Again, a side note based on an ezine I subscribe to ... An expert marketer just weighed in on how ineffective branding is as a way of generating income for a business, and I felt the need to rebut such outlandish claims.

Your brand is the overriding theme of all of your marketing, from start to finish. It's what makes people choose your business over the competition, makes it simple to understand why you're special and makes the most of your company's biggest strengths in the marketplace.

Done right, your branding efforts make it much easier to market your business over time -- giving you the platform your business needs to serve as a solid basis for all of your campaigns and to keep clients coming back to you time and again.

What the experts call "branding" isn't branding

Every last one of the marketers I've heard "dissing" branding as a discipline are talking about the overly hype-ridden fluff that some "brand marketers" claim is effective in generating awareness of your business, but never gets a response. Of course that stuff is fluffy -- the marketing equivalent of the gooey marshmallow fluff you use to make Rice Krispie Treats, tasty in combination with something of more substance, but ineffective in and of itself. The "branding" that these experts are referring to are those silly ads in mainstream magazines and on TV that do nothing other than entertain a little and do nothing to generate a response.

But every brand marketer worthy of being called one (and I modestly include myself in that category) knows that a real brand is the foundation for everything else in your business, and in no way means that you can stop marketing yourself entirely the moment that you have outlined your brand identity. Marketing requires asking people to act, to buy, and it is the next step in the process after establishing a brand for your small business.

My upcoming manual helps people use a brand strategy as a means of strengthening their message to prospects -- and then use that strategy to market themselves more effectively. Anything less would be unhelpful and not worth the paper the book is printed on. But don't tell me that branding is useless -- it works for companies large and small all the time.

One last rant

With literally no exceptions, every single marketer who has spoken out against branding has done an *amazing* job branding himself or herself as an expert in a particular marketing field and works hard at keeping that reputation intact. You can't tell me that branding doesn't work because it sends work their way time and again. If they don't see branding for what it is, it's simply because they're calling it another name.

/rant mode off