivate members of the group to buy a product promptly and buzz about it.

Other times, as in our case, it is to propel the group to volunteer, donate, evangelize and vote on a certain date. In contrast, long term branding endeavors to establish a long term demand (or support) based on an enduring preference and trust. Think of your allegiance to a particular brand of toothpaste.

The relevance of short term branding to political campaigning is evident. This is true especially when the candidate is relatively unknown, and his or her political and leadership records are too limited to flaunt.

Every brand, short or long term, holds a promise of benefit to its target audience. It is the expectation of this benefit that stimulates desire. A short term brand (as opposed to a long term one) presents a transitory opportunity to achieve such a benefit. Thought of this way, the Obama campaign’s promise is clear and unique: “here we are giving you a one-time opportunity to impact history by electing the first African-American President of the United States”.

But isn’t this promise similar to that of the Clinton campaign, if we, say, substitute “female” for “African-American”? It could have been, but it is definitely not. The main reason is that Senator Clinton’s campaign is not about this equally momentous opportunity. It is about “Clinton as president”.

Therefore, Clinton is already running a presidential campaign, i.e., attempting to build a long term brand. She is trying to inspire trust, while Senator Obama is spreading enthusiasm, taking advantage of the benefits of short term branding.

My 80%-20% Marketing Hits Formula postulates that a successful STB (Short Term Brand) will be 80% conventional format and 20% innovation. The 80% part is meant to dissolve resistance and to ease acceptance and, therefore, will challenge the consumer only minimally to learn and adjust. Prima facie, the Obama campaign has all the elements of such a campaign. It has a logo, an emblem, a slogan and it employs all the customary one-to-many communication tactics. That is the 80% part.

However, it is the other 20%?the innovation?that delivers on the brand’s promise and drives the STB phenomenon. The Formula says that the 20% must be innovative in a way that will entice action. One of the main rules of short term branding is to use something very contemporary and cool, or something which stimulates a Wow response of pleasant surprise and wonder, or something that is twisted, unexpected and provocative in some manner.

The chieftains of the Obama campaign team opted for cool. Personal expression and activism as well as social networks constitute the cool “now”. These are the exact trends that the Obama campaign has used in a pioneering fashion.

Its remarkable use of the Internet is all about inviting, empowering and enabling people “to make history” on their own. On BarackObama.com people can find plenty of means to do that. They can create their own blogs, send in policy recommendations, find other supporters in their area (thus creating a quasi-social network), organize events, set up their own fund raising mini site, get call lists and scripts, download videos, photos, ringtones and any other “now” cyber service you can think of.

The use of social networks from FaceBook to niche demographic ones such as Blackplanet and Asianwave sends a message that everyone is included and reinforces the feeling of brotherhood amongst people from all races and origins. The many viral clips on YouTube produced by supporters and fans are a natural outgrowth: people doing their own thing within the framework of a “history making” movement.

All of that understood, does the success of the short-term brand ,”Candidate Obama,” foretell similar success for the completely different, long-term brand, “President Obama?” Not necessarily!

If Senator Obama wins the Democratic Party nomination, we must expect a switch in voters’ perceptions. They will then begin to give increasingly more weight to the potentially long-term “President Obama” brand, at the expense of the weight they had given to the “Candidate Obama” brand previously. It will not suffice to be a part of a history making movement.

Voters will be interested in the promise of the “President Obama” brand, which has to be a promise in which they can believe. In other words, they will want to know how President Obama will function as president at these challenging times for America, regardless of his racial identity.

The open-ended, “let’s do it together” leadership style that is such a powerful element of the “Candidate Obama” brand may even become a setback during the presidential campaign stage. To win against Senator McCain, Obama will have to more distinctly shape the “President Obama” brand as well as its promise to Americans in a strongly persuasive manner.

Among other tasks he will have to explain in a crystal clear manner how he is going to redefine the leadership of the United States in the world and how he is going to integrate its economy with the global economy in a healthier manner.

If he wins the nomination, then this will certainly be the next challenge which the “President Obama” campaign masters will have to overcome: to smoothly handle the transition from short-term brand “Candidate Obama” to long-term brand “President Obama”. Time will most certainly tell.

Dr. Dan Herman, a globally renowned strategy consultant, an author and a lecturer, is the author of “Outsmart the MBA Clones: The Alternative Guide to Competitive Strategy, Marketing, and Branding”
( http://www.outsmart-mba-clones.com ).

The power of the brand! A strong brand draws people. A strong brand allows people to trust you much more quickly than a weak or nonexistent brand.

Tres Preguntas (Three Questions.)
1. What do I mean by your brand?
2. What do I mean when I talk about properly branding your company to the Hispanic community?
3. How do you properly brand your company to the Hispanic community?

When you apply the answers to these three questions you can have good people waiting in line to work for you, recruit members more easily, and most certainly, make a lot of money selling products and services to Latinos.

Question No. 1
What is a brand?

Going back to the Old West, you can picture the cattlemen branding their cattle so they could always identify which animals belonged to them.

This is the origin of the term brand. In today’s world, a brand allows you as a businessperson to identify which clients are yours. More important, when a client is properly branded by you, they will identify themselves with you. A brand is not a logo or a logotype or a trademark. A logo is a word or a few words manipulated by a graphic artist who hopefully understands how to work with typography. (By the way, most don’t.) A trademark is the graphic that many times accompanies a logo, like the Nike Swoosh. That trademark is so strong they don’t even need the logo anymore.

A brand is not something you see, it is something you feel. It is, as Marty Neumier, says in his excellent book The Brand Gap, a gut feeling. Your brand is what people feel about you. A strong brand is what people feel about you and your company in their heart and in their gut. A strong brand elicits immediate trust and goodwill. A weak brand makes people think, “Mmm, maybe I should check out some other companies, or maybe it would be better to work for XYZ Co. than your company.

Companies with strong brands do not have to worry about their clients; they worry about how to provide their clients with better products, services and systems. Weak companies with weak brands are constantly looking for new clients and constantly looking for people who want to work with them. It’s called turnover.

Question No. 2
What do I mean when I talk about properly branding your company to the Hispanic community?

When you are properly branded to the Hispanic community, you don’t have turnover. In fact, you will always have the best workers and, very important these days, the best documented workers. Again, branding is how people feel about you; it is an emotion. Coca-Cola’s market cap, for example, presently is $120 billion. Of this value, $70 billion is attributed to the value of the brand, only $50 billion to the actual company products, services and systems.

How much is your brand worth to the Hispanic community? You want people to hear your company name and say, “What I would give to work there, or, if I buy products, I am going to buy them there. I trust them, what a great company.

Question No. 3
How do I properly brand my company to the Hispanic community?

This is the meat and potatoes question. Again, branding is all about trust. It produces a feeling in the soul that says, I can trust this company. It makes people think, “I feel good purchasing here (in person, on the web, on the phone) and I know I don’t need to check around. I can go to work for them with confidence.

The million dollar question is, “How do you get the Latino person to trust you, to see you and your company and immediately feel this sense of security and trust” The answer is simple, always keep your word. Never tell a Latino something and then go back and tell him or her you’re sorry but it just didn’t work out. For the most part, Latinos are fairly skeptical and non-trusting people. Information travels very quickly in the Latino society so do things right the first time. The Latino culture is very viral. Also, you must show a sincere and genuine interest in our people and culture.

I have in front of me several pieces of literature and handbooks that are handed out to Hispanic employees. They are literal translations from English to Spanish. This is not good branding. There are no visuals and the ones that are used are exactly the same as in the English manuals. To make matters worse, I also found several misspellings. This is probably due to having someone in the shop, or a friend, who is “bilingual”, but not a professional translator. This is poor branding and produces the gut feeling that the Latino person may be a necessity in your company, but he or she is not a valued person or client.

You must make adjustments. The Latino culture is different, the people are different, and there is a different way of thinking about information and life in general. Your marketing and branding initiatives should reflect cultural relevance and understanding.

In a nutshell, yes, logos, trademarks, color schemes, company T-shirts and all this good stuff can help with branding, but these things are not the brand. Perhaps they support the brand, but they are not the brand. The brand is the feeling of trust and confidence people feel when they hear the name of your company mentioned. This goes for people who work for you and for your clients. Without either group of people, you and I are out of business! If you don’t do it, then your company will always be worth less than half of what you think it’s worth when you look at your financial reports.

Just take a look at that branding giant, Coca-Cola. In this case, it really is the real thing!

Ricardo Gonzalez is an expert on Language and Cultural Leadership. He is the Founder of Bilingual America and publisher of The Gonzalez Report. He can be reached at 888.850.1555 or via email at rgonzalez@bilingualamerica.com. Learn more at either the Bilingual America Website or at The Gonzalez Report.

The demand for custom labels in Chicago is continuing to grow with all the food processing and confectionery business centralized in the central US for easy transportation around the country. Chicago is also a hot bed for manufacturers, technology, health care, distribution and many other custom label consumers like cosmetic labels in Illinois.

Custom food labels and confectionery in Chicago have a high demand for quality, and for applicators that can affix the labels to the product without smashing the contents within like bread, snack products, and cookies. Many times these labels have custom colors for branding with a logo and an area for the food business or confectionery to print a date code or ingredients that will be variable text on each label. These can be accommodated in a thermal transfer or direct thermal label, depending on how long the product will be on the shelf in the supermarket or deli. These can also be made for scales where the variable weight and price will be printed onto the labels.

Manufacturers use custom labels for a number of reasons. The most common reason is to brand the product they are making. These are usually 4 color process labels with a UV coating that will prevent the label from fading over time. Manufactures also use custom labels to label parts and shelves in the tool cribs they use to maintain the manufacturing operation. These custom labels can also be used in the shipping process when the product is shipped into distribution. Many distributors require special barcodes to be placed on all products that are shipped to their centers. These manufacturers also use labels to mark racks in the finished goods area of the operation.

Another manufacturing application is custom UL labels. If the manufacturer is making an electronic consumer product then a UL label is required adding more custom requirements to this business sector. This also applies to the technology sector.

The technology sector in Chicago uses custom labels on circuit boards, computers for asset tracking, and special custom tamper evident labels that can show if a product has been tampered with. The circuit board labels are usually very small and some need to be produced for clean room environments. These labels require a strict and clean environment to make and seal the rolls of labels so they are air tight.

Within the health care industry in Chicago there are many sub groups and custom label applications from labeling test tubs to labeling patients wristbands to match the medications that are assigned to that particular patient. The health care industry also has their own distribution setups where custom labels are used to organize files, shelves and shipments.

The distribution industry includes transportation and consumes many labels but not all of these labels are custom. Many of these distributors use stock 4×6 labels to label shipments, but if they want to brand these with a custom logo, these custom labels can be made right here in Chicago. Rack labels, product labels, and shipping labels are very common in this business sector.

There are many other businesses in the Chicago area that need custom product labels including cosmetic labels in Illinois and all over the country. So, if you are a business in Chicago and need custom labels, you must realize the demand for custom labels is high. The capacity to meet that demand is even higher. Custom food labels, UL labels, Clean Room labels, tamper evident labels, custom 4 color labels and even cosmetic labels in Illinois and across the country is a competitive area for all of these industries.

John Barth founded Adazon Barcode Labels and Barcode Equipment www.adazonusa.com in 2003 and has a wealth of information in the barcode arena from over 20 years of experience in distribution. John’s experience allows companies to cut costs on custom labels Chicago, barcode labels and total barcode solutions. For more information call 847-235-2700.

There is so much money being made on the internet that it’s stupid. And if your reading this your genius because I’m going to be revealing secrets not many people are aware of.

You see, many online guru’s don’t want to share with you their real secrets because then you would be on the same level playing field as them and you would no longer buy their products. You would simply create your own and start raking in all the money, I mean why wouldn’t you?

First things first, start branding yourself so you can start establishing yourself as the expert. Many people fail in home business and in network marketing because they are not branding themselves. People naturally want to follow the “leader” or make an intelligent buying decision based on expertise. This is what people buy into, they buy into YOU as the expert.

An extremely simple way of branding yourself would be to start writing some articles on a consistent basis and submitting them to the top article directories on the net. Every time you write an article you get to type in your bio with a link in your authors section box. Here’s an example, “Learn how internet marketing expert YOUR NAME HERE is revolutionizing the home based business industry.” Put in whatever your tag is and position yourself as the expert, this is how you brand yourself.

The key is consistency here. Typing one lousy article isn’t going to get you anywhere fast but type an article everyday for 90 days straight every single day and see the massive response you generate. By submitting a simple article a day for 90 days you will create a massive army of branding and expertise all attracting back to you and your website. Publishers may find one of your articles floating around on the web and may want to feature it broadcasting it out to hundreds of thousands of readers. Imagine the traffic your website will produce then.

The next secret is building a list. When it comes to internet marketing it’s all about your list. With no list to market to you will not generate any sales. So how can I start building my own list?

Crate a simple landing(data capture) page with a opt in section. Offer some free valuable info like a free report or Ebook in exchange for their contact information. Start building your list immediately or your just hurting yourself.

Your list doesn’t have to be a million names long. I know very successful marketers making 7 figure incomes online from just a list of 5,000 strong. It’s not about how large your list is, it’s about how responsive and developed your list is that makes ALL the difference here. So start developing a list ASAP and I would recommend sending them valuable information on a regular basis so you can build that relationship & trust with them.

Now I am bringing out the big guns, Joint Ventures. A Joint Venture is a business enterprise in which 2 or more companies combine forces to multiply their efforts. Joint Ventures are the holy grail of internet marketing.

Here is an example of how it works and how it all goes down. Let’s say marketer A has a list of 25,000. Ok, now marketer B has his own list of 25,000. They find similar list types then exchange list or cross promote to instantly double their database along with their profits. It’s being done everywhere and if you want to be big time start finding some jv partners on the internet, it’s the perfect place to start looking. They have become a blessing to me on my journey and thousands of others in more ways then one.

These are all those missing secrets, pieces to the puzzle, hidden gems or whatever you want to call them. The bottom line is this, if you want to build a 7 figure empire online beyond your wildest dreams then get out there and start branding yourself.

Go absolutely nuts meaning just take massive focused action & have fun with this. Build a solid responsive list, continue to provide them with value to build relationships with. Go network with some other online like thinkers and do some joint ventures together and you’ll be within the top 1% of online marketers out there, I promise you that.

Learn how Justin Verrengia & his inner circle are helping thousands of people put $5,000, $10,000 into their pockets every week.

visit: Funnel Of Wealth

Small business owners continue to grapple with marketing.. either not know what to do or not having enough time/resources to get the activities done. The problem is that marketing is generally considered the most important function of a business. Without a steady inflow of new customers and prospects, the business will quickly come to a halt.

And therein lies the problem. Marketing is unique in that it’s an engine that must always be turned on. Putting an effort here or there will not lead to increased revenues. Small business owners who recognize the importance, excel over their competitors.

In an effort to shed some light on the marketing guidelines, I’ve put together 10 “commandments” that dispel many marketing myths and help the owner to stay on track. To the degree that companies adopt and live by these commandments, their businesses will flourish-

I. Marketing is defined as getting someone who has a need to know, like and trust you…in that order. You can’t circumvent that process.

II. There is no mystery in marketing. The more people you communicate with and appeal to in a compelling way, the more business you’ll generate.

III. Unless you operate a monopoly, it generally takes 6 to 9 contacts with a prospect before they’re ready to buy from you.

IV. Building an effective marketing program is like building a house. Planning is the foundation and marketing activities are the bricks. Marketing contacts are never wasted…they’re small investments in a foundation that will eventually lead to business.

V. The most important aspect of effective marketing by far is follow-through. If you’re doing something, then half of the battle is won.

VI. You should be investing at least 5% of your ongoing revenues back into the business through marketing. It takes money to make money.

VII. If the business you’re generating is only as good as your last advertising dollar, then you’re not branding (differentiating) yourself. Effective branding is essential to taking your business to the next level.

VIII. Marketing today is an integral part of a small business. If you’re not devoting time and/or resources to it continually, then you’re at the mercy of the cycles and pitfalls of the marketplace.

IX. Due to its creative and reflective nature, marketing can and should be fun.

X. Marketing is not sales. Sales can have more immediate results. Marketing generally has a longer return on investment but because you’re communicating with the masses, has a much broader impact.

Scott Campbell is the President of marketing firm Impact Marketing, Inc out of Atlanta, GA. They install marketing systems into businesses working predominantly in the “Building” sector.

Learn more about Impact Marketing and its solutions here at www.impactyourcompany.com.