When we speak of branding most of the time people try to relate it to big business house, however, the fact is that every business needs to establish their brand in order to survive the competition.

I just heard that I was quoted in BtoB Magazine on word-of-mouth marketing (WOM). Richard Karpinski wrote the piece which, from what I can tell, is one the the first articles on WOM for B2B marketers.

I. The Marketing Plan

In the decades since World War II, economics prowess replaced military power as the crucial geopolitical determinant. The resilience of a country is measured by its inflows of foreign investment and by the balance of its current account – not by the number of its tanks and brigades.

Branding is more than product recognition or a simple logo. It is the overall intellectual and emotional impression people have when they think of your company and its product. It is a strong and consistent message about the value of your business.

Todd over at the A Penny For Blog, shares some great insights on word of mouth marketing (WOM). Check it out.

How clear is your image in the minds of your potential customers? How can you bring that image into focus? Defining, developing and maintaining a brand identity is the key.

Not too long ago I put up a post about my personal [possibly OCD] tendancy to prejudge a company based on whether or not they used CSS as the foundation for their html markup.

Lately I’ve been thinking about css based layouts and how everyone and their brother are jumping on the css bandwagon.

The new Yahoo contextual search feature [dubbed Y!Q] rocks! It’s like vivisimo without all the annoying crap getting in the way of your search and there’s no flash to bog down your pc. Clean and simple interface that doesn’t require any downloads and allows you to drill down into search results in an easy to use manner.

Highlight points from the panel – pictured, left to right: Anita Campbell, Evelyn Rodriguez, Dan Taylor, Andy Lark – moderated by Elizabeth Albrycht.

Battelle talks about Google’s UK engineer recruiting tour and the Easter Eggs being laid down by Urs Hlzle of Google …

Who wouldn’t want to advertise on television and only pay for results? Many advertisers who have used popular pay-per-click programs on the Internet are now discovering that a similar model exists on television known as pay-per-call advertising.

Internet advertising is often thought of as direct marketing, unlike magazine ads. Of course, this concept makes zero sense and advertisers are finally beginning to come to terms with this reality.

The signs are in – the employment trend in Singapore is picking up again. As the republic continue to do well economically and register better-than-expected growth, investors’ confident will climb and business will expand. Good news for job seekers, especially those who had just graduated and those who has been retrenched last year – companies are hiring again.

Branding versus search engine optimization is a marketing dilemma that larger companies will need to come to grips with on the Internet. Often companies will need to decide whether to promote their own brand name as their main keyword phrase or optimize for a more generic keyword phrase.

The Take Away

Brands which are credibility-based sell products and services. They also have brand value, or ROI. The key is a Credibility Based Logo Designsm as the cornerstone of an integrated brand promotion system. The result is marketing communication which is planned to add credibility to the brand image. This is long term credibility-based integrated brand promotion. Credibility branding is a prudent investment for better selling and as an accrued financial return on marketing expenditure. Remember this: Credibility branding sells and has value.

A study conducted by Nielsen//Netratings and IAB has found that high-ranking advertisements on SERPs can be an effective tool for branding products. IAB commissioned N//N to conduct the survey, called the Internet Search Brand Effectiveness Research.

How do I Create a Successful Directory?

There are a few things which are important to do when creating a directory. To maximize the long term success of your directory you want to ensure:

In Branding Your Business Part I, we began discussing how to most effectively brand your company. In Part II, we will continue by adding more crucial areas where you should implement your new brand. Considering its pervasive nature and obvious importance, let’s start with content development and copy writing.

Branding is the process of creating a specific strong, memorable image and identity for your business. Besides utilizing good design and media that will help sell your product or service and stick in consumers’ minds, a good brand should inspire loyalty and confidence in your company by emoting specific responses and associations in your target audience.

The descriptions search engines offer when displaying search results are generally retrieved from two sources: