Advertising and Branding: A mythical connection

Most of us love advertising and like to see new brands being portrayed in a creative way (but not in the middle of a nail biting match) and making place in the prospect’s mind.

There’s a misconception among marketers that advertising builds the brand. It may call for brand awareness, interest and may create a buzz in the marketplace. But it’s not a sole function that builds a brand. There are various elements like Packaging, PR, Sponsorships, Events, Social cause, Social media (latest in the list; not to be missed), Customer Service etc. Building a strong brand requires careful planning and a great deal of long-term investment. At the heart of a successful brand is a great product or service, backed by creatively designed and executed marketing.

Advertising money will certainly go waste if inferior products are promoted. Whatever branding efforts you undertake, it will kill the brand. In fact the quickest way to kill the inferior product is to advertise it. More people will try the product and tell others faster that how bad it is. They are not in the isolated world. The communication platforms are enormous for the customer and it can make or break the brand.

For an effective brand-building, don’t limit the communication with just a commercial. Let there be a channel for the consumer to interact with the brand; be it Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. It will only create an opportunity to learn from the consumer and analyze the effectiveness of brand-building, awareness and satisfaction.

The fight for traffic!!

What would it take for marketers to move from search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization to social media?

Facebook has become a bigger source of traffic for some large websites than Google. While the social network gets a little more than a third of Google’s unique visitors in the U.S, since the summer, registered users have grown at a double-digit rate. It has also become a source of referrals for video sites as users post and share clips.

According to research, Facebook will surpass Google by 2011-2012 because the unique visitors to Facebook are growing enormously. Facebook has become a traffic source for Google as 19% of Google sessions now come from Facebook, up from 9% a year ago. At the very least, Facebook can negotiate a referral deal at some point.

But for Microsoft (which pays Facebook), it must be annoying to watch the company send all that traffic to Google.

Remember, search and social are two different things altogether. They may have some big overlap but they serve different purposes. We don’t expect Google to tell what our close friends are doing right now, and we don’t expect Facebook to tell the exchange rate of a dollar or pound.

What’s your opinion? Even if Facebook sustains its growth, can it “kill” Google?

Google's Internet bus

Google India started creating awareness about Internet as its internet bus hits the road of Tamil Nadu, India. This project is intended to show case the benefits of the Internet to the people and they are targeting the people with limited internet exposure.

As the Google India blog states,

“The bus is designed to make a simple introduction to the Internet for a new user. With a focus on the four themes of education, information, communication, and entertainment, the Internet Bus will be loaded with useful and informative content in English and Tamil. We'll showcase how the Internet can make everyday life simple through services like search, email, social networking, maps and others”

Looks like another unique initiative from the Google team and sure they’ll have the early mover advantage and carve a mind share among the new internet users.