If you want to build and strengthen your brand in the twenty-first century, you need more than guerrilla marketing, grassroots promotions, and digital banner ads.
Profitable and purposeful brand creation will be essential to entrepreneurs in today’s crowded and technology-driven market; where multiple services and products (even counterfeits) are aggressively vying for your clients and world is swiftly changing. Workable and thoughtful marketing models will need to be created to support sturdy and long-living brands. The following is a blueprint for those that want to build long-lasting (immortal) brands.
Stop trying to create demand. Your brand must fulfill a desire
If there is one thing my experience has taught me is that creating demand is a lie. If no one needs “it” (right now), relax. The best marketers and the best brands satisfy real needs (emotional, physical, or actual). There are exceptions to this rule (like anything in this world), however, those exceptions either come with luck or well-researched and enlightening marketing appeal.
Tell your brand story
People can care less about what you do. However, why you do it gets hearts, wallets, and minds to open. Tell your story; have a clear understanding of why you’re selling a product, service or idea. Yes. Define your purpose, and have us fall in love with you.
Create a brand culture
Culture is the God of all great brands. Cultures are created by groups that share similar lifestyle patterns, values, dreams, and views of the world. Building a brand with the understanding of culture is a sure way of integrating with consumers lives, and becoming a long lasting (desirable) brand.
Select your brand’s media
Media the plural form of medium. A medium is a means of doing something. In the case of branding, your mediums are live-streamed events, broadcast radio, television, newspapers, internet (blogs, social media accounts), pretty much any means of mass communications. In order to select the right form of media, knowing your target audience is essential.
Collaborate with brands, bloggers, publicists, and influencers
Perhaps you’re developing a global brand? Identifying influencers; publicists, marketing professionals, and or bloggers in new markets that relate to your story will be key. In the case of influencers (especially bloggers), align your brand with other complimentary brands through guest blog posts, social media takeovers and or running contests. Collaborations on value-filled giveaways, for example, not only expand your reach but also allow you to connect with various people who may desire your offerings. By providing the aforementioned items for their audience, you open doors for:
a. Future collaborations because you’re helping bloggers attract users to their blogs
b. A promotional machine, because bloggers will naturally promote you when pushing giveaways to their users
c. Gain prospects who test (and possibly get addicted) to your offerings
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Human #AF.
Sade Disu is known and sought after for her ability to leverage storytelling, data, and business operations with her innate understanding of the cultural consumers’ lifestyle attitudes.
She attributes this aforementioned attention (press and awards) to her grit for creating cross-cultural content, platform solutions, and activations that engage (what she coins) the ” multi-hyphenated millennial women.”
Her content strategies and live event platforms were deemed unmatched for its convening power of global content, culture, and empowerment according to Forbes, LA Times, Essence, and Black Enterprise. And even more, was given a proclamation, by former Mayor of New York (now Presidential candidate) Michael Bloomberg in 2010.
All in all, Sade has delivered award-winning and has been press ordained (had a 4-page press feature in Black Enterprise and 2-page press feature in Forbes French Edition for her global experiential marketing and digital work across various clients.
Brands like Kimora Lee Simons, Iman Cosmetics, Pikolinos, Zara, Roommate Hotels and USAID, immediately tapped into her three-tier prong approach “community, content, to commerce” when looking to connect with the cultural consumers.
Under her auspice, she managed a team of 25 and built a 10-year-old marketing and digital communication firm, responsible for offline and online platforms that connected brands to consumers organically and authentically.
The results increased brand awareness 8.5 million views; $300+ K in revenue generated per event (total of 3) for project sponsors, and performance beyond the expected for key performance indicators such as newsletter subscribers. Media giants such as Hearst Magazines caught wind of her competencies — the ability to connect to cultural consumers through content and experiential solutions– and immediately hired her agency to build and produce its international spin-off of COSMO (which Disu also helped cultivate and manage editorial teams for).