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Your company and your products are not equivalent. Rather, each of your products requires its own brand identity. Here are 5 tips for branding your product.

Tip #1: Distinguish between your company and your product: Your company is not the product you are trying to brand. Some companies waste enormous resources and confuse customers when they divide their branding efforts carelessly between their company name and a specific product. When you message to the public, be crystal clear about whether you are talking about your company or your product.

Tip #2: Select a logo that is applicable to multiple media: Quite simply: your logo should look just as good on your business cards and letterhead as it does on your Web site. Make sure you choose a logo that reproduces well in multiple media. Ask a graphics design specialist for their input.

Tip #3: Leverage every customer-facing process to build your brand: Your brand is not just about your name, your logo, and your tagline: it is about the total package. Examine every customer-facing point your employees have – including telephone calls, e-mails, your Web site, ads… even how product returns are processed – and make sure that they say the right thing about your brand.

Tip #4: Do not spread your brand too thinly: If you have built your brand for one product or product line, it can be a good idea to expand that niche using your current brand equity. However, it is usually a very poor idea to try to spread that brand to other product lines. Imagine if BMW came out with a line of high-end golf carts. You get the picture. Doing this will only serve to dilute your brand.

Tip #5: Work to associate a specific customer promise with your brand: Your customers should always be reminded of one particular quality that they will always experience, without fail, whenever they do business with you. This is your customer promise and everything about your brand should reinforce this customer promise, without fail, every time. Consistency is key here as even a single point of failure could ruin your brand image for a group of customers which can never be restored.

Branding a product is not complicated, but it does require expertise, attention, and careful thought. By developing an effective branding strategy your products stands to fair very well against its competition.

By: Jed C. Jones Ph.D.

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You might require a professional help from an expert to accomplish certain crucial tasks. At times, you can find out that the expert is not too sure about the probabilities of the failure. A perfect behavior and approach of an expert is make his followers understand the uncertainty that revolves around them. Success is 99% guaranteed. However, that 1% should not be neglected at any cost. The importance should be understood well. Most of the people would not love to witness failure.

There are certain people who would like to change their guard or the mentor when they try to reveal some of the practical issues like that of the failure probability. A lame follower would not try to understand the gist of his mentor’s speech but will decide that the mentor would no nothing and is for nothing. A perfect combination of leadership and management would bring out the best of experiences that can be shared with the fellow beings. So never underestimate people those who speak about failure and who try to explain the practicality.

You can be a business owner or an employee in any of the companies. You can use this perception to win over hearts and see the magic working for you. Personal branding will help you in the best ways to present you as the best individual in the world. It will help you to sell your marketing capabilities. You can promote yourself in a better way. Have the spirit in yourself while promoting your self brands. Take the pride and be happy for what you are. Have a gentle pad in order to accomplish your own goals and tasks. Technology should be used at its best to promote personal branding. People have websites and blogs to raise their concerns and approaches in marketing the product. Blogs are easy to construct when you have the domain names. There are also free domains and sub domains available with which a blog can be booked. There are ready made templates like that of the WordPress. WordPress is one of the leading blog template providers who also offer different applications and widgets to promote online marketing.

Remember the success of personal branding would start in your mind. There are three rules that you should always abide by while using WordPress to brand yourself. These are -

1. Know yourself – You should know what you are good at and what are your asset skills set through which you could promote the services. You should be able to evaluate your potential and should know on how to contribute and make yourself useful to the others.

2. Believe in yourself – Unless you believe in yourself, no one else would do.

3. Never say die – The moment you give up, you are doomed. The results of personal branding are not immediate but it does have promising results.

By: Melissa Mitchell

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The way your employees conduct themselves and what brand names they are carrying on their clothing communicates things about the product or services your company is offering to the people. In such matters, the impression you create in turn creates a corporate identity or image for your company in the minds of people.

Your company could also offer corporate gifts to people or promote your corporate golf apparel by offering a huge variety of clothes items and accessories to go with them. People tend to keep these items as a memento of the pleasant moments they have had at your company’s golf games. Some of the best examples of corporate golf apparel are Levi Strauss and Nike.

Corporations prefer to sell long-sleeved golf t-shirts these days mostly to women. Untucked shirts are a popular fashion amongst men these days. Selling the shirts with V-neck, scoop neck or the Cardigan vest types is a great idea. These are some of the most popular types of golf shirts today.

Golf bags, bats and caps are increasingly being sold by most corporations; some corporations hold team events in which they gift pens, custom t-shirts and other fancy items. You could alternatively follow such examples and even offer golf-related magazines, training courses and workshops for golf at a reasonable price. Other promotional ideas are corporate golf holiday packages, where people go on a holiday to play their favorite game. However avoid overdoing promotional programs.

If you need better and more professional ideas, you need to take the services of either an advertising agency or an event management agency.

By: Richard Romando

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There are advanced ways to use Squidoo.com to make money, but I think there is another great use for Squidoo: branding. Squidoo allows you to create miniature websites, called “lenses” about any topic imaginable. This site is great because of the tremendous amount of content creation it encourages. When visitors to your “lens” click on any of the ads, you get paid a small commission from that, and Squidoo gets the rest. So how can we leverage this site for own own brand? Well, there are several ways:

1. Create a ton of content relevant to your niche.

Whether its a history of the greatest people in your area of expertise, a collection of thoughtful stories, rags to riches stories, funny stories, cartoons, videos, pictures, inspirational quotes, how-to advice, or anything else, it should all be related to your business and your area of expertise. That’s step 1. Don’t have enough time? Get someone to create content at Elance or another outsourcing website.

There are advanced ways to use Squidoo.com to make money, but I think there is another great use for Squidoo: branding. Squidoo allows you to create miniature websites, called “lenses” about any topic imaginable. This site is great because of the tremendous amount of content creation it encourages. When visitors to your “lens” click on any of the ads, you get paid a small commission from that, and Squidoo gets the rest.

2. Create a Squidoo username using your company name

Since it is so easy to create lenses in Squidoo, its foreseeable that you could have 10, 20, 30 or more lenses, all of which carry some username. Why not have it be your company name? When you are getting hundreds or thousands of page views every week, you want your brand to stick out in people’s mind.

3. Make great lens url’s.

Make sure that each one of the lenses you create can potentially be found by someone searching for it in Google. If its about Facebook fan pages for example, don’t make the url Squidoo.com/fanpages. Make it Squidoo.com/Facebook-fan-pages or something similar. Spell it out and use dashes or underscores if you have to. You want these sites to show up in Google within the first couple of pages. That’s the first step in doing that.

4. Add tags to your lenses.

When you are making your lens, you can add as many tags as you want. These serve three purposes:

1. If someone is searching for something on Squidoo or in Google, the lens may get found on the merit of those tags.

2. The ads on the site are more likely to be targeted when you have several tags on the page (this means the viewer is more likely to click if they are interested).

3. But the best reason to add tags to your site is because Squidoo renders up “related pages” that are usually above the fold and very noticeable. The thing you want is for all of your other lenses that you have created to show up in this box. That means that no matter where they go within Squidoo from your site, they are very likely to land on your page and see your brand. This creates a web of traffic within Squidoo that will automatically create more free impressions of your brand.

By: James Nissen

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golf branding

This holiday season, the economy’s wrath will be seen in offices when holiday cards, which had previously been accompanied by gifts, start arriving alone. With the corporate gift season looming and the economy in a difficult position, executives are faced with a tough decision: To spend or not to spend? Budget cuts have been widespread for companies, both large and small.

Cost-cutting is an issue that’s faced by everyone, but when it comes to choosing a corporate gift the question is not whether you can afford to give one. The question is can you afford not to?

A cardinal rule of corporate gifts has always been: “Thou Shalt Not Logo For the Sake of Exposure.” Corporate gifts should never be mistaken with typical promotional products. The two are entirely different entities. Remember, the corporate gift should be looked at as just that: a gift. It should not be seen as an excuse to brand your logo, and if you ask many promotional consultants, they’ll advise you to leave off the logo. However, the need to increase business and keep clients returning has never been more important than it is now. So what is the answer? It’s simple and can be summed up in two words: corporate apparel.

Corporate apparel, often referred as executive apparel, is an easy and affordable way to brand your logo, and still provide a gift that will be appreciated. The items that fall into this category include a wide assortment of styles at various price points, so finding one that will suit your budgetary needs is almost guaranteed. Let’s take a look at some of the various styles available.

Polo Shirts

The golf polo is like the executive version of the promotional t-shirt. These casual shirts are the most affordable options when it comes to corporate apparel. They’re available in a variety of styles and colors. Brand name golf polos are also available, many of which have low minimum quantities. Co-branding your logo with one that is well established in the apparel business will show your customers that you care about quality. As for affordability, embroidered polo shirts are available starting at just about six dollars.

Wovens

The classification of a “woven” encompasses a variety of different types of shirts. Oxford button down shirts, denim shirts, dress shirts and casual shirts are all considered woven shirts. Typically, these are the types of shirts worn by executives or in a workplace with a “corporate casual” dress code. Embroidering your logo on one of these corporate shirts will result in a corporate gift that will be admired by others and appreciated by recipients.

Outwear

Promotional outwear is often chosen by businesses as the corporate gift of choice because the winter months, in most places are cold. Promotional jackets, while slightly more costly, than other promotional apparel items, are looked at by recipients as valuable gifts. For a more economic choice, try embroidering your company name on a promotional fleece jacket. And although they’re often seen as casual items, promotional sweatshirts can still make excellent and affordable corporate gifts.

There is no doubt that the upcoming holiday season will be affected by the economy. People will be spending less across the board on gifts for family and friends. Make sure that you don’t forget the most important people to your business and consider investing in executive apparel gifts this holiday season.

By: Sarah Shepherd

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