How’s your brand visibility on Google? Did it recently change? Just the other day, Google implemented their newest rule changes, codenamed Penguin, and the brand visibility of some sites plummeted. (That bass drum you hear is the Salvation Army, sinking). Some sites moved up. Our site, BTW, continues to do fine on searches. The people who watch this closely are …
Must you compete on price?
Competing on price is evidence of branding failure. The strongest brands don’t have to compete on price. Consumers happily pay 40% more for Morton Salt over store-brand sodium chloride. They’ll pay an equivalent premium for a famous deodorant over a chemically-identical price brand. Is it just awareness? No. Some brands have high visibility, but that’s never enough. Awareness, although crucial, …
Selection Set: get in it, and win it
What’s the first duty of a brand? Visibility? Differentiation? Customer insight? Kickass logo? Nifty swag? All plausible choices, because they’re all attractive, and most of them should be present to achieve success. So … let’s go into Double Jeopardy where the scores can really change, and see what needs to be done once we have a brand ready to battle …
Is your website a destination or a conduit?
Hulu and Netflix are both investing hundreds of millions of dollars into original programming, instead of being just a conduit for content. The value of mere distribution is shrinking everywhere – it’s not a great time to be a wholesaler. Relevant question for your brand: can search engine robots find original content on your website? It’s not a trivial matter, …
How many competitors do you have, really?
If you answered, “too many” or “way too many” or “crikey, too bloody many,” you are normal, worriedly normal, or weirdly influenced by Danger Mouse but normal. Most companies (and cpg brands, job applicants, charities, tv shows, candidates, etc., etc.) feel they have plenty of competition. They’re correct. One traditional (and often correct) strategy is to become visible to prospects, …
Keep your “drill down” down
Writing for and designing websites means serving three audiences, all of them important: people who want to hear your brand story (Quals), people who also want to know your proofs and processes (Quants), and search engine robots (Bots). Most websites fail this test. The biggest failure is not realizing that 86% of visitors, the Quals, just want to hear your …
Leave company and product naming up to us.
Not that you aren’t passionately concerned with your new name. On the contrary. You’re the one most in the risk/reward hot seat. But naming is not your primary business, so it’s something you should outsource, just as you outsource brain surgery, elevator repair, and dog grooming. There are people out there with skills, experience and specialized tools. We immodestly include …
Giant Accounting Firm Joined Witness Protection Program
One day in 2011, my wife was watching golf’s Players Championship on tv, and asked me about the logo of a principal sponsor: “Who is pwc?” I had a guess in mind, but I had to go to Wikipedia to verify it, which should tell you something. It seems one of the world’s largest accounting firms decided to become forgettable …
The Rule of 3
If you’re #1 in your category, never mention #2. If you’re #2, get more visible than #1. If you’re #3 in your category, change categories.
More about “botcred”
We’ve been thinking more about botcred, the word we invented last week to describe the credibility you need to accumulate with search engine spiders, aka robots or bots. The first response of human visitors when they encounter your website is a pre-conscious evaluation of the look and feel (i.e., “this looks like what I’m looking for”), and they’ll give you …
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