January 2010 E-NEWS
from Steven Donaldson and Michael Zinke, the Brand Guys

Shaping customer experience in a multi-channel world — creative, print, web, new media Radiant sends 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. Branding and Online Surveys: Finding out what customers want. Input from customers and potential buyers provides a powerful tool to define brand positioning …
2. In 2010 Social Media is Here to Stay: It's now a must-have item in marketing budgets. You may love it or hate it but social media is here to stay …
3. RadiantBrands Blog: Are Chain Store Brands Authentic Local Businesses?: Is Peet's Coffee like Walmart? Read more in the RadiantBrands blog.
4. Radiant Work: Pet Food Express packaging — designed naturally. All natural cat litter that meets the customer's needs and gives the cat a voice.

Branding and Online Surveys

Input from customers and potential buyers can provide a powerful tool to define brand positioning. After all, what they think and how they act shapes your brand.

By using one of the many online survey tools (Survey Monkey, Constant Contact, Opinion Place, etc.) you can easily and inexpensively discover more about your customers' perceptions, desires and values. At the same time, a well-positioned survey can create awareness, participation and loyalty as respondents guide you to improved customer interactions and new products.

Design a Survey

Carefully look at what you need to know. Is it about product satisfaction, your customer demographic mix, or your brand message? Is it how customers view you and other choices in the market? Shape the questions to generate strategically valuable results.

Make the survey short — under 25 questions is good, mostly multiple choice or value ranking (such as 1 to 5 ranking where 5 is most valued and 1 is the least) so respondents can quickly and accurately complete the survey. First, have customers or potential customers define themselves demographically and per key characteristics that you need.

Target Your Respondents

Be aware that how you engage and who you talk to will determine the responses you get. Loyal current customers, one-time buyers or prospects may give you radically different responses, which is valuable information. The kinds of incentives you offer will also determine who responds. If you purchase email lists you must be aware that response rates will be low unless you provide ample rewards for respondents.

How Does it Work?

Send out your request to participate with a link directing recipients to your online web-based survey. Upon completing the survey, respondents should receive confirmation of their award, if any. During the time frame you've specified for responses, you can log on to review virtually real-time reports of results.

Turning Customer Data into Brand Action

Survey results can provide a treasure trove of marketing intelligence. The great thing about many of the survey tools is they enable grouping of responses and generating charts and graphs to easily see trends. You can explore characteristics of one demographic subgroup of your survey, such as women over 35, if that is a defined characteristic. At the end of the day, the value is that you see what customers or consumers in the market value, from their perspective. This gives you key strategic information to guide your brand into the future.

The Benefits of an Online Survey

1. Inexpensive and easy to deploy
2. Allows insights into customer experience
3. Let's customers know you care
4. Tells you where new customers may be
5. Allows for unique brand positioning
6. Builds loyalty into brand interactions

In 2010 Social Media is Here to Stay

You may love it or hate it but social media is here to stay. It now literally defines and shapes brands in the market. Companies that have a weak or nonexistent presence in this arena may risk losing the voice of their brand to crowd that's shaping it. Everyone from BrandWeek to Advertising Age is saying we need to stay on the pulse of social media.

Social media tools and channels give the customer a new voice to reach out to shape your brand but remember that they also give you leverage to shape perceptions. For example, a Facebook fan page gives brands an opportunity to interact with consumers and allows companies to keep their fingers on the pulse of product value, consumer experience and customer service.

All this being said, I reviewed a couple exceptional online surveys, read the online and print media and here's my summary of what's next:

Must Have

Social media has gone from a nice thing to include to a must have for major consumer facing brands.

Shaping Brand Awarness

The main focus of social media tools by brands is not outbound sales marketing but building and shaping brand awareness with customers. This value is measured by number of friends on Facebook, number of tweets and references. The conversation is ongoing. Knowing customers is the goal.

Two-Way

The one-way channel from marketing media to the outside real world of consumers is now a two-way street — customer conversations must be monitored and addressed.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing (by segmenting responses by customer types) will become a key part of future targeted direct sales channels to consumers. Expect highly relevant, very targeted marketing that doesn't seem like marketing.

Radiant Work: Pet Food Express

Challenge: RadiantBrands was engaged by San Francisco Bay Area regional pet store chain Pet Food Express to develop branded packaging for a line of innovative, all-natural cat litter products. The goal was to develop something that had distinctive visual appeal, spoke to the customer about their particular cat and visibly displayed the actual material.

Solution: RadiantBrands developed a complete family of product packaging that uses brand colors as well as 3 variations in color to differentiate the different cat litter types offered in the line. Bag art features the iconic Pet Food Express cat as a "spokescat" for the product description. The bags are colorfully printed and use natural tones and colors along with a large window to easily display the product.

Result: This new product launch has enjoyed increasing sales and market share throughout all 35 Pet Food Express Stores.

Services:
Brand Strategy
Packaging Design
Copywriting
Branding Standards
Packaging System

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