From your company slogan to detailed marketing materials, you want to be very careful with the words that you choose to represent your business. What may sound perfectly fine to you may be construed as pretentious, offensive, or outright incorrect by another person. This is a particularly pressing issue when you cross cultures or the language barrier. When I took a recent trip to Taiwan, I was bombarded with all sorts of signs that may be fine in Taiwanese, but they sound terrible in English.

Beyond simple language issues, another area that deserves your attention is corporate or industry jargon. Even when marketing to others within the same industry as yours, it is important to be mindful of what jargon you are using. The marketing materials may make perfect sense to you, but the person from the accounting department of a potential customer may not understand. Technical language may stand in the way of completing a sale and it may make for a poor customer service experience. At the same time, you don’t want to patronize your clients by explaining every little detail.

Take the target audience into consideration when drafting up any sort of signage, newsletters, or even blog posts. Talking about PHP and mySQL may make sense to intermediate web users, but the novice blogger will have no idea what you’re talking about. Acronyms are a particularly touchy subject, so try to spell things out the first time before reverting to their shortened versions.

Have you ever been turned off by jargon? Has it stopped you from dealing with that company?

You may believe that your business is superior to your competitors in some way. Maybe you offer a more affordable price point or a better product overall. For whatever reason, you believe that your company is ultimately the better choice for your customer. After all, if you don’t believe in yourself, there’s no reason why a potential client would believe in you.

Even if this may be the case, it is probably not in your best interest to directly attack your competitors in your ad campaigns. You inevitably see these kinds of commercials around election time, and it is not uncommon to see Coca-Cola unleash a marketing campaign that says that their product is better in some way than the equivalent product from Pepsi. The automotive world isn’t all that different in this respect either, as you’ve surely been bombarded with ads that say something about being more fuel efficient than X or having a better crash test rating than Y.

Ultimately, these forms of advertising can work against you. By mentioning competitors in your marketing campaign, you are simultaneously providing them with free advertising. It’s possible that your potential customers weren’t even considering that particular competitor and now you have piqued their interest enough to warrant further investigation. By attacking your competitors in your ads, you are also presenting a not-so-friendly image to the public. Would you want to deal with a firm that was spiteful and negative? I know I wouldn’t.

The next time you design a marketing campaign for your company, you may want to avoid the negative advertising paradigm. It is likely not in your favor to do so.

Every day I see a new subbrand come to life which makes me shake my head. These companies only focus is on the short term gain and not the long term brand issues. The law of subbrands says, if you want to launch a new product or service that does not fit your current brand then create a new separate brand.

We currently follow this rule for our own services that we run. Each company has it’s own branding and they are very different. As an example you will see our BlueFur site is much different from our InfernoDrive site and they both are very different from our dotUptime site. We could put all of our services as subbrands to BlueFur, like BlueFurUptime and BlueFurDrive but doing so would dilute our branding of BlueFur.

Another example which will really hit home for most is the mistake made by Cadillac in the late 90′s. When you think of a Cadillac a large, luxurious vehicle comes to mind. Cadillac created a subbrand called the Catera which is tiny in comparison to the full Cadillac. Can you imagine anyone going into the Cadillac dealership saying, “Hi I really like the idea of owning a Cadillac, I just wish you had one smaller.” With the Catera doing horrible the subbrand died in 2001.

Can you think of any subbrands that have failed or do not make sense to the main brand?

Generally speaking, there are two main ways that you can go about marketing your company. On the one hand, you can try and specialize in only a small number of products or services. There are freelance writers who only do press releases and they do very well in this area of expertise. On the other hand, you can market your company is such a way that you become a one-stop shop for customers, offering all sorts of supplementary services. For example, a freelance writer may also offer services related to graphic design, web coding, and publishing.

There are clearly advantages and disadvantages to either strategy. Following the law of contraction, your brand can become very well known for a single product or a single family of products. Toys ‘R’ Us has done very well for itself specializing in toys, just as Starbucks has performed exceptionally well in selling coffee. Given the right advertising and marketing, people can come to associate a family of products or services with your brand. If they need product XYZ, they’ll know that they can get it from you.

Following the law of expansion, potential customers may appreciate the convenience of having to only go to one place to fulfill all of their needs. This is the nature of something like a department store or mega-store. If you walk into a Costco or a Wal-Mart, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to find everything you need there, from clothing to electronics, bedding to pet food. For many businesses, offering supplementary products and services can have a huge impact on the bottom line. Instead of referring customers to someone else, you can offer additional services in-house. Get your legal and accounting needs from a single business management firm, for instance.

Ultimately, one of the biggest keys to success for any marketing campaign is consistency. Decide from the beginning whether you want your company to be recognized for specializing in a single product or whether you want to market your company in such a way that it is known for selling a wide variety of products. The alternative would be to set up separate brands for separate families of products. Companies like Proctor & Gamble and General Electric have done well under this model.

When building a brand be sure to build a unique brand and avoid being generic. Any brand that is generic will be easy to forget, cause brand confusion and is a recipe for disaster. Strong brands are unique and well though out.

Take for example if they had of named Bable Fish something more generic like Easy Translate. The name would be better at describing what the service was like many generic easy translate software that is available the brand would have been easy to forget.

Have you been to a health store lately? All of them seem to have the word Nature in them, Nature’s Way, Nature’s Best, Nature’s Resources. All of these stores use the same colours, similar logo’s, sell the same products and in essence have the same service. If you owned a health store how would brand it?

 

There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all marketing campaign. There are so many variables involved in creating an advertising campaign that they really have to catered to each specific company for a very specific purpose. While certain sports themed companies, like Nike and Under Armor, may perform better by emphasizing the concept of competition and rising above the rest, this may not be the best strategy for other organizations.

A recent post on DarrenBarefoot.com illustrates this very concept. In taking a closer look at a box of Girl Guide cookies that he recently purchased, he noticed some rather interesting copywriting on the box.

In a prominently featured text box, it reads “No tryouts. No cuts. No competition. It’s the greatest team she’ll ever join.”

Although they may go after individual badges, Girl Guides are not supposed to compete against one another. The organization is meant to foster teamwork and collaboration among its members. It’s clear that they want to emphasize the concept of “team” in the Girl Guides organization rather than the concept of “competition”. This follows in an increasingly popular trend in parenting circles to reduce or eliminate competition among children.

When designing a marketing campaign for your company or product, consider the emerging trends among your target demographic and how you can best address their wishes. Parents of Girl Guides want the girls to learn about community and collaboration, and the message depicted on the cookie box reinforces this commitment.