What is your personal brand?

“We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

—Tom Peters

The term “personal branding” was first coined in 1997 by leading business-management thinker Tom Peters. A personal brand is formed by an individual’s professional reputation and online image, as well as personal characteristics such as work style, community engagement and worldview. It incorporates all the skills, talents and areas of expertise an individual has cultivated over his or her lifetime.Read full post...

Congratulations. Your organization’s leaders have decided to establish a new positioning statement, brand platform, externally facing mission statement and even a new slogan. And they want you to come up with concepts and copy to get the message out. Now what?

Before you jump in head first, put together a work plan to collect marketplace research in order to create a brand platform and strategy that will support your organization’s suite of current and future products and services.Read full post...

Have you updated your marketing plan lately?

I’m here to say, it’s 2016 and marketing has changed. A lot. Marketing is no longer centered around your product, but your customer.

Now’s a good time to update your marketing plan (you have a marketing plan, right?). Make it your road map for this year’s marketing initiatives. Use it to set goals that you can check on from time to time—and say, “Oh, yeah, lookin’ good” or “Oh, sh*t, we’re totally off.” If you Google “marketing plan template,” you’ll find a standard outline consisting of about ten things you could include—like a SWOT analysis, USP and pricing strategies.Read full post...

What benefits working with a full-service agency can offer over a project shop.

In the end, designating an advertising Agency of Record (AOR) for your organization should be a decision based on the strategic, long-term marketing and communication needs of your stakeholders in your marketplace.

I know what you’re thinking. My conclusion may sound biased, since I am employed by a full-service ad agency, I can also offer this opinion from the perspective of a CMO with more than 25 years of experience from the client side in healthcare, higher education, and professional services institutions.Read full post...

What are your marketing resolutions for 2016?

The New Year gives us a clean slate and an opportunity to make resolutions to improve our lives. Typical goals and resolutions include losing weight, exercising more, improving finances, getting a new job or procrastinating less. Which, I’m sure we’ll all fully accomplish this year.

Yeah, right.

According to recent research published in the University of Scranton Journal of Clinical Psychology, while nearly 45 percent of us make New Year’s resolutions, only 8 percent actually keep them.Read full post...

Almost 400 people took the Business and Labor Resources Employment Branding Survey this past June. The results highlight the importance of marketing and human resources professionals working together to build and maintain an employment brand.

Slightly more than one quarter (26.6%) of survey respondents said their organization has an employment brand program—i.e., “a program directed at employees and potential employees as opposed to a general brand program directed at the population at large.”

Of those who don’t have a brand program, 40.5% said they plan to implement or are considering one, and 50.7% said they may consider one in the future.Read full post...

by: Kathleen Doyle and Michael English

While we’ve heard rumblings in the industry about the demise of Flash for some time, it has become a reality only recently. Here’s a quick history of the rocky relationship between the Internet and Flash. Back in 2007, Apple chose not to allow a Flash player plugin on the iPhone, and in 2010, Steve Jobs called for Adobe to “kill Flash.” The writing was on the wall.Read full post...

Brands don’t happen over night.
image credit: Latimre Appleby

In my career I have built, enhanced and even created numerous brands for multiple organizations in healthcare, higher education, and other industries. And people always ask me, “How long does it take to establish a brand?”

My answer: five years.

In the first phase, you’ll develop your brand. This requires qualitative and quantitative marketplace, stakeholder and competitor research; positioning and brand platform formation; and creative execution, messaging, and brand guideline and internal collateral development. You’ll need careful planning and patience—and about 18 months.Read full post...

The term “diversity” is popping up more and more in in the news and within our organizations. Why? Diversity is great for business—it’s a key driver of innovation, and it’s crucial for companies that want to attract top talent. Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is no longer just “training” that your employer requires you to complete—it’s a crucial factor in the culture of successful organizations. Read this case history about how Sodexo used D&I to improve employee engagement and foster creativity.

Have you ever wondered how D&I affects your brand?Read full post...

While business owners keep the doors open, change agents do that and more. They constantly challenge the status quo and find new ways to achieve greater success—and then work tirelessly to ensure that success.

These driven people share four traits:Read full post...

I happen to be an early millennial (1986), and my brothers came around at the end (2000 & 2002) And the three of us consume content very differently, and much differently than mom and dad.

If you’re not a millennial, you probably have a mental image of how we behave—we can’t put our phones down, we can’t pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds, we aren’t following the traditional 9–5 workday and we can be kind of difficult.

It’s all true.

But we’re also an important demographic—and we’re changing the way marketers do their job.Read full post...

Whether you have separate teams dedicated to marketing and new business development, or you have one person responsible for both, you need to start an inbound marketing program. What makes inbound so important?

Let’s start with something everyone (especially our b2b clients) realizes: The buyer’s journey has changed. There’s now this Zero Moment of Truth—the moment when a person identifies a problem and then heads to Google to research a solution. If you don’t come up on that first page, chances are your competitors do, and they will snag that lead and eventually that paying customer.Read full post...

Inbound or content marketing is nothing new. As marketers, we’ve been creating content — e-books, white papers, webinars, infographics, blogs — for years. What’s new is using inbound to build business. Here’s how: We create content that potential buyers want and need, optimize the website, build trust with the prospect through personalized lead nurturing, and eventually turn that prospect into a customer.

And we do all of this in real time, while we track what’s working and what isn’t, enabling us to show the ROI of marketing. Statistics tell us inbound methods cost 62% less than outbound methods, and generate three times more leads. Those are some pretty awesome numbers.Read full post...

The budget tango – the precious dance clients and agencies do around the marketing budget.

Budgets.

There, I said it. I’ve never been a fan of surprises.

There’s a silly little dance that takes place in most client-agency relationships around the subject of budgets. I call it the budget tango.Read full post...

Motivation is like a muscle, it won’t grow on its own! You need to push it!

I finally hit my one-year anniversary at AB&C — and every day I still wake up as excited as I was on my first day of work here. I know, sounds totally cheesy — but whatever. I refuse to get into a rut. Because once things get stagnant, I quit pushing myself to become better. Like at the gym. Doing the same old routine gets old real fast and, before you know it, going just seems boring and skipping becomes a lot more appealing. But if you keep your routine new and exciting, you’ll always be looking forward to going.Read full post...