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Credibility Branding

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A marketing and business system to accelerate sales through credibility

 

Linear, manipulative, spin marketing is over. The social media world and savvy customers have created influencers that can sell products and change public opinion. These influencers (customers, users, media, celebrity, pundits, partners etc) are cementing the trust in products and companies and contributing to a dramatic increase in the speed of sales. Credibility branding is a model that helps to manage this opportunity and is an important new conceptual marketing breakthrough.

The Credibility Branding Blog 

Your marketing and business resource to accelerate sales through credibility.

The Credibility Branding Blog offers real world ideas and solutions to build a brand platform based on credibility. It even offers fundamental approaches to business planning, strategy and marketing / PR basics.

This blog delivers the goods to get those C-level folks (CEO, CMO, CFO) to think about marketing as a strategy not just a budget item and to get marketers to think like strategists not tacticians. The content consistently encourages companies to review all the possible points of credibility available to accelerate the speed of sales; when an influencer endorses a product there is less time for the consumer to decide, it speeds the decision making process. This blog is well written and is offering a unique voice to the blogisphere. In fact Steve Rebel a well known marketing blogger recently named it one of the "New Voices" on the blogisphere, and Branding Strategy Insider, Converstations and Marketo all included it on their tops lists of marketing blogs.

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Focus - The Missing Marketing Ingredient 

Are You Driven By Your Sales/Engineering Team Or Are You Driving Them?

I think one of the biggest challenges facing companies at just about any timeframe of its corporate life is focus. The focus I am referring to relates to a number of areas within the company. First is the notion of culture. Does your company have more of a sales-driven culture, (which represents a majority of companies)? Or is your company an engineering driven culture? Or is it a marketing-driven culture? In my experience, a small percentage of companies are based on a marketing-driven culture, more than half are sales-driven, and for technology, they are generally engineering-driven. Not being a marketing-driven company is big challenge to maintaining consistent focus.

What I mean by marketing-driven is looking from the ground up at everything you are doing as a marketing opportunity. So, for example, looking at your sales strategy. Is your sales guy running the show? This is very common. The sales guys come in and they want the sale, no matter the cost. And that cost is what I call a "seat-of-the- pants" approach where there is a frenetic environment and the sales guy turns on a dime depending on his customer. And features and benefits of the products are sometimes even adjusted for that one customer. That is a lack of focus.

What most companies are not doing is starting from scratch, looking at the market opportunity, looking at the market need, looking at what pain their product is going to solve in the marketplace. (That's actually a key issue: "product myopia" - benefits versus features%u2026 this will be covered in a future post).

In an engineering-driven culture, it's kind of a "if you build it, they will come" type of approach. They focus on "that little knob over there can create this really cool GUI which really is, like, cool". Versus creating a product that is actually going to meet the needs of the customer. Sometimes in an engineering-driven environment, the product marketing person will meet with customers and will clearly see the opportunities for product improvement%u2026 that the engineers will resist to their death.

What is needed is a different way of thinking; empowering your marketing executives and departments and using your marketing brand when making business decisions is of the utmost importance. For example if resources are limited and you have the choice of pursuing several different customers but can't service them all, don't just go for the money. Go for the one that will meet budget expectations but also add credibility

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Related topics: Credibility Branding,  advertising,  blogging your brand,  Business,  more

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CredibilityBranding

About CredibilityBranding

I started my career in advertising, and learned the business of
building brand while developing newspaper advertising for companies
such as Mazda, The Gap, Hostess, and Nortel. During my lengthy career
as a business strategist and public relations professional working with Microsoft, Pioneer, Canon, AOL etc. I leveraged
brand-building strategies to focus more on the communications end of
things, specifically how to identify and work with industry leaders and
experts (that I also call influencers).



As I worked at agencies and with a variety of clients, I realized
that most companies really don't have a strategic plan, or even a
thorough comprehension of their target market. They are generally very
sales focused meaning run by the sales staff, each with their own
agenda for generating a sale; sometimes at any cost. I found that a
sales driven company is usually running by the seat of its pants and, while they can be successful, there is often no road map to where they
are going or why. I regularly witnessed that this sales driven culture
eventually limited sales potential.



In an effort to assist these companies to think like marketers and
make marketing driven decisions (vs. sales or engineering driven
decisions), I created a system that walked them through the steps of
strategy this became "credibility branding" and is covered in my book
The Credibility Factor.



The book reveals some of the secrets I use with my consulting
clients; how to build a credible company and / or product from the
ground up in order to draw in highly influential editors, analysts,
early customers, celebrities, industry pundits, strategic partners and
the like. It shows how to leverage customers to spread word of mouth testimonials. The credibility branding model that the book is based on
helps to influences the influencers to influence customers and in the
process creates extremely loyal long term subscribers of your products
and services.

I have been approached as a as a speaker, commentator, guest
contributing writer and consultant. I have spoken for PRSA, AMA, IIR,
Association for Women in Technology, Oregon Entrepreneurs Forum, UCLA
Entrepreneurs Association, and I have been a regular guest speaker for
the University of California Irvine's MBA program.

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