Branding Strategy - Go Big or Go Home

August 4, 2008

I often tell my branding clients to develop their brands with their biggest aspirations for those brands in mind. What’s the point of creating a business and brand if you don’t have big goals for it? So often I hear of businesses that create a brand and grow out of it within a couple of years. At that point, the company needs to invest time, resources and money into rebranding when that problem could have been avoided if the brand was originally created with stretch goals in mind.

This is a problem that has grown exponentially thanks to the increasing influence of Web 2.0 and social media. Suddenly, brands that existed quite comfortably living an offline existence are being stretched to find a home on the social web. It’s a consideration that can’t be ignored in new product development meetings and branding and marketing plans. Perhaps the influence of Web 2.0 is most obvious in the pervasive logo redesign efforts initiated by large and small companies around the world. Millions of dollars have been invested to update logos to be more Web 2.0-friendly in recent years. A perfect example is the redesign of the Apple logo into a Web 2.0 icon.

Social media has also given way to an influx of word-of-mouth marketing making your brand messages available to a vast audience for whom you may not have planned. Is your brand ready for that global audience of people who want to actively interact with your brand? Brands like Dell and Target have been the subject of negative publicity at the hands of the social web. Are you prepared to help steer the online buzz about your brand?

Is your brand positioned for success if your biggest goals for it become a reality?

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Susan Gunelius

President & CEO at KeySplash Creative, Inc.

Susan Gunelius is the author of multiple marketing, social media, branding, copywriting, and blogging books, and she is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She also owns Women on Business, a leading blog for business women. She is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com, a featured writer for Forbes.com, and the Guide to Blogging for About.com. Additionally, her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, FoxBusiness.com, WashingtonPost.com, TheStreet.com, SmartMoney.com, TodayShow.com, BusinessWeek.com, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Small Business, and more. She has nearly 20 years of experience in the marketing field having spent the first decade of her career directing marketing programs for some of the largest companies in the world, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC. Susan also appears at in-person and virtual events where she speaks about marketing, branding, social media, and more (visit www.SusanGunelius.com for more information). You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.