Brand Management has been defined as “the development of brand perception in the market.” It entails the construction of a positive relationship with the target market. All aspects of the customer’s brand association and relationship with the purchasing process constitutes brand management.

It is an integral aspect of marketing. It goes a long way in boosting the value of a product and making it more attractive to customers and prospective customers (leads).

Ours is a maddeningly competitive world. In the purchase of products and patronage of services, customers are spoilt for choice. Take for instance the private university business in Nigeria. For the records, Nigeria boasts of more private universities than public universities. Within the South-western part of the country alone, there are tens of private universities. Brand Management invariably plays a key role in determining which of the universities parents and students would settle for, in addition to several other significant factors.

Effective brand management builds loyal customers through positive brand associations and images or a strong awareness of the brand. In order to develop a strategic plan to maintain brand equity or gain brand value, there is the need for a comprehensive understanding of the brand, its target market and the company’s overall vision.

It is instructive to note that all the employees of a company are the brand ambassadors of the company. They must key in to the mission and vision of the company. Their actions must not in any way tarnish the image of the company. The company must get buy-in from the entire organisation to communicate the brand. This internal adoption is pivotal for the maintenance of brand consistency. Be sure that every department represents the brand in all communication with customers, partners and suppliers.

Should the brand management of a company be handled internally, or should it be outsourced? This will be addressed in a subsequent article. Watch out!

Dr Olusola Oso

Founder/CEO, Pendrof.

Content is the king, so goes a cliche in digital marketing. The import of this statement is that in order to position your brand properly, you need to embrace content marketing.

Content Marketing is a form of marketing which is focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. Content Marketing Institute defines Content Marketing as ” a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable action.”

Note the use of the word “valuable” in the definition given above. It means that you must take the pains to create valuable contents for the purpose of content marketing to be accomplished. If a company has a problem in this regard, it can be outsourced to content marketers, who are digital marketers (content marketing forms an integral part of digital marketing). Digital marketing agencies usually offer content marketing services.

Content Marketing is usually employed by businesses in order to:

1. Expand their customer base;
2. Generate or increase online sales;
3. Attract attention and generate leads;
4. Increase brand awareness or credibility.

James O’Brien of Contently has this to say on Content Marketing: “The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.”

In order for a successful content marketing campaign to be launched, there must be a continuous delivery of large amount of valuable contents. Also, the needs of the prospect or customers must be put into a great consideration. These information can be presented in a variety of formats such as infographics, e-books, white papers, case studies, podcasts, photos, blogs, etc. A good number of these formats belong to the digital marketing channel.

Dr Olusola Oso

Founder/CEO, PENDROF.

Facebook hugged the headlines for all the wrong reasons on Thursday (9th May, 2019) when Chris Hughes, a billionaire co-founder of the company, argued in a New York Times Op-Ed essay that the company should be broken up and regulated.

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s Vice President for Global Affairs and Communication decried Chris Hughes’s suggestion. According to Clegg, “You don’t enforce accountability by calling for the breakup of a successful American company.”

In his lengthy Op-Ed, Mr Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook, argued that the social media giant be subjected to extensive government oversight and separated into multiple companies, notably by spinning off the photo-sharing app Instagram, and the messenger service, WhatsApp. In the essay, he reiterates the fact that Mr Zuckerberg is a good, kind person, but simply wields too much power for any one individual. According to him, “Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.”

Mr Hughes’s statement has drawn intense interest across the globe primarily because of his role in the start of the company and his once close-knit relationship with Mr Zuckerberg.

Specifically, Mr Hughes advocated for government intervention. He wrote that the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department “should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years. ” He called the decision to allow Facebook to buy these two major competitors, “the F.T.C’s biggest mistake.”

Dr Olusola Oso

Founder/CEO, Pendrof

Branding, when effectively done, can catapult a business or company into a global brand. Cases abound of companies which have been blasted out of obscurity by the deliberate employment of branding. Our focus in this article is on Lipton Tea, a British brand of tea founded by Sir Thomas J. Lipton when he bought his first tea plantations in 1890 (lipton.com, 2017). Today, it has become the world’s leading tea brand, and is sold in over 150 countries across the globe. Lipton Tea is currently owned by Unilever.

The branding was kick started with an attractive designing of the tea label. Needless to say, packaging forms an integral component of branding.

A ‘Lipton Do Good’ contest was also launched to engage the audience on the social media. The idea is to get them to share a story of an act of kindness they did on a particular day with other users so as to inspire everyone to do something good to another person. Social Media Marketing was employed to popularise the social media campaigns.

In addition, a special website was created for the campaign, “Lipton Do Good”. The website displayed a wide spectrum of videos that depict acts of kindness, ranging from sharing a cup of tea with a stranger to helping an old person cross the street. Visitors are asked to select the video that best resembles their good deed, and write a short description of what they have done. Lipton also designed a GIF for each person story and asked users to share it on social media.

The results are remarkable. Around 100 best stories were printed on the tea bags’ labels. Close to 10 million consumers were engaged. The exposure of the campaign was boosted by a rash of news and entertainment websites such as Scoop Empire, Ragel.com, Cairo360, and Cairo Gossip.

For your branding campaigns, Pendrof can do a marvelous job for you at an affordable rate. Call us on: +2348038341039. Email: info@pendrof.com. Website: www.pendrof.com.

Dr Olusola Oso

Founder/CEO, Pendrof.

Neil Patel defines Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results.” It is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword. SEO forms an integral part of digital marketing. It is not enough to have a website. The big question is: how many people visit the website? The higher the traffic rate of the website of a business enterprise, the brighter the chances of getting more clients. Of what importance is having a beautifully designed website that people don’t visit?

We have two categories of SEO. The first is On-Page SEO. This concerns all of Google’s ranking factors that they determine by directly looking at the page you try to optimize such as headlines, content , and page structure. The second one is Off-Page SEO. This refers to all variables Google takes a look at. They aren’t exclusively in your own hands. They depend on other sources such as social networks, other blogs in your industry, and the personal history of the searcher.

In doing SEO on your website, pay attention to the following things:

1. Focus Key phrase: Your focus key phrase must not exceed five words for better SEO. Ideally, you must not have used the key phrase before.
2. SEO Title: Your SEO title will be visible to people who are not on your website yet. It will be shown to people on the search engines’ results pages as the title of your snippet, and it can, therefore, be different from the title of your post or page.
3. Text Length: The recommended text length is minimum of 300 words.

For your SEO, you need digital marketing agencies who are experts in it. Pendrof is a branding and digital marketing agency who can effectively handle your SEO at an affordable rate. Contact Pendrof on: +2348038341039. E mail: info@pendrof.com. Website: www.pendrof.com.

Dr Olusola Oso

Founder/CEO, Pendrof.