Brand Strategy

I read a book that is called Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands by Alina Wheeler and the book states that brand strategy should be build on a vision that is associated with business strategy and it should reflect an understanding of the customer’s needs and perceptions. Also, Brand strategy should show a unique value of a business and its products and services and it is a road map that makes marketing and sales easier.
I believe a Brand used to be just an image that represents a business in the minds of its customers, but in this book the fundamentals of brand strategy are: Vision, Actions, Expression and Experience.

As many companies are launching their products and services online these days, I believe they should create strong and recognized brands so each business can differentiate itself from others. And making use of Web 2.0 will help in building and spreading out the brands to the customers, especially that many marketers consider Web 2.0 as word of mouth on the internet. I feel that Web 2.0 is becoming a direct marketing way between businesses and their customers, do you think so?

Learn from Obama Some Marketing Techniques

I want to share with you two impressive articles about Barak Obama, the first one entitled " Obama's Text: Message Received, With a Few Garbles" was posted in Washington post, about Obama and how he made use of the technology to market himself as a president of the US. This article indicates that he used text-messaging as a main tool to inform his supporters who registered on his website of his vice presidential choice "Joseph Biden" before it was announced to the public. That was a very smart way to attract fans and register in his web which can lead to collect lot of votes for the election in November.
The link of the article: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/08/23/obamas_text_message_received_w.html
Another article entitled "What Obama Can Teach You About Millennial Marketing" states that Obama's brand management knew the tools to reach potential voters from the millennial generation such as sticking with his message every speech about the change and using it as a slogan for his campaign. Also, the article reported that Andrew Romano wrote in Newsweek: "Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a high-end consumer brand." His rising-sun logo echoes the one-world iconography of Pepsi, AT&T and Apple." Moreover, the MYBO site, which stands for "my.barackobama.com", allows his fans to post blogs, discuss things and upload photos, this has led to have good and loyal fans. His campaign has changed CRM (customer relationship management) to CMR (customer-managed relationship), as the article stated.
This is the link of the article: http://adage.com/article?article_id=130254
Those two articles shows that Obama has branded himself, has a slogan "we can change" and used different channels, media and technology to reach his target market and he's achieving his goal. So, marketers should learn from him how to understand their customers and their needs, how to market themselves, their companies and their products and services to achieve their goals.