What do you think about the above article from the Wall St Journal? It’s an important shopping trend not only for US consumers but for Australian shoppers as well.

Retailers, resellers, wholesalers, manufacturers and anyone that sells a ‘product’ will be affected by the growing trend towards researching and even purchasing online. Once wary and shy consumers are now experienced online consumers by the use of ebay, Google, Gumtree and even Facebook.

Whilst many traditional brick’s'morter retailers look at online shopping as a possible way to reduce their overheads (offering more stock without increasing floor space and reducing staff costs) it means they are now competing even more.

This means that the retail experience for the customer has to be even better so that consumers WANT to make the trip to a retail store. Retailers who don’t improve the customer experience and customer service will struggle to maintain revenue and will ultimately go out-of-business.

A quote from Michael Jordan : "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is precisely why I succeed."

What a great attitude and what a great man!

Isn’t fascinating that every great person has this type of winning attitude and ‘mindset’. After all, in sports and in business – no game or venture (or even every marketing campaign) succeeds every time.

Even successful business leaders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Donald Trump have failed with certain ventures (read their biographies to find out what they were). But, these successful business people know that one or two ‘home-runs’ can outweigh ten or more failures and make them very rich.

If something doesn’t work, try and try again. If all possible, seek mentors or experts to achieve goals faster. Our expertise here at Kinetic is ‘Great Business Marketing‘. Whether it’s business-to-business marketing (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) we aim to bring in quality leads (enquiries) into a business at the lowest cost possible.

When it comes to business attitude, we found that the wealthiest business owners have a strong ‘marketing mindset’. They understand that they need to ‘invest’ in order to achieve a ROI. For example, a business owner spends $1,000 on advertising, and brings in sales of $5,000 with a profit of $2,000.

Question is – How often would you run that advertisement? I hope you answered – "As often as possible."

Whereby, ‘Brand’ is the relationship between the business and the consumer’s values. For example, when a consumer looks to purchase a running shoe they may think of Nike because of it’s alignment with winning and achieving.

Image and branding has everything to do with identifying your target market, identifying the values that are important to your target market and then creating an image and a brand that relates to those values.

Trying to cover all demographics and values is not recommended because it would be very difficult to achieve effective branding economically. The consumer will be disappointed with the product and the business.

For example, promoting luxury airline tickets whilst actually hearding travellers into small seats and delivering poor customer service will upset those consumers and word will get out and damage the ‘Brand’. Conversely, entering the marketplace promoting high levels of service at a cheap price, will hurt margins for the business and will unsustainable in the long-term.

Typically a brand will consist of an unique mix of values, such as :

• Consumer benefits,
• Style,
• Reliability,
• Quality,
• Price,
• Consumer age target (e.g. children, young adults, mature adults, Generation X, etc),
• Image projection (athletic, adverture, wealth),
• Culture,
  and so on.

Branding can also be broken down into ‘external’ and ‘internal’. External branding is prodominately used to create new customers for the business via mass advertising, such as print, internet, radio and television.

Internal branding is reminding existing customers that you value their business of which the aim is to increase repeat sales from those customers. Internal branding will typically use such media as email, SMS, direct mail and the telephone.

Creating an image and a brand for a small to medium size business is not about flashy and slick advertisements. It’s about getting your key customers (target market) to recognise your business as their prefered choice for the products or service you provide.