Businesses need to take the time to determine their brands strengths then deliver their message boldly, clearly, simply and consistently.

We often see brands that would rather spend their dollars on campaigns, then they would determining what aspect of their company contains the strongest brand potential.

We have actually applied some of the concepts behind Six Sigma to our strategizing for clients. It helps us in two ways:

1. It helps us delineate down to the “low hanging fruit” or the areas that hold to most potential for immediate gains.
2. It helps us actually sit down with companies and sift through the many multiple layers, people, philosophies and goals that have piled up from previous campaigns. By properly applying several Six Sigma principles we are able to ascertain where the root and foundation for their brand actually lay.

We can then discern what the their brand message for all time is.

I also love your examples of commercials and billboards and agree with many of your statements. Good design is worth the money. It is one thing to look at a concept on a small flat screen monitor, it is another to see it printed, standing in the midst of city noise and speeding by.

And you are right, nothing is easy…

Thanks for the conversation!

So the 2 graphs are not actually visible. It’s a term used to designate the connections that exist and the various pathways to enhance brand awareness and WOM.

In Facebook, working with a FB rep is one way to better understand what a brands’ FB Fan Page “graph” consists of. Knowing the types of interests and other social and behavioral demographics a brand wants to target will help identify the number of players that exist in different areas of the “graph”. If set up for FB Ads, an individual can easily identify the population set given specific criteria.

For Pinterest, and other social bookmarking sites, asking target audiences what types of information they gravitate towards or what they may be interested in is certainly one way to determine the direction a brand can take on these types of sites.

Of course, both always come back to knowing and leveraging brand ambassadors. These are the most valuable teams any business can “employ”. In some industries, it’s illegal to financially incent ambassadors, so getting creative to pull out the info can sometimes be a challenge, but not impossible. The good news is that once a brand ambasador has an established relationship, a company knows that individual(s) is/are 100% truthful with their feedback.

So, to get back to Pinterest and other social bookmarking sites – learning how to position a brand on these sites (if appropriate) takes some leg work and can start with something as simple as asking or following. Observing how brand ambassadors are using these sites, the things they are interested in,etc. – a company should be able to identify some common threads and explore opportunites within those threads.. thus, the “graph”.

I think the more unexpected the product, the better. We bought single packages of veggie wipes and created a micropamphlet on the back for a weight loss company. We created individual branded tins of belly butter for an OB GYN’s booth at a lifestyle fair. We’ve done running socks at a trade show for health care architects after researching that the target market consistently self-identified as a health-seeker. We produce green screen karaoke videos at a trade show booth and upload them to youtube and the client’s facebook page, so that the customer can tag and share their photo. A pen is just a pen. I probably have 10 promotional pens on my desk right now and I couldn’t tell you what companies are on them. T-shirts are for gardening, so at least the squirrels get to see the company logo.