Marketing Your Vision As Your Brand

Marketing your vision is critical to your overall branding to your target market. The vision should be a guiding passionate statement that ties into the core fabric of the company, it’s products, people and potential clients. There are many examples of strong brand association like Pepsi™, McDonalds™, GM™ and Wells Fargo Bank™.

You only have to hear the name and you can visualize their product or service offering. Their name will associate to many as a past relationship or perhaps as a competitor that you must figure out a way to take market share from. No matter how the relationship to a name ultimately defines itself the end result came from heavy research dollars that typically take a cross section of the target market and expand on potential winning approaches.

A highly recommended approach is focus groups. Enlist a core group of individuals who together work on solving brand related needs as targeted to your suspect market. They will work together studying the buying habits and future trends of a particular group or subset of a market and then begin to develop an over arching business model design that will lead to the branding of your companies vision.

This exercise could take days or weeks but ultimately it could make or break your initial ramp up to success within a new market or perhaps the launch of a new product or service into an existing market. The end result is that you want your company name to define instantly what it is you market and thus provide to your customers. Sounds simple enough doesn’t it?

There are also consultants who target their services to provide industry specific capabilities that could accelerate your efforts, of course at a fee. Sometimes when you are faced with a great product or a great service idea but your target market is saturated the consultant can role play with your group to help isolate whether or not you can enter this product or service in the direction you visualize.

Having someone from outside of the company perform this can be very beneficial as they will not be emotionally attached to your product and thus can articulate based on facts, experience and trends without trying to provide a “soft landing” to ease personal feelings. If the budget is there, this is an extremely viable option to pursue. Once you have developed your plan you should road test it. Find small cross sections of your potential market niche and exercise the plan through interviews or soft placed ads in various media. Often you can target Universities and shopping malls (assuming a consumer product) as possible locations where you can gain access to independent assessments from people who will not have time to research your solution.

This is a golden database of information as it relates directly to the ease of which your plan design resonates with the general public. Obviously this can be emotionally draining trying to get perfect strangers to spend 5 minutes of their important day at the mall to stop and listen to your ideas. A more costly approach is the payment plan. We call this the payment plan because it involves giving your product away to potential clients who are viewed as potential repeat buyers. The upfront cost is high and the results initially will be thin to none in the start up phase.

If you have a food or drink product such as Mona Vie and their acai berry juice then perhaps a sample of the product could be a nice approach or teaser which absolutely could lead to return buying as a consumable. No single idea is “the idea” and you may find variations of these approaches suit your business just fine. The key is to take your time, invest in third party support if you can afford to and learn from those that have come your way before.

The Media Platforms

Very important to solicity domain (people who know your target market) experts who can assist you in your marketing plans. This is all too often looked at as pure overhead. Just build it and it's such a great idea that we will be sold out in no time. Been there done that folks.

Today's buyer is equipped with more decision tools than ever before in our brief history on this planet. We can buy around the clock and around the world. So choosing the right Media Platform is mission critical.

Types of Media Outlets:

These are just a few but they are the one's you will need to consider along with good ole fashion word of mouth!

Executing On Plan

This is a critical phase of a companies early development strategies. To launch to fast you may over spend. To launch to narrow and your target may not be the right target and thus provide the early results you seek.

This is where you want to map your available budet for Sales Operations against anticpated short falls. In other words, plan for failure on the cash spend so that you can re-group if necessary and re-target. Model your first target test zone wide enough but with enough control in the spend so that you can recover.

Don't hire the complete sales force just yet. In fact, out source this perphaps to get as many Sales producing head count into the mix without the burdern of full time employees all at once. There are many to seek advice from here and this is not a bad way to go to maximize spend and expansion. There are sufficient examples of early phase companies doing this for the first 1-3 years in fact.

What ever your decision, plan it out. Role play it out territorially and always have a Plan B. Plan A's do happen and strike it rich but many if not most do not. Try to get as many domain experts on exactly what your product can do for the intended audience.

Domain Experts

Simply put a domain expert is someone who has worked in the industry you target. As an example, if you are selling to the Department of the Navy an ex Navy Captain would be a great addition to the team. There are many but that is the most obvious. Seek out consultants that target your focused market specifically. Highly reccomend this for State and Local government interests.

As you interview the Domain Experts check their references. Call their references and seek out the roles they played when they serviced the client. We also reccomend soft selling your product to their refrences. Why? They are most likely management executives that are being given to call. Thus they are most likely in the circle of influence you seek. If the call goes well you may have yourself the perfect opportunity for that first sale. Hiring the individual who can gain access to a warm audience is always best.

You would be surprised how many companies do not call the references!