Unique Branding

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to this tutorial on unique branding. Now, as always with these tutorials, please feel free to fast forward, pause, or rewind as many times as you need to make the most out of the time that you're going to spend here. So let me ask you a question. What's unique about you? Is your height? Your hair color? The way your face is? The way your ears are kind of shaped that really funny way down at the bottom? You know what I'm talking about.

What is it that's unique? What is it that can set you apart from everybody else? Well, during this lesson, what we're going to be doing is taking a look at setting your brand apart from all the other brands that are out there. We're also going to be looking at marketing techniques that do that. And lastly, we're going to look at how public relations or PR supports brand identity. The key terms of this lesson, are going to be Buzz marketing and Viral marketing.

So setting your brand apart. What is it about the brand that should be unique to that particular company? Well, first of all, brand awareness is incredibly important for a company. People have to be able to recognize your brand. If they don't recognize your brand, they may not go out and look for it. And this can be very important to the health of the company as it relates to its financial aspects and the profitability for a company in the future.

Now, there are generic products out there, but those are mainly concerned with price as their primary focus. Things like store brands and items like that where they're really trying to beat people on price or not really worried about promoting the brand so much as the price of the product. A product placement can also impact brand awareness. Literally, placing it versus stage placement. For example, placing it in a commercial, or a movie, or the fact that American Idol judges drink Coke.

And TV show scripts where you see like little mini-mercials for a Toyota Prius during a TV show. These are staged placements. Whereas literal placements would be places on the shelf or what story you're going to sell it or on what street corner that you're going to place your particular store-- particular part of town or city altogether. These are things we're talking about literal placement, as opposed to staged placement. When we talk about marketing techniques, there's two basic ones we're going to look at. The first one is Buzz Marketing. Now Buzz Marketing is a marketing process that generates a strong word of mouth response via social media outlets.

What we're doing is we're using social media to create a buzz or word-around-town. It's almost like gossip if you will. Hey, did you hear about what company A did? Or did you hear about what company A didn't do? This is the type of Buzz Marketing that brings attention to my brand. The next one we're going to look at is Viral Marketing, and this is a marketing program that focuses on unpaid people utilizing social media outlets to generate sales awareness or a general positive regard for the brand.

An example might be things like viral videos or emails to get people to share in the word for that particular product. Now in contrast, an example of Buzz Marketing might be Dove Real Beauty sketches, where I'm doing sketches to illustrate the beauty and the benefits of Dove soap. So these are techniques that I can use for marketing my brand. Now PR also plays a pretty big role in. And supports brand identity in a big way. You see, PR can develop a favorable brand ID-- or generally favorable.

And it also helps make that brand memorable, having it associated with good positive news or good positive things helps people associate your brand or your product with positive ideas or positive emotions. However, PR can also be negative. You can have a negative association based on uncontrolled or unexpected occurrences. Tylenol suffered this back in the 1980s when their products were poisoned. Now obviously, Tylenol didn't poison the product, but the simple fact that they had poison in them-- at least some of the bottles-- had a horrible PR impact on Tylenol as a brand.

They were able to ramp up their PR folks and turn that negative into a strong and thriving brand that it is today. And it was only through PR that they were able to accomplish this huge turnaround. So as you can see it can be pretty important. Now milk has a PR campaign running right now-- it's Got Milk? And what they're doing is getting milk into the schools, sort of going into the schools as a brand and helping to spread the word about the health benefits of milk and also dispelling some of the myths that might be out there-- how milk is a healthy part of school lunches.

So what did we learn today? Well, we looked at setting your brand apart-- what is it that makes my brand different than everyone else's? We also looked at a couple of marketing techniques-- at Buzz Marketing and Viral Marketing. We also looked at how public relations can support brand identity. It can be positive or through unexpected or uncontrolled means. It could also have a pretty negative effect on a brand identity. So making sure your public relations is as positive as it can be can be a pretty important thing. I want to thank you, as always, for spending some time with me today. I hope you had a good time, And you guys have a good night.