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Branding is a key part of building any business. But what if you are the business? When promoting yourself—as all consultants and freelancers must do—one of the first steps is to create a strong, recognizable logo that conveys who you are, both as a person and as a company. Sound complicated? It can be. But luckily, there are some incredibly successful branding role models who can show you the way—professional athletes. Though many of them are part of a team, top athletes also have specific personal brands that accompany them wherever they go. So, how do you create a personal logo that’s inspiring and enticing (and represents the essence of who you are, of course)?Let’s check out how some of the pros have done it...
Brandless, a company which can best be described as an online hybrid of Trader Joe’s and Ikea’s kitchen section, just raised a $35m Series B to be the “Procter & Gamble for millennials.”
Their site launched yesterday, and is already selling everything from colanders to quinoa puffs — all for a flat fee of $3 per item.
And they’re doing it all without a “brand”…or are they?
Fighting the “false narrative” of consumption
Created in 2016 by entrepreneur Ido Leffler and Sherpa Capital partner, Tina Sharkey, Brandless has raised almost $50m thus far on the bet that younger consumers don’t care as much about brands as big CPG companies would like investors to believe....
When you are marketing a variety of products to 170 different countries, content production time is of the essence. With this in mind, Heineken partnered with Grip, an online platform that automates the production of visual content for physical goods, for a beta test for its first solution Still Shots. Grip processes photo input and generates virtual version of the product (like a beer bottle) that can be edited, manipulated, and downloaded for use...
Consumers seem to have fairly clear ideas about brand personalities on social media, and the use of slang isn’t… woke. In a new study from Sprout Social, roughly 1,000 US social media users weighed in on brand personalities, with most feeling that it’s “cool” if brands talk about timely events, but not politics. (In related news, consumers aren’t that interested in brands taking public stances in on social issues.) Meanwhile, respondents are most accepting of the use of video clips (83% seeing this as “cool” rather than “annoying”), though the exploding use of GIFs – which brands starting incorporating in their emails back in 2013 – isn’t met with quite as much fervor (58% approving as “cool”). It stands to reason that most would be happy with brands responding to questions, although separate data from the report suggests that only about one-third of consumer messages on social media in Q1 that needed a response actually got one… Behaviors that more social media users see as “annoying” than “cool” include: Making fun of competitors (67% annoying) and customers (88%); Using slang (69%); and Talking politics (71%).
According to Wordstream, over 50 million businesses use Facebook Business Pages with 2 million of them using Facebook for advertising in the US (2016). Instagram, on the other hand, earns $595 million in mobile ad revenue per year. These stats just show the huge potential of social media marketing and its impact on increasing sales. Most marketers just lack understanding on how to achieve positive results. Social media helps build brand awareness and engage their audience outside of their company website. Data shows that more than 56% of online adults using more than one social media platform. Thus, the competition to gain the attention of the audience is hard. According to Social Media Examiner’s 2016 Industry Report, “40% of marketers say social media marketing has gotten more difficult for them in the last 12 months.” Despite the tough competition for attention, a huge audience pool is there just waiting to be wowed. Studies suggest that 59% of Americans with social media accounts think that customer service through social media has made it easier to get questions answered and issues resolved. People will follow your brand when they “like” what you offer. These may come in the form of discounts and special promotions, entertaining content, or customer service. People will follow your brand when they “like” what you offer. Here are 7 Brand Management tips to help you along the way....
Via janlgordon
If you’re hoping to boost your online traffic with better ads, you may be asking yourself: what is web banner design? Web banner design focuses on the systematic creation of effective web banner ads through the careful application of basic design guidelines. Banner ads are one of the most prolific forms of marketing used in today’s online world. All companies use them in one form or another because they’re an affordable, measurable and effective medium to increase brand awareness. So how can you design and create web banner ads that will bring in those clicks? Below is a list of tips and general guidelines for designing banner ads....
YouGov has released its US Buzz Rankings list for 2016, revealing that Amazon again enjoyed the best public perception, for the fourth consecutive year. The study, which measures consumer perceptions of brands, asks respondents whether they have heard anything about the brand during the prior 2 weeks and subtracts the percentage who answer they have heard something negative from the proportion who have heard something positive. Six brands from last year’s top 10 made this year’s list, with Amazon, Netflix, YouTube and Google again occupying the top 4 positions (in that order). The other two brands again appearing on the list saw varying fortunes, with Lowe’s climbing 4 spots to #5 but the Cancer Treatment Centers of America dropping a couple of spots to 7th. New to the list this year are: M&M’s (#6); Home Depot (#8); Dawn (#9); and Cheerios (#10). They replaced the following brands from last year’s list: Apple (#6 last year); Samsung (#7); iPhone (#8); and Walgreen’s (#10)....
In 2015, there was a marked increase in the popularity of brand videos on YouTube. In 2016, brands took social video storytelling to another level, not only on YouTube, but on Facebook and Instagram as well, and were rewarded for their efforts.
That’s according to social media analytics company Unmetric, which tracked social campaigns throughout the year as it did in 2015 to determine which ones performed best in terms of engagement.
"Videos have moved from being just reposts of 30-second TV spots to long-form storytelling, with the popular Nike Football post being nearly six minutes long," Unmetric CEO and co-founder Lux Narayan told Adweek. "This year really showed that there's an appetite and attention span for longer branded content if it's authentic and tells a story that resonates well with people, not merely as consumers but universally as humans."
Unmetric studies Twitter, Facebook and Instagram data to determine an engagement score for brand posts of zero to 1,000. The engagement score is a weighted measurement based on the idea that some metrics like shares and retweets have more value for brands than others such as likes and favorites. For YouTube, the company uses a different method for measuring the successfulness of a campaign. There is no engagement score, but likes and how quickly a video accumulates them are important factors. It also uses a combination of its own algorithms and human insights to determine overall engagement....
Seventy-seven percent of B2B buyers said they speak with a salesperson only after they’ve performed independent research online.
More than 50% of decision-makers have eliminated a vendor from consideration based on information they found online.
With this many eyes watching, it pays to build your personal brand in the most effective way.
I’ve had success with growing my personal brand because of careful planning. I had things ready to go before I started promoting myself.
Here are the things you’ll need to have in place as you work to develop your personal brand....
When does a sneaker become more than a sneaker? What makes a consumer choose one seemingly identical gown or coat or swimsuit over another? Emotion. Branding at its best, speaks to its intended audience like a BFF – it, like, really gets you. And in fashion, it stands up for you, becoming the outward-facing expression of your personality.
For small brands and emerging designers, widespread logo recognition is an unattainable (or at least very far-away) goal. But branding is more than a logo. It encompasses values, voice, and design choices that run like a continuous thread through product and packaging and online presence. Good branding is storytelling – a consistent and continuous message, weaving meaning into every piece.
How do your nail branding for your own fashion brand? 14 experts weighed in on the discussion. These are their words:...
Over the past three years, Scotch whisky has struggled to regain growth, hit by softness in key markets, notably China, Russia and Latin America.
However, the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) recently confirmed that the sector’s export declined slowed to -2.4% in 2015, compared to -7% in 2014, indicating positive growth prospects for the year ahead.
Growth is skewed towards single malts as the blended category declined in terms of both value and volume.
This dynamic is reflected our list of the top 10 best-selling Scotch whisky brands – all unsurprisingly blends and many still struggling to claw back growth....
Millennials make up a crucial group of consumers.
Ad agency Moosylvania asked over 3,500 millennials — defined as 20 to 35-year-olds — to select their favorite brands over the past three years.
Great Questions, LLC helped rank the winning brands.
These brands are the ones that came out on top.
Some are surprising — others, not so much.
A common theme for successful brands? Engaging with millennial consumers via social media....
BRANDED CONTENT: A SHORTSIGHTED CON
But branded content isn't a long game. There are several reasons why. The first issue is intent. The essence of branded content is deliberately blurring the line between editorial content and advertising. Hiding your true colors is never a good idea. Another issue is the logic behind branded content itself. It’s misleading to use a totally different set of qualities—good stories—to sell a product that has intrinsically nothing to do with these qualities. Hiring a top filmmaker won’t improve the quality of your energy drink. Brands cannot deliver what they advertise. Shoes or coffee can never live up to their brands’ promises—they are just shoes and coffee. You could even say that the better the stories, the more dishonest the companies are being.
A camouflage strategy also complicates an already too complex world driven by hidden agendas. Even well-informed people who are able to both enjoy branded content and take it with a grain of salt will subliminally become accustomed to the new branded content standard—not to mention more vulnerable groups such as kids and adolescents. And what about the stories no one wants to hear, stories incapable of selling something? People are more likely to follow a happy, undemanding brand instead of bonding with real people and real-world problems. A brand will never ask you for help. It won’t confront you with difficulties or opposing views....
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The logo is the most essential part of making any brand recognizable. Hiring a professional designer to create a custom logo can definitely be expensive, especially for most small business owners and individuals who don’t have the budget. Fortunately, there is a seemingly endless supply of Web-based solutions to help you create logos with relative ease - and these are some of our favorites. Once you're done, head on over to Logo Rank, an AI tool that critiques your new logo design. ...
It's all in caps and punctuated with a small maple leaf at the end. And it only took three years to develop. "This is our one-word brand," said Brad Ferguson, president and CEO of the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation, as he presented a picture of the so-called wordmark to city councillors Tuesday. The wordmark is one piece of the redevelopment of Edmonton's overall image, brand and reputation that EEDC has been working on for years. It will be used to promote the city to an international audience. ...
Traditional advertising went after “share of mind”–the idea was to get you to associate a brand with a single idea, a single emotion. Volvo: safety. Jaguar: speed. Coke: happiness. The Economist: success. Bang, bang, bang, went the ads, hammering the same idea into your mind every time you saw one. Advertising briefs evolved to focus the creatives on a single USP and a single message. Tell them we’re the Ultimate Driving Machine. Tell them in a thrilling way. It worked when you saw ads infrequently on television, in a Sunday magazine, or on a billboard on your morning commute. It hasn’t worked online. Audiences have stopped engaging with advertising. Big brands like Pepsi and P&G have slashed investment in Facebook spending. The agencies’ response has been to create new formats of ads that take over a page, dominate our mobiles’ screens, and generally scream at us. And when somebody screams at you for long enough, you put in earplugs and ignore them. Or, in the case of the online world, you install an ad blocker, as much of the U.K. population has now done. Yet there are many brands online that people don’t want to block. We asked over 5,000 people around the world to tell us about the brands whose content they actively sought out, then analyzed what those brands did. The results were surprisingly consistent. Popular brands had multifaceted personalities. They could make you laugh, or cheer, or lean forward and take notes. They’d stopped hammering away at a share of mind, and were expanding to achieve a share of emotion....
Colors can affect our feelings and behavior in ways so profound that studies have been conducted on how we can better use them in life, and in society, to “hack” culture. This covers subjects from what colors to wear to a job interview … to the ideal shade for prisons. Because of this odd relationship we have with color, the colors we choose, and what we name them, become meaningful shorthands for much bigger stories. Every year, Pantone selects a “Color of the Year” that thematically puts us on the right track for the next 12 months. We project as much onto Pantone’s choices as the brand seeks to project onto us. (This year’s color was “Greenery.”) With all this in mind, research scientist and neural network geek Janelle Shane decided to see how well artificial intelligence fares at both selecting colors and naming them. A writer at Ars Technica calls her results “the greatest work of artificial intelligence I’ve seen to date.” On Tumblr, Shane describes both the terms of the experiment and its output. “I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values (RGB = red, green, and blue color values),” she writes. “Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?”...
Josh Tetrick was standing in a Dollar Tree in Oakland, California, when he asked a customer which brand of mayo was best. The woman pointed to a gleaming white jar of Kraft.But Tetrick asked, “What about the Just Mayo?”–the flagship product of his company Hampton Creek–which sat nearby. “She said, ‘No, that’s the private-label brand at the Dollar Tree,’” Tetrick recounts. In other words, Just Mayo’s craft paper label–a label that had first been X-Acto-knifed, one at a time, for its initial appearance on shelves at Whole Foods–it didn’t register as some Brooklyn-inspired, vegan artisanal good to this bargain shopper in Oakland. It looked like the generic stuff sold by a budget retailer. “That was an important learning for me,” says Tetrick. “It shows how important context is in design.” And it cemented a hunch, that Hampton Creek, with the lofty, sometimes controversial goal of bringing sustainable, transparent, healthier processed foods to the mainstream consumer, simply didn’t make sense where many low-income and middle-class consumers were shopping: Walmart and Dollar Tree....
Logo design is a very important part of building your brand’s identity. “Branding” yourself, is the best way to represent who you are and what you are all about. If designed properly, logos can have an enormous impact on your company’s success. In this post I have assembled an amazing collection of fresh new creative logos for you to be inspired by. I am confident that these new logo designs will get your creative juices flowing. So with no further ado here is your latest dosage of beautifully designed logos. Enjoy!...
Every business, be it big or small, needs a logo for recognition and establishing an identity. However, not every business gets it right. There are some common mistakes we commit when designing a logo. These mistakes cause us not just embarrassment but loss as well.Let’s have a look at six logo design mistakes committed by designers and business persons that cause logos to fail:
Google has been quietly plugging away at its own design language, Material Design, for a while now, and its rules and conventions have been adopted by most of its mobile and desktop applications. Based on paper and ink but taking advantage of digital's own unique features, Material Design is a great framework to use if you're building a mobile website or want to make good use of responsive web design. It enables designers to create digital material that can expand and reform intelligently, using seams and shadows to provide meaning about what you can touch. Material Design has a new site and a new visual identityAnd now Google is expanding Material Design with a new site and a new suite of tools and open source projects that it hopes will help make product design more productive and inspiring. The new Material Design site introduces a bold new visual identity for the the Material initiative, inspired by the principles of print-based design and with an emphasis on user actions and motion....
Selecting a color palette is one of the most impactful choices you can make while developing your brand aesthetic. Choosing the right logo colors can highlight your business’ strengths and help you attract the right customers. And, as you might guess, the wrong combination can have the reverse effect.
Everyone has heard of color psychology, which tells us that colors impact our emotions and behaviors. yellow is cheerful (because the sun is bright and yellow!) and green is calming (like laying in the grass and looking up at a bunch of leaves is peaceful). But do these “rules” really translate into logo color meanings?
Researchers Lauren Labrecque and George Milne looked into that and found that some do and some don’t. So yes, yellow will make your brand look youthful and approachable, but a green logo doesn’t inherently make customers think your brand is peaceful. Does that mean if you want to intelligently choose a logo color scheme you have to read and and interpret a long academic study?
Nope! We did that for you. And turned it into a handy infographic quiz. Just answer a few fun questions about your brand and we’ll tell you which logo colors you should think about using.....
You know what's really difficult?Being succinct. Seriously ... it's ridiculously hard. If you don't believe me, just grab yourfavorite copywriter and ask them. It's especially difficult to express a complex emotional concept in just a couple of words -- which is exactly what a slogan does. That's why we have a lot of respect for the brands that have done it right. The ones that have figured out how to convey their value proposition to their buyer persona in just one, short sentence -- and a quippy one, at that. So if you're looking to get a little slogan inspiration of your own, take a look at some of our favorite company slogans from both past and present. (Note: We've updated this post to include some suggestions from the comment section.)...
The world might be a mess, but look on the bright side: Men’s shaving products are much better than they used to be.
Thanks to several online shaving start-ups, razors, creams, gels and other paraphernalia are now cheaper, of higher quality and more convenient to purchase than ever before. Last week one of the upstarts, Dollar Shave Club, was acquired by the consumer products giant Unilever for $1 billion. For shaving behemoths like Gillette, it is the first skirmish in the coming guerrilla war for men’s faces, not to mention other parts. (Dollar Shave also makes bathroom wipes for men.)
This column usually focuses on the technology industry, an area that sounds far removed from shaving. But the Dollar Shave acquisition signals something bigger than a mere improvement in shaving — it also underscores a consumer products revolution that would not have been possible without technology.
Hilarious online ads passed along social networks allowed Dollar Shave to create instant customer recognition — in other words, a brand — far more quickly, and for far less money, than a shaving company could have managed a decade ago. Online distribution allowed it to get products into consumers’ hands without a costly retail presence. In fact, by cutting out on retail, and shipping products to people’s homes on a subscription basis, the company made buying shaving products more convenient than going to a store....
In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts have had very little payoff.
As a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?
To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call crowdculture. Crowdculture changes the rules of branding—which techniques work and which do not. If we understand crowdculture, then, we can figure out why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding methods are empowered by social media....
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99 Designs found the 8 best logos of professional athletes. Learn why they're great and how to create a logo for your own personal brand.