In the last few years, one of the most popular business trends has been purpose-driven business operations and promotional efforts. Back in 2019, there was a Harvard Business School study published that linked the positive performance of companies on the stock market to their purpose.

Yet most of the purpose-driven businesses and promotional efforts around the world have been largely driven by companies in the B2C industry. The pandemic gave companies in the B2B industry the opportunity to join in on that trend and promote themselves as being purpose-driven.

While “branding” a product is all about promoting a term, symbol, or product name, public relations (PR) experts view their job as also pitching something with marketing and advertising efforts. The internationally known “Coca-Cola” brand owes part of its success to an aggressive public relations campaign that has made drinking Coke akin to apple pie, baseball, and other American “brands.” There is a view that proper branding mixed with good PR can result in both higher sales and customer loyalty for a product or service.

Some people think branding is an afterthought, unimportant, or largely irrelevant to the grand scheme of marketing. Those people are wrong. Demonstrably, inescapably wrong in both the substance and context of their ideas on the subject. While it is certainly true that the importance of branding can be overstated – it is, after all, not the only important metric for success in branding – the plain fact is, too many marketers don’t put enough thought, energy, effort, or resources into their brand.

Many business professionals these days still believe that they should use as many words as possible to convey a message. However, the truth is that excessive use of buzzwords or industry jargon tends to be counterproductive to a brand’s message.

The more words that are added, the more complicated a brand’s message is going to become.

Whenever an athlete ends up on the cover of magazines such as Sports Illustrated, those magazines show others that that athlete has reached a high point in their career and have become very popular.

This year was the first time an eSports brand was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, which made history and showed how the gaming organization FaZe Clan is influential in the industry.

These days, business communication tends to focus on the customers, and with the sheer number of similar products and services available to them in the market, it’s easy for those customers to switch from one company to another.

Companies that are able to prioritize the customer journey through communication can get a competitive edge because these days, customer support isn’t the only thing that buyers are looking for.

Key messages are an extremely important category of information that a company wants its target audience to hear, understand and remember. A key message articulates what a business does, why it does it, how it is different, and what value it brings to stakeholders. Key marketing messages should have certain traits, as enumerated below.

Shorter attention spans and the increasing use of mobile devices have made it necessary to create messages that are concise. To make sure that a message is received in the right way, the language used has to be simple and clear. A succinct message carries less risk of being misunderstood.

The cultural export known as K-pop has been streamed over 4.5 billion times on Spotify as of February 2020. With a massive reach such as this, they teach quite a few marketing strategies to willing learners. By adopting their best practices businesses can turn customer engagements into meaningful relationships. Given below are the strategies which ensure the viability of the bands.

The K-pop industry builds bands with the help of auditions. The applicants who are selected train for a certain amount of time until they are ready to debut as a band or as solo artists. In the time leading up to their debut, the managing company adopts various marketing strategies to promote them. They share content like rehearsal clips, behind-the-scenes videos and teaser photos to build excitement. Once the artist debuts on a music channel or a show, they have already created a fanbase and pre-promoted their brand. This shows that there is no reason to wait until a product launches to start promoting it.

Rebranding is a challenging and exciting point in a brand’s lifetime. It signals the beginning of a new chapter for the brand, but if not properly handled, can lead to damaging effects. Customers might believe the brand has simply gone out of business, or may not trust the new brand, as new management may be included with the rebranding process possibly resulting in changes to their favorite products. A rebrand is when a brand changes core elements of their messaging, imagery or core assets that made up the old brand, and introduces new or refreshed core elements.

Most companies focus their rebranding efforts on winning over customers, the media, and the public at large. However, companies should begin their rebranding efforts internally. Don’t allow employees – even contracted janitors – to find out about the change in the news. Prepare everyone involved with the company to ensure the process is smooth and is supported by employees and partners.