Establishing your company as a thought leader provides benefits that no marketing or advertising program can deliver on its own. As a thought leader, your company will gain credibility in the market and become a trusted advisor and partner—not just another vendor. Potential customers will gravitate toward your products and services. Journalists will seek you [...]

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I had a conversation with a business owner who wanted advice on building his company’s brand. Brand is an elusive concept that can have many meanings. Maybe that’s because each brand has its own unique meaning in the market. If your goal is brand building, you are after three things:

You want your company to be [...]

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HubSpot is a company that offers a platform to manage “inbound marketing” efforts. Inbound as opposed to outbound, which means prospects contact you rather than you reaching out to them. Most inbound marketing is online marketing: search engines, links from blogs, and other social media.
I’m writing not to promote HubSpot—although I have recommended them to [...]

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Google started as a noun and became a verb. That’s what I call brand strength. Can Bing do the same? Bing is Microsoft’s name for its new search service, as noted in the New York Times’ article “Microsoft’s Search for a Name Ends with a Bing.” Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer was quoted as saying he liked Bing’s [...]

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In July 2008, when I first wrote about Starbucks closing 600 stores, I said to expect more store closings and a long, slow decline for a once highly respected brand (see original article). Well, here I am reading the New York Times and discovering another 300 stores are closing, which will affect 6,000 employees, with [...]

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Some marketers have a militant reputation for policing their company’s logos and graphic marks. They safeguard and hide original logo files as if protecting a confidential information source.
Invariably, there are leaks. It could be a clever salesperson copying the logo from your Web site and throwing it into a presentation or proposal, but first applying their own [...]

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In Part One of this series, I discussed the first marketing steps a new company should undertake: naming and positioning. In Part Two, we move on to every creative person’s favorite – logo development, which is the visual foundation of your branding strategy.
Here’s the assignment: Create a logo and visual identity that reflects the essence of your company’s market [...]

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