Most brands suffer from despair, but stand firm with courage. They realise that courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. Like everyone, I love it when it is fast and sure. But hey these words do not go together most times. So today it is my desire to discuss, share my little knowledge on some of the conditions that I know will guarantee your brand’s success any day anywhere.  

Comprehensible and quantifiable objective: No brand will succeed without a road plan. Every brand must see the end before it starts otherwise the challenges of the road will chase many brands to ground zero. So a clear comprehensive as well as quantifiable objective and goal is essential. Have you lost your brand’s objective? There is an opportunity to go back to the drawing board.

Deep insight of consumers’ psychology and behavioural patterns: Since the success of every brand is dependent on customers, brand must understand their sustainers’ psychological and behavioural patterns. The days of assumption and arm-chair researches are gone for go. Brand must go out to the warfront, at the point of desire and ability of their clients.

Learn to provoke, stir up and appeal to customers’ emotional bonding: people buy from those who stir them up of make them feel good and appreciated. Do not bore your customers. Add fun, be the brand that gives them hope and stir them up to reach their dreams.

Reach clients through their preferred medium: Brand does not make any headway by following selfish desires and enforcing that on its audience. Brand must look out for new media that appeals to its audience and follow that part.

Expose your brand’s relevance to clients through your creative stories: brand creative stories today is part of what ensure audience bonding with it your audience. Study and look around you, most channels are obvious for those who will look.

Let me conclude this with this quotation “No one has ever found success by doing the same things tomorrow that resulted in mediocrity today.”

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While major profit brands are still in the doubt whether this stuff (new/social media) works, a non profit brand (Daystar Centre Lagos) is blazing the trail and I am happy that Non-profit may dictate the phase of what should be with the use of new/social media in our nation.

As our community would recall, it is this same non-profit brand that initiated the first ever social media campaign in Nigeria with its Excellent Leaders congress (ELC 2009) in November 2009.

I am so excited to break the news that this non-profit brand initiated the use of new/social media on Sunday March 28, 2010 to strengthened internal bonding among its audience. This experiment of using new media to reach internal audience that work successful came as a result of long absence of the President/ Senior pastor of the congregation. The senior Pastor fondly called Rev, Sam has been away for about six weeks on a preaching tour to United Kingdom and Western Europe. Apparently, this is the first time the senior Pastor would be away from home for such a long time in Fifteen years.

Expectedly his internal audience is beginning to miss their ever-cheerful, easy going but sound teacher of the Word who has nurtured them for about fifteen years. The audience is used to seeing him regularly as he is accessible to all. A great lesson to some brand’s leaders with less than two thousand employees/volunteers who have remained elusive. This long absence of the senior pastor is beginning to show despite the fact that the leadership of the brand has efficiently run the brand as if the senior pastor were to be around.

So it was a pleasant surprise and a great relief to the internal audience when a life ‘broadcast’ of Pastor Sam’s preaching was powered through ‘SKYPE’- an internet communication device that functions like Yahoo messenger- from London. Even though there was a little interruption due to internet disconnection during the second shift (which was quickly fixed), the audience was happy that at least they could feel their senior pastor all the way from United Kingdom. The four sessions of the church ran normally as if the senior Pastor was with the audience life. A great kudos to a brand that work hard on breaking new ground.

My concern today is why is it that our corporate/profit brands  are running away from reality of our time? What if the corporate brands use the new/social media to promote internal bonding, build support for the corporate ideas through a bi monthly/quarterly session with the Managing Director through the use of social/new media tools? Will there be a big difference. Many employees have not had any opportunity of meeting, interacting with the Chief Executives immediately after the meet the MD chat. Will a life meeting powered through ‘Skype’ make a little difference?

What if the Top Executive holds a quarterly briefing with major distributors of their products with these devices at the distributors’ zones and locations? What if a corporate twitter account is created for this purpose where meetings with zonal employees could be done through that medium? All that is needed to be done is to protect the tweet from external party that is not part of the team. What if a corporate retreat is powered with these tools and no one needs to travel long distance? Can we save cost through this mean? The question can go on and on. But what do you think? Use the comment section. I cherish your opinion.

Disclaimer: I am a member of Daystar Centre and I served as head, Content creation, development and management (New/social media) for the ELC 2009

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The huge crowd that has been laid off is still battling in the euphoria of what the future holds. Recently someone in a paid employment told me that the opportunity I have to build a strong personal brand is due to the fact that I am not engaged in a 24/7 duty or possibly that I am not at the lower level of management in my organization. While I responded that anyone will have time for what is uppermost in his/her priority, I also thought that many who still  hold a job are  under intense pressure to deliver or they will be shown the way out. By the time they come back home, they are already worn out. Many around me also go to work on weekends to cover up the demands of their responsibilities.

To thrive in today’s distressed economy; innovative brands must begin to leverage on power of social media to expand their brand’s appeal, relevance, and credibility as well to protect their brands from avoidable crisis. The challenges of social media that I have seen though is that to gain recognition, it is not a platform for ‘weak hearts’, lazy individuals or brands looking for quick fix it. Such brands will fail without any warning signals and such brands are the ones that will conclude that there is no credible ROI in social media.

An intelligent player in social media games can stand out of the crowd through proper management of great content, backed with sound creativity. Through right influence, a brand can still drive enough customers that will keep it afloat the troubled water of the present economic position. I have also discovered through feedbacks from my community that over dependence on a social media channel will not help much. The present crops of clients are looking for more value while they are not willing to pay premium. The positive side effect of a truly satisfied client or community member is that they will bring their friends, families, colleagues to patronize your services at no charge or increase in marketing charges.

Given the above, we are about to introduce a new channel to this community. The channel will be known as BRANDGAVEL RADIO. Hopeful in the future we may bring in Television series when the logistics are perfected. Brandgavel radio programme is a series of audio programmes that will  be featured weekly on this platform. It focus will also includes intelligent panel discussions on a range of issues that affect brands enlightenments programmes, personal brand initiatives, success stories, interviews with successful entrepreneurs who are willing to share their success stories from ground up. So if you know any one we can interviews who have credible brand stories that can inspire others who are still going through stuffs, please do send their names and contacts. Is your brand still romancing the old ways of doing things?? It is time to have a rethink.

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