Most Common Reasons Affecting Brand Failure

Here I am trying to list out and identify the reasons why some of the brands failed. As per the analysis carried on by experts main reason that is proved to be a main backlog with those brands are inefficiency in Brand Management and most common mistakes done by all.

The other reason that be noted is that usually in a case where two prominent companies dealing in same business try to offend the other one and even seeking for a chance to take over the competitor of itself. This happens only because of lack of proper Brand Management Practices and proper management of company and in other terms also.

And the other issue that may play main role is lack of involvement of CEO of the company.  The CEO doesn’t pays attention to the analysis of the marketing experts, other researchers and even suggestions of experienced chief marketing officer.

So, this may lead to failure of company and indirectly the brand reputation hurts and cause to downfall of the company progress.

So the possible reasons for Brand Failure are listed as under:

1. Not delivering the communicated brand commitment.

2. Lack of interlinking Brand Planning and Business Strategic Planning together.

3. Decrease in service quality and product deliverables.

4. Increase in product / service costs inviting other competitors to take over you and become more popular in the market and sell their product more than yours and even increasing process may also pull you down more towards inflation which is again a negative point.

5. The brand gets buried soon as time passes after all of the above described practices are applied to your business which leads to downfall in profit graphs.

6. Limiting the brand to only one channel and even to the business channel which is not much prominent in the prevailing market and also not fulfilling the customer needs.

7. Lacking back in a process where new variations of the product is coming in to market but though dealing in the same category because of low funds and other reasons related to monetary issues.

8. Dealing in targeted market by following totally inefficient way to sell and promote your brand.

9. Not implementing the new incremental strategies and improvement to your brand.

10. Misguiding you targeted market by creating variations of your product rather than delivering the committed product to your customer to fulfill their needs.

11. By introducing the sub brands may totally divert the original brand in some negative path that may lead to decrease your market reputation and brand reputation also.

12. Trying to raise your brand to some higher level but without proper strategic thinking and analysis may also lead to cause your brand in market.

13. Trying to copy your leading competitor rather than trying to stand out of the competition as compared to your competitor that in turn increase your competition.

14. Not getting involved in new innovations but just dealing with the same brand.

15. Making decisions that are not according to the brand and company benefits.

16. Not having proper knowledge of brand and Product that you are selling with seniors and other officials in the company.

17. Just ignoring the brand equity management rather than analyzing and implement some effective steps to improve business and increase consumer contact.

18. Just applying the decisions at the end of the development process of the product rather than implementing it right from the basic phase of product development.

19. Mixing the brand management practices with product management practices whereas both are totally different entities.

20. Just promoting the product with improper management and supervision.

21. Well thought-out marketing decisions are second guessed by non-marketers who think marketing is a matter of opinion rather than an art and a science in which experience matters

22. Defining your target consumer too broadly

23. Not understanding the consumer needs and requirements

24. Just promoting the brand without any type of central control so that other brands may also take over your brand and move ahead.

25. Using very common brand name as brand name should be unique and identifiable by customers.

26. Not defining your Brand purpose properly which in turn raise confusions in customer minds.

27. Trying and simply copying present competitor trends rather than implementing some innovative idea to attract customers and targeted market.

28. Just trying to improve the product quality rather than improving the brand promotional activities as both are interlinked with each other.

29. Just simply trying to acquire all of the points related to the product rather than focusing on your specialization and expertise.

30. Changing the brand promotional activity on frequent basis and even its strategy which may raise confusions in customer’s mind.

31. Losing market share and targeted customer acquirement because of improper promotions.

32. And even promoting the brand in excessive manner that may also move your customers away.

33. Spending lots of money on unnecessary promotions and other activities.

34. To be in focus for such institutions who may affect your reputation in market.

35. Recruiting the expert personnel who helps to promote your brand in proper way.

Please suggest if you think I forgot to mention some points.

Source: brandingstrategyinsider.com

 

B2B Social Media Content Sharing Strategy in 7 Steps

When it comes to the social web people often spend too much time talking about the applications and not nearly enough about the content that fuels them. Sharing content and information is the currency of the social web, and without content the platforms are useless. So when we think about B2B social media success we obviously need to focus on content. Though we have written many posts on how to create B2B content for the web, today I want to address how to share content.

Before we get to strategy, I have one rule.

The Rule: Don’t only share your content, people don’t care about ONLY your content.

Now with that rule out of the way, let’s talk about developing a strategy and tactics for sharing content on social web. This framework should work for sharing content your business creates as well as other relevant information to those in your industry.

B2B Social Media Content Sharing Strategy in 7 Steps

1. Understand What Is Interesting To The People You Are Trying To Influence – If you are in a B2B marketing department you likely know what you want to tell them about your products. Do you have a clear understanding of what they are interested in in general related to their industry? Do you know what information they need to do their jobs better? In some cases you or a member of your organization will know these answers. If you aren’t sure about the type of content you customers are looking for, then consider trying a few of these approaches:
* Look at popular articles from industry trade publications
* Use Twitter Search for industry keywords to see which links are being shared
* Ask customers what information they look for online

2. Develop A Process To Gather Relevant Information To Share – It is unlikely that your B2B company has a full time social media team member and if you do, they are likely booked solid. This means that spending your entire day looking for information to share isn’t an option. To solve this problem, invest a little time to set up a system that allows you to filter and receive content to share in one place. One of the easiest ways to do this was to set up an RSS reader, such as Google Reader. RSS feeds allow you to get new posts from across the Internet in one place in real-time. You can import RSS feeds from leading industry media outlets as well and feeds from Twitter Search and Google Blog Search results into your selected reader. By doing this you have created one tab in your browse that is jam packed with relevant information to you customers that is ready to share. If RSS readers aren’t your thing, you could always use a real-time search engine like Collecta to help gather information.

3. Preform A Content Distribution Inventory – Take a look at how your business is distributing information online right now. What is missing to properly reach your customers is an e-mail newsletter? Twitter account? Blog? etc. Do you need everything, no. However, content on the social web can get more powerful as more pieces are put into place. Inbound marketing has a lot to do with probability. If you distribute information in 6 ways instead of 3 it is more likely that people will find it.

4. Segment B2B Content By Platform – Once you have a method of gathering content to share and ways to distribute it online, you have to put the two together. For example if you are searching Twitter, it is likely many of those may be retweeted through one or multiple business accounts. While you may pull all of the stats from your feeds and use them for a blog post or SlideShare presentation. The point is that different types of online content serve different purposes. By segmenting content it makes it quicker and easier to share.

5. Set Up Cross-Posting – Repetition is the enemy when it comes to sharing B2B content online. People who share a high frequency of good content online use services to distribute. For example using a service like Tubemogul it is easy to upload a video once and post it to multiple video sharing sites. Another popular service Posterous can allow you to post a picture to Twitter, Flickr and Facebook all at the same time. Doing research to see what type of platforms can help with your content distribution could not only save time, but insure that opportunities for distribution aren’t missed.

6. Implement Measurement For Each Distribution Method – Measurement is still the painful part of content distribution. Most platforms have their own measurement systems to track views, engagement, etc. This means it is difficult to have one dashboard to look at your measurement for each social platform. Even though spreadsheets can be painful, most services will let you export your measurement information as a .csv file. Doing this would allow you to have one spreadsheet document with measurement data to help compare platforms and demonstrate overall success.

7. Optimize Distribution Timing – Like it or not different segments of people online have different habits. Some people like to check e-mail in the morning and tweet in the late afternoon. So to add a layer of complexity to the process of sharing content, it is important to look at measurement data from step 6 to understand when you need to be sharing. Does this mean you need to actually share it at these times? No. Many tools exist that will let you schedule how you share content online. For example for most blogging platforms have a scheduling feature and services like CoTweet and Hootesuite will allow you do schedule messages on Twitter.

Sharing content buildings credibility and improves all inbound marketing efforts. I hope these steps will help outline a strategy to allow content sharing to be a success for your business. Other content sharing tips that you think should be added?

Source : B2B Social Media Content Sharing Strategy in 7 Steps

 

Yahoo Rolling Out “Accordion” Search & Other Features

Yahoo is launching a number of search enhancements this evening that start to deliver on the UI innovation that the company has been promising since the Microsoft search deal was announced. It’s part of Yahoo’s bid to remain relevant in search by spicing up the user experience and trying to bring more utility to page one.

Many of these new features were previewed at the recent “Runway” event last month. The two biggest changes or enhancements that users will immediately notice involve image search and a new “accordion” module at the top of search results (though it doesn’t always appear).

Do a search for “Toy Story 3″ or “Lady Gaga,” for example, and you’ll see this:

Users can flip through panes that contain different types of information. In the case of Toy Story 3 there are “overview,” “video” and “Twitter” tabs. The content types and number of tabs will vary and be relevant to the query. In the case of Lady Gaga there are additional “events” tabs and “album” tabs. The events tab contains a link to buy tickets. There are also horizontal tabs with related content on top.

Search SVP Shashi Seth told me that there will be more such transactional elements in search results going forward. It doesn’t currently exist but one could easily imagine an embedded OpenTable link tied to a specific restaurant query. And there are other scenarios in which this accordion module could enable actions or transactions. Travel is another category that quickly comes to mind.

I spoke to Seth about the potential appearance of display and rich media advertising in this area of the page. (Earlier today I moderated the SMX East panel on search and display, so it’s on my brain.)  He said that isn’t the case at launch but Yahoo has thoughts along those lines in certain commercial contexts.

This module also enables “discovery” of information in a way that traditional search results do not. There’s a mixture of push and pull going on here, which is very interesting. Accordingly it goes beyond the “smart box”/”one box” universal search approach favored in the past couple of years.

Consistent with the notion of making page one more “actionable,” Yahoo is integrating what it calls “quick apps” into search farther down the page. The first of these is a Netflix app that will open a window and enable “Netflix members to add movies to their Queue right from the Search results page.”  You could also watch trailers and theoretically stream entire movies in this window.

The philosophy behind all these moves involves taking search “from finding to doing.”

As mentioned, image search is being revamped. Image pages get a new more visually engaging and “immersive” environment. Yahoo is putting more slideshows (from Flickr and other Yahoo sites) in image search results that then lead to pages that look like this:

Beyond this, Yahoo image search will allow people to “view personally meaningful public Facebook albums from friends when they sign-in and connect their Yahoo! accounts to Facebook.”

Finally Yahoo says that iPhone and Android users will see faster and “more sophisticated” search results built on HTML5. The new Yahoo Finance app is an example of this.

This collection of new features and tools rolls out immediately in the US and then globally next year.

Yahoo has been promising UI/UX innovation for many months and these new capabilities represent something of a down payment. However the company says it will continue to do more and go further over the coming months. This “is just the beginning.”

 

Source : Searchengineland