What is Corporate Branding?

Posted in: Blog, Marketing by heath on July 13, 2009 | No Comments

Corporate branding is the practice of using a company’s name as a product brand name. It is an attempt to leverage corporate brand equity to create product brand recognition. It is a type of family branding or umbrella brand. Disney, for example, includes the word “Disney” in the name of many of its products; other examples include IBM and Heinz. This strategy contrasts with individual product branding, where each product has a unique brand name and the corporate name is not promoted to the consumer.

Corporate branding can result in significant economies of scope since one advertising campaign can be used for several products. It also facilitates new product acceptance because potential buyers are already familiar with the name.

Corporate branding is not limited to a specific mark or name. Branding can incorporate multiple touch points. These touch points include; logo, customer service, treatment and training of employees, packaging, advertising, stationery, and quality of products and services. Any means by which the general public comes into contact with a specific brand constitutes a touch point that can affect perceptions of the corporate brand.

It has been argued that successful corporate branding often stems from a strong coherence between what the company’s top management seek to accomplish (their strategic vision), what the company’s employees know and believe (lodged in its organizational culture), and how its external stakeholders perceived the company (their image of it). Misalignments between these three factors, in turn, may indicate an underperforming corporate brand.

Source: Wikipedia

Have You Claimed Your Facebook Vanity URL?

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Tutorials by heath on July 6, 2009 | No Comments

In case you missed it Facebook has launched vanity URLs. URLs for user profiles were previously user id numbers – such as facebook.com/profile.php?id=7016478. Now you can claim a vanity URL such as facebook.com/heathcates much like MySpace has done.

The reason you need to pick your vanity URL – vanity URLs have proven to be a powerful tool on MySpace, Twitter and other services. It’s not just that users like them and it makes telling people your profile name easier. People have also long used MySpace URLs as their online identity. Twitter, more recently, has started to become the online identity provider of choice. Even Google is getting in on the vanity URL game.

If you have yet to select your vanity URL for your profile then go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and select it today.

If you are a business or organization with a facebook page you can still get a vanity URL but it is a bit more tricky. You must have at least 100 fans and even then some users report having trouble claiming a name for their page. For the most part though the biggest requirement is the number of fans your page must have. You can apply for a page vanity URL at the same place you did your profile, http://www.facebook.com/username/.