BRANDING, MARKETING and ADVERTISING

Would you commission your plumber to repair your car's engine? Does the baker cut your hair? Would you trust your mechanic to perform a heart operation? Everyday professional intrusion is more common where unqualified employees (freelance or staff) make decisions for which they are not prepared within companies. Representing the image of a brand is a great responsibility. Even if your products are wonderful, if your image is mediocre, you will not achieve the success you deserve.  Starting a business is expensive, creating a brand requires a lot of investment. And why is there professional intrusion? This does not only happen in Taiwan, it's common throughout the world, marketing departments, communication departments, etc...  In some cases, the managers in charge do not have specific training to recognize the professional shortcomings of their employees, or they do not have time to supervise the work they do, so everything seems fine to them because they have their eyes close...

Having good branding to get our products or services to the global market is absolutely essential. In Taiwan, there are many companies with extraordinary products, but for certain reasons, they do not have access to communication agencies that can understand their business and give them a brand image that can lead to success outside the island. One of the main reasons is that in Asia there is a shortage of agencies that know and understand the global market, there are no agencies with decades of experience in America and Europe and that also operate in Asia and the agencies that operate in this market are extremely expensive. For these and other reasons, not all companies in Taiwan have access to this type of service, due to the high costs of renowned international agencies, large commissions, and high prices for their services. The key to helping these companies is knowing how to offer personalized services according to the needs of each client, as is the following case study of the c...

Years like 2020 make it very clear that marketing is a discipline in constant evolution and companies that do not evolve at the same speed, run the risk of getting stuck and not being able to evolve as the competition will surely do, as I mentioned in my previous post . There is a set of tactical techniques or tools such as Marketing Mix, which are a combination that allows us to align our strategy to achieve our objectives through the famous 4Ps introduced by E. Jerome McCarthy in the 60s, which evolved to become what Now they are called the "7Ps of Marketing" or as I like to call them: "Fantastic 7P" . This has not happened now, Bernard Booms and Mary Bitner changed this concept in 1981 when they proposed to apply the concept of the 7Ps  since at the end of the 70s the marketing specialists had recognized that the Marketing Mix had to be updated and this new conception reached a high degree of acceptance throughout Europe. Well-coordinated, the 7P of Servic...

The response of some companies to the current global economic crisis generated by COVID19 is to adopt a completely opposite position to what they should have adopted to maintain and grow their income. Here are some keys to success. In these difficult times for everyone, it is important to know how to adjust the sails to continue sailing and not sink into this ocean of inconveniences. The biggest mistake that many companies are making today is cutting budgets in the marketing department, this being the best tool they have to predict transforming their company according to their needs. Both strategic and operational marketing is essential, especially at this time. Marketing is not a business expense, it is an investment to achieve our objectives. Being such a broad concept, where it is not easy to clarify its principles, its functions, and much less its dimensions, marketing can help us in practice to achieve our objectives. If we want to strengthen our competitiveness, first of all, we...

As individuals we are constantly communicating, when we do it as a brand, we have to pay close attention to every detail in order to meet our objectives, each step we take as a brand we are projecting our image abroad and that is how the consumer will perceive us. The images used in advertising usually contain several layers in their meaning, they are not images chosen at random when there is a professional behind this task, but on the contrary, they are really worked in order to deliver a message to the consumer and manipulate their perception of our brand to convince them of the benefits of using our products The psychology of the image in advertising usually uses different strategies to achieve objectives, almost all of them are based on the psychological theory of Maslow's Pyramid or hierarchy of human needs.  These strategies include the following: Mechanistic strategy: It makes use of psychoanalysis, seeking to condition people through the repetition of an image until it con...

When asked about the projects I’m most proud of, there´s one I remember with special affection due to its greatness, in terms of its difficulty, competitiveness, and reward. Working for a marketing agency in Madrid, we contested with several major agencies to get the Direct Marketing account for the multinational SAP. Not only was this a big account (over a million dollars), the target audience was a select group of CEOs with high-level incomes – the crème de la crème . The objective was to communicate the benefits of using mySAP SCM in all of a company’s organizational processes. For this project, there were two big challenges. One was the fact that what SAP offers is hard to intuitively explain to most people. But an even greater challenge was the budget. When it comes to people who have money, it costs money just to reach them, and I had a whopping 10 US dollars in budget per audience member.  Not enough to buy my way in on its own, but as usual, creativity was my best ally. My ...

Direct marketing is a very valuable, accurate, and profitable communication tool that is becoming increasingly important thanks to the new technological tools of the media but to understand these new tools it is essential to understand their meaning in order to evolve and transform our strategy. Its objective is to generate a reaction in the consumer, a measurable and quantifiable response that provides us with relevant data for the definition of our strategic plans. Direct marketing advertising campaigns are aimed at a specific and precise group of consumers, so your strategy must be personalized for this specific target. This strategy allows us to optimize and save costs by exactly reaching our goal. As I said at the beginning, in the last two decades, direct marketing has been gaining importance in an exponential way, thanks to the dissemination tools that through technology have infiltrated the lives of all consumers. Prior to the internet revolution, the tools that were used to do...

One of the fundamental keys to success is creativity, applied to branding, marketing, or advertising. Words and ideas can change the world, without creativity we are mere spectators, followers of other brands, never leaders. There are dozens of myths around creatives, you cannot follow a manual to be creative, true creatives are those who have great ideas that create trends and applied to business objectives, they translate into good results, in the achievement of objectives. Being creative is a talent that we all have, a baker, an architect, a cook, a hairdresser, a designer, a salesman ... we are all creative, each one in his field, although there are those who, due to certain circumstances, never discover how to exploit your creativity. Being creative is not something exclusive reserved for advertising or marketing professionals, creativity is a mixture of several factors, starting with talent, a creative has to love what they do, go deeper in each step they take, study what you are...

Possibly you already know the difference between these three very basic concepts, but since I have come across some large companies where the meaning of these terms is confused, that is why I have decided to summarize them in this article. If we made a visual comparison to explain it, the best way to start would be to use the Russian matryoshka dolls, where the branding would be the big doll and the rest of the marketing would be a smaller one within the big one, and within this other one would be the communication, and within this other advertising. While branding is the soul of the brand or how consumers will perceive our brand, marketing is the set of actions that following an objective defined by a strategy "make the market", as I explained in my previous article ,  open the market by defining our products and promoting them, serving sellers as a support tool that facilitates reaching the final consumer. Marketing must always follow a strategy under the umbrella of br...

Having a good marketing plan is essential for any company, the marketing plan is a tool that helps us organize, organize our company in order to achieve our objectives and not be lost. Although it may seem absolutely obvious, there are many companies wasting resources by not having a marketing plan and they go around like headless chickens hitting the road. This bad practice can lead to the failure of a company. A good marketing plan can be summarized in the following four phases: - Analysis - Planning - Action - Analysis of results ANALYSIS In this phase, all internal and external agents that intervene in the market in which we operate will be studied. Internally, it is a common mistake to isolate the marketing department from other departments. Teamwork has been shown to be more effective, hence the importance of maintaining a close relationship with other departments that can provide us with vitally important information. In theory, all companies will boast of doing it, although as ...