Have you ever wondered how multi-national companies like McDonalds, Coca-cola, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Motorola, Sony and UPS came up with their names? Just think, if these companies have some lame or forgettable brand name, would they be as big as they are now? Every company starts out by thinking of a name. A law firm, for example, commonly uses the names of its associates, like Smith, Johnson and Brown Law Firm. The name of a woman's specialty shop should be something sensual and exciting, like Victoria's Secret or Bare Essentials. A clothing line should boast the popular designer's name.

Corporate branding does not just involve the company name. It also includes the corporate logo design and the overall company image. More importantly, it conveys your corporate identity. When you think of computers, Microsoft comes to mind. Instead of photocopier, you think of Xerox. Toothpaste equals Colgate. Coming up with the perfect brand name that will stick to the consumer's mind is as important as coming up with the finances to start a company - be it big or small.

1.       First Impressions Last

When you distribute a business card, see what dominates that small piece of paper. Brand names and logos. Bland brand names never work. When you think of a name, follow these rules:

-          Be original.

-          Do not be overly creative - business cards must be functional. Sure a uniquely sized/shaped card might generate interest but it's very hard for a secretary to file in a business card rack.

-          From your options, choose one that has a global appeal.


2.       Branding

In today's global marketplace, a brand is considered as a valuable corporate asset and a marketing tool for success. Thus, you should always give careful consideration to different cultures if you plan to conquer a worldwide market.


3.       The Simpler The Better

When creating the company logo, it is much more advisable to be creative and distinctive. The more conservative designs apply to a target market of the same kind. If you apply the same concept to a company whose customers are supposed to be young and hip, they will fall asleep as soon as they hear your brand name and see your logo. With a younger clientele, it is best to be energetic and creative when thinking of corporate naming and branding.


4.       Brand Name Equals Image

With the Internet being considered as the most powerful marketing tool, it is very important that your customers remember something distinctive about your company. Give out a clear picture of the message that you want to impart and the image that you want to project. Strong graphic design is the ace up your sleeve to leave a lasting impact of your company.


5.       Be Consistent

Corporate branding takes time. It includes your company name, your logo, your customer service, the staff, the building location, the state of the offices, even your maintenance staff and the company vehicles. As years pass, your company develops a certain reputation. It is a good thing if, upon hearing the name of your company, people would immediately associate it with the service or product that you represent. Make sure that you stick to the corporate image that you want to project.


6.       Create A Powerful, Branded Web Site

Marketing though the Internet is yet another aspect of corporate branding. You should develop a distinctive, informative and complete web site. This is so that customers would have a clear understanding of your company profile.


7.       Research, Manage, Dominate!

Try visiting websites which offer corporate branding and advertising services. Better yet, look for the people behind the big companies and ask or research on how these establishments have gotten to where they are now. Check on their corporate structure and how they began. Make sure that the people who make up the corporate ladder have enough enthusiasm and confidence about the company which should rub off on the rest of the staff. It would never hurt your company if you have a good personnel attitude and an intense pride of work.

Good Luck; Good Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

Branding is much more than just a thoughtful logo or slogan and it's more than just a unique color scheme. Below are the initial steps that need to be taken in order to start your successful brand image.

Step 1: Examine the Competition

One of the keys to creating a successful brand image is to separate yourself from your competition. You will need to know how consumers see your competition. You need to recognize how your competitors differentiate themselves from others. Also, you should know your competitor's strengths and weaknesses. Your business can benefit from knowing this information by learning from their weaknesses, and learning how to differentiate your company from the competition.

Step 2: Identify Your Strengths

Now that you know your competition's weaknesses you can begin to focus on your company's strengths. Perform a target market analysis, learn from it, and use it to your advantage. This is a useful tool to confirm your company's strengths are in fact important to your target market. Once you've realized your strengths, and what strengths are important to customers, you can think about ways to successfully market these to the public and involve them in your branding campaign.

Step 3: Know Your Customer

Learn more about the customer. Know their purchasing behavior. How often do they buy? Do they buy only during sales or promotions? Do they buy an array of products or services or just a select few? These are questions you should ask to better market to your customers. Also, know your customer's lifestyles, needs, mindsets, and attitudes. Knowing and working with these personality traits are also key to marketing success.

Step 4: Be Your Brand

Make sure your company truly represents what your brand identifies you with. For example, if one of the traits your brand identifies your company with is politeness, be polite. This means every employee from the receptionist all the way up to the CEO needs to live your brand.

Good Luck; Good Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

Branding a small business is a must if you want to succeed in a competitive world. The importance of branding a business disregarding its size is based on not only real benefits, products and services that your business possesses, but also an image concept that all businesses should keep in mind.

From color business cards to global business identity, depending on how effectively you brand your business, the more or the less opportunities of success will knock at your door. The reason why large companies brand their businesses is because they know this is the best way to differentiate their products and services from their competitors while creating a corporate image.

Many small business owners believe it is not necessary to development a corporate image, particularly those whose business integrate just a few individuals as staff, or even when they own a one-man business, using the internet for selling or promoting their professional services. However, even a small business should utilize the same principles as the large enterprises to brand their business.

Furthermore, if your business has business cards, stationery and other branded elements along with a matching website, you will not only create a corporate image, but also loyal relationships with your customers and prospective customers, who will find more reliability with a small business with these characteristics, than others without a professional look and feel.

Because you only have the opportunity to impress new customers once, you should make sure that this impression is a positive and lasting introduction and handshake, only possible if you brand your business conveniently and professionally. There is no need to spend thousands of dollar to achieve it, but do not go to the other extreme using uneven elements.

Small businesses should be aware of the elements that will make their brand unique and recognizable, including consistency between online and printed elements, such as your logo, signage, business cards and even a slogan that helps people understand at a glance your business's mission statement.

Effective branding must achieve these goals; be consistent and never differing, carrying the same logo, colors, slogans and statements through to every element of your business, all of them always visible and unique, hence the need to avoid elements that anyone can find anywhere such as free or cheap clipart.

Creating your brand, whatever your budget requires a business plan to have a solid appreciation on whom your customers will be and what can you do to serve them. This is not only a matter of elegant stationary or catchy business cards; it is the most important deployment of a small business for an eventual growth in future terms.

Internet marketing is all about hard results, not generic concepts of branding. Still, there are ways to go about branding your product or service on the net without spending a fortune.

But is branding a legitimate marketing strategy?

Branding refers to the vague notion of creating an identity for a product, service or name with consumers. The classic example, of course, is Coca Cola. Being first on the scene, the company has been able to create such a strong name brand that most people use the word “coke” instead of soda when ordering. This is true even when they prefer Pepsi. In the world of marketing, we all bow before the marketing team that accomplished this branding. The Internet, however, is a different beast. That same marketing team would be crushed if they went after a similar strategy on the net.

The Internet is so large that branding is an expensive and difficult goal unless you are the first major presence in a niche. Sites like EBay and Amazon were the first major money players in their fields, giving them a huge advantage over subsequent competitors. Unless you are coming to a field with a lot of money and no current dominant site, your branding efforts are going to meet with failure or limited success at best. If you want to stick with it, the only cost effective and ultimately successful strategy is to pursue a width search engine optimization campaign.

Search engine optimization is simply an effort to get pages on your site ranked high in search results on the three big search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. To establish your brand, the best Internet marketing strategy is to identify every single phrase your prospects use to find services or products in your business area. You then build optimized pages for every single phrase and get them ranked.

This strategy has two benefits. First, it will produce free traffic to your site. If you build 200 pages and each gets 50 visitors a day, your site will receive 10,000 visitors a day. The second benefit is your brand becomes established. Regardless of what the prospect searches for, they keep seeing your site. This creates both recognition and credibility with the prospect as they tend to equate high rankings with quality. As they visit your site over and over, they will also become readily familiar with your unique selling position as presented on the site.

If you want to establish a brand, avoid wasting your money on banners and such unless you are in a niche that isn’t dominated by any single site. Instead, use the width search engine optimization tactic to establish your site and pick up free traffic.

Good Luck; Good Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

Branding is a unique thing that can create business longevity for you. I am not saying that that is going to happen initially, those that have bad business practices, after a year or two, or even six months, they will soon become like that, they will wonder where their next sale is going to be. So hopefully they could even turn it around, if you are like that you are branding yourself that way, you can turn it around. It is probably harder to turn it around than if you had initially done that, but things could turn around through the same branding practices.

Other branding methods, you can brand yourself in the search engines. With some of these search engines the name like, pay per click king, you can have articles and sites up under those keywords, even pay per click ads and things of that sort, so when people look that up, they will see you. They find you there under that keyword name. Anything that you can think of, even with your offline marketing, even when you do newspaper ads, magazine ads, anything else offline, media, radio ads, tv ads, you can always put your branding in there, sign off throughout the process of doing that, you can refer to yourself as the pay per click king, then that becomes your branding.

So continue learning on this ever growing path for you to be successful in business, whether you already are successful you can become more successful than you already are. Never think you know everything, we do not know everything. we have been a student of marketing for many years and we will be a student of marketing for as long as we can, until we stop working. That is our branding, that is what we do and so we are always learning. Never think you know everything, always learn. The simple marketing formula is targeted traffic pointed towards a targeted sales page or landing page equals money or commissions. That is the online marketing formula in the simplest form.

Most people routinely mess up the left side and that is what we teach. Everybody wants the right side, the money, but they do not want to do the left side. If a person was going to go to college and be an accountant, it use to be that you could be an accountant just for four years of college. But it has gotten so competitive now you need at least a six year degree in accounting to be even competitive in the accounting industry. And so they spend six years learning their trade so they can actually make money in accounting. You do not have to spend that long online to learn this information, especially if you find the right mentors that will put you on the fast track.

You should always find the cream of the crop, this is what we do. We can go into any industry we want and get to the top of that industry because we find the cream of the crop in that industry and pay them whatever they want so that we can learn from them. It usually takes us six months in that industry to do that, and that is after paying people for their time to tell us the things that they know. Sometimes you pay for courses and the courses were garbage, but we never complained about it, we just said that is a person that we do not need to learn from. We just keep going forward until we found the cream of the crop.

The money that we spent on that is pennies compared to what we learned from the cream of the crop and continued to make large sums of money in that industry. That is what you need to do, find the cream of the crop. When you find the cream of the crop, pay that person whatever they want and learn everything you can from that person. Do not suck them dry overnight, then they might not teach you anything else. Let them teach you, let them do it over time and just learn everything you can from them. Most likely the information that they teach you, you will have to read, listen to, watch, whatever method they use to teach you, over and over again to get it correctly.

Good Luck; Good Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrators

Your online marketing efforts can bring, literally, millions of people to your door simply by adding your personal touch with a Personal Branding Marketing campaign.

Now how do you go about doing it?

1. Video Because Moving Images Sell.  YouTube has given us, as internet marketers, a level playing field by providing us their FREE platform to host our videos.

2. A Relationship Building Website . You can create a website or hire a web designer to create one for you.  On your website you will acquaint visitors about what it is you have to offer them. They will either like your energy and return for more information or they will keep searching for someone whom they relate to.  The whole purpose of your website however, is to create a relationship with your visitors.

3. Get Personal. People like to buy from people so it is important when someone goes to your website, and opts-in for more information,  you send them a “personalized” thank you email and then follow up with a personal phone call.  You separate yourself from all the other marketers when you practice this.

Traditional Marketing efforts, on the other hand, are more arduous and almost always very costly to say the least!  Advertising space in magazines, newspapers, brochures, T.V., etc could cost you well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the ROI is still just a hope and a prayer away.

Traditional Marketing is very generic in its approach as the reach is extremely broad.  The personal touch is not present when you are sending your message out to millions of people in the hopes they see a value in your offerings.

Take a close look at how your business can profit by implementing Personal Branding campaigns.

And remember Tuxedo Branding is here to help you!!

Good Luck; Good Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

When it comes to branding no one ever thinks about who actually uses it. Most simply think of brands as items you pick up while shopping or maybe even the retailer you are shopping in but countries use branding the same way businesses do.

You see a country's "customers" are its investors, tourists, traders, market intermediaries, NGOs, and office-holders in other countries and in multilateral institutions. Their interactions with one another take place in a complex environment, affected by governments, social forces, cultural factors, and markets.

The country must clearly identify its clientele: who are they, what motivates them, what do they do and buy (and how, where and when), what are their decision-making processes and priorities, who influences these and how. It is important to remember that people and institutions buy goods and services to satisfy needs. Nation branding is tantamount to casting the country as the superior if not exclusive answer to those needs it can cater to or even create.

The country's brand manager would do well to analyze the purchasing process: how, when, and where transactions are concluded. Understanding consumption and investment habits and patterns allows for better targeting and education of relevant market segments in order to influence and alter the behavior of target customers. They must also understand the people not only living in the country but visiting it. Understanding their psychology and demographics is crucial.

In this scenario the brand manager must distinguish consumer customers from business customers and from institutional customers. Consumer customers purchase goods and services from the country for their own consumption. Even tourists are consumer customers.

Business customers buy goods and services from the country on behalf of third parties. Tour operators are business customers. Business customers operate on a large scale and are, therefore, less numerous and less dispersed than consumer customers. Consequently, it is easier to foster long-term and close relationships with them. But, being dependent as they are on end-users, theirs is a volatile, demand-driven market. Moreover, business customers are tough negotiators (though some of them seek quality rather than price advantage).

Institutional customers assemble information about the country and analyze it in order to make or to influence political and credit decisions. Banks, governments, NGOs, and lenders evaluate and finance tourism projects based on such data.

To attract these movers and shakers, the country's brand manager must constantly monitor the global economy as well as the economies of the nation's main partners. Everything, from monetary policy to regulatory and fiscal developments affect purchasing and investment decisions.

So the next time you think of branding, take a step back and realize that everyone does it and needs to do it to stay "in business", including who countries.

Good Luck and More Successful Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

Okay assuming your product is a mind-blowing fabulous one and you’ve gotten your tag line down to reflect and reinforce what your company product or service line is and does, it all comes down to image.

This means your logo.

A logo isn’t just a picture. It can be a word or name too. This is known as a word mark. Again, this is the visual representation of your company. This is the symbolic icon that will forever conjure up your...to continue reading to learn the 7 Keys click here.