February 2009 E-NEWS
from Steven Donaldson and Michael Zinke, the Brand Guys

Creating the Visible Brand in a multi-channel world—web, retail, print and electronic media. provides these brand insights to help you build value, uniqueness and loyalty for your brand. In business, your brand's critical differentiation helps your customers find you, remember you and come back to you.

In this issue:

1. Listening to the Customer: How brands and products are being shaped by the customer through social networking tools.
2. Brand Brain Science: How do brand images, experiences and choices stimulate our brains and motivate behavior?
3. Radiant Work: A New Site for Technologent

Listening to the Customer

Dell is doing it; so is Starbucks: creating a place for customers to actively define what they want from the brand. Customers are demanding more and more for their loyalty. They want the brands they most favor to listen to them. With the advent of online interactive communities everyone can have an opinion and rate or support brands they love. Dell has created a site called IdeaStorm and Starbucks developed MyStarbucks, both of which are forums for customer input, product development critiques and reviews. Starbuck's site says "share, vote, discuss, see." This online interactivity really gets to the essence of connecting to a brand.

Brand loyalty is seen as the ultimate goal of good marketers, so big brands are experimenting with the interactive community model to get your input. Differentiating your brand, knowing your customers and creating loyalty is more challenging than ever. The market offers so many choices, whether it's laptop computers or where to buy your next double espresso. Why go to one brand over another?

The Power of Social Networking Sites
Social media communities include forums, online rating services like Yelp, news organizations and general sites that allow participants to share opinions; even the "5-star" reviews on Amazon and many ecommerce sites are a powerful form of social media that can drive traffic to or away from brands.

As an online marketing tool, social networks offer opportunities for your organization to leverage the power of the network to build brand recognition and increase customer loyalty. These opportunities facilitate connections among a broad gathering of people so that brand exposure extends far beyond the reach of traditional marketing channels. With thousands, if not millions, of customers talking to the brand you can filter, listen and respond to customer feedback.

Following Brand Trends from the Customer's Perspective
It's a lot of work to pay attention to what customers are saying, but it also can guide long term brand strategy and allow brands to see what the trends are in industries, where the product demand is, which niche markets are gaining strength and which ones are loosing customer interest.

The key to branding in this online world is to have some clear idea of what your brand is about when you enter into the world of social networking and customer input. Whether it's a blog, connections to other sites, or a site similar to Dell's you need to aware of the challenges and pitfalls.

Key Rules About Online Networks and Brand Building

There's no simple way to control and use social networks to build brands, but as a tool for listening to your customers it's invaluable.

Brand Brain Science

The new book BUY OLOGY — Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, from well-known brand consultant Martin Lindstrom, is a fascinating discussion of a multi-year study on how the brain really works in creating brand loyalty and motivating buying decisions.

This book gives some powerful insights into how people think about brands and how their brains actually function around branding. Using MRI scans while exposing individuals to visual brands, odors, and messages, the scientists could see what part of the brain reacted to the experience.

The results overall show that we are truly sensory beings motivated by experiences with brand touchpoints that remind us of those experiences. I feel it's as if the primeval hunter-gatherer in all of us that could tell one edible plant from another now knows the difference between our favorite cookie or soda and other options.

The findings dissect the effect of brands and ads that are carefully crafted to appeal to buyers on a sensory level — the iPod's bright white headphones, PlayDoh's distinctive smell, Tiffany's blue-green boxes.

Lindstrom says companies create rituals around their products — drinking Corona with a lime, or eating an Oreo cookie filling-first — in an attempt to integrate their products into habitual, comforting, daily activities.

I highly recommend this fast read which can give some insights into creative brand approaches and powerful brand experiences that build customers loyalty.

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom Copyright ©2008 by Martin Lindstrom. Doubleday Business, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

Radiant Work: Technologent

Challenge:

Technologent is a national IT solutions provider with offices across the US. Radiant engaged with them to build a new site around Technologent's core message of "technology solutions simplified. Technologent wanted a site that was more contemporary and allowed them to highlight different service areas on the home page.

Solution:

In the new site, RadiantBrands developed an animation that focuses on Technologent's creative engineering capabilities, while the main content area encourages viewers to explore one of three featured service areas. Radiant developed a flexible sub-page layout that would allow for changes in content and graphics, and applied a consistent branded look and feel throughout.

Result:

Radiant worked within a tight schedule to design and produce the site, including all content formatting and coding.

Services:

Brand Implementation
Web Site Design
Animation

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