Pragmatic Branding - Best Practices

Traditional brand development is too slow, complicated, and un-collaborative for today’s pace of innovation and communication. To survive and thrive now, brands must be more than relevant, compelling and competitive. They must be easy to grasp, easy to share, and easy to grow.

Drawing on his extensive branding experience with clients like AT&T Mobility, Ericsson, and Applied Biosystems, as well as his experience as a technology entrepreneur, Axle will reveal the critical components of winning corporate and product brands. This two-part seminar will focus on:

• Brand Strategy: The steps required to quickly define a brand that is compelling, authentic and easy to socialize
• Brand Tactics: How to express your brand for maximum impact, especially for Search & Social Media  

Part One - The New Brand Strategy

Your brand strategy plays a decisive role in creating loyalty. With a strong brand your investors, prospects, customers and team will cross the confidence gap and become loyal to you. If yours is like most technology brands, it is diffuse, conformist or fragmented. That's bad for business. But it doesn't have to be that way.

• Identify if your brand is conformist, diffuse, fragmented, or authentic. Learn the critical factors to ensure an authentic brand emerges from your branding efforts.
• Uncover an easy to grasp "Plug & Play" branding model that fits on one page, that you and your team can use to streamline and strengthen your marketing efforts.
• Question how your brand is positioned, to be sure that it makes a difference in how prospects resolve their needs with you instead of competitors.
• Avoid the most common, all too common, technology brand strategy blunders.
• Learn how to determine your brand personality - the tone and manner you want expressed consistently through all customer experiences.
• Find out why your brand promise is your most important marketing idea, and how to distill that idea out of your team's top passions and your audience's greatest need.
• Save time, money and headaches by determining the right naming architecture for your portfolio, be it Masterbrand like Rogers Communications, Overbrand like Apple, or Freestanding like Fido.

 

Part Two – The New Brand Tactics

Internet Advertising has already eclipsed TV advertising in the UK. Your brand must be primed first and foremost to survive and thrive online. Based on the learning from Session One, "The New Brand Strategy" you'll learn what it takes to avoid the most common branding missteps, and make the best moves possible.

• Grasp the new Do-It-Yourself ethos in Internet marketing, where cheap and sincere trumps expensive and contrived.
• Discover where traditional technology naming techniques backfire online
• Learn best practices for naming with the web in mind -- be it for your company, solutions, domains, twitter names, blog names, and social media group names.
• See examples of the right and wrong way to choose your brand’s descriptor and keyphrase.
• Learn best practices for ensuring that your brands visuals and messages break through the noise, and get noticed all while remaining true to your brand promise, personality and position.
• See how to use Search and Social Media to cheaply prototype, test, and measure your names, taglines and creative campaigns for greater speed, efficiency and success.

During both sessions participants will be provided with opportunities to reflect on their brand(s), halt inefficient branding practices, and quickly break through to a brand that simplifies, unites, and sells. Teams are encouraged to attend together, so they can collectively co-create their brand.

About Axle Davids 

Axle Davids, founder of Distility Branding, is a visionary brand developer and pioneering brand technologist. In 2001, he established aXle Branding, which focused on branding and design for industry innovators like AutoShare Car Sharing Network, AT&T Mobility and Applied Biosystems.

This venture has evolved into Distility Branding. Before starting aXle Branding, Davids was Creative Director at two of Canada's top interactive agencies, My Virtual Model and Extend Media, where he oversaw more than 150 interactive design projects for high-profile brands including Land’s End, Cosmopolitan, Disney and Apple.