Brand Blog - Author: John Howard

Tough to Ignore I tried to get past it. Weeks went by and I thought I’d finally put it behind me. Then I saw one more stupid post about Super Bowl Ads and the companies that were winners and losers with them. This was the last straw and I had to do something about it. […]

Good for All Types of Businesses We interact with a lot of businesses in the course of our work and it would probably surprise you to find out how many of them don’t have a Social Media presence. What is even more surprising is how many of them have no intention of establishing such a […]

Time To Drill Down Now that you’ve planned your entire universe at a macro level during Trade Coverage Planning, it’s time to take it down to the micro level. This is the primary function of Territory Management. In essence, Territory Management is where you take hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of customers and assign them […]

Assumptions Into Dollars During Trade Coverage Planning, the decisions you made during Customer Census & Classification start to take shape in the form of a viable customer call plan and the associated resource requirements. In effect, Trade Coverage Planning is where your criteria are converted into numbers. It may also be the place where you […]

First You Find Them Customer Census is exactly what it sounds like. You are basically taking the strategy you defined at the beginning of the process (see Issue 1) and using it to determine what your desired customers and prospects might look like. This is, essentially, the potential customer universe for your company. Since you […]

What Is Trade Marketing? We better get this answered before we go any further. While it has similar processes, Trade Marketing is distinct from Brand Marketing in a very important way. Trade Marketing is focused on marketing to your supply chain rather than to consumers. Quite simply, it is how you market your products and […]

Better To Have Than Not Backlinks are like lifelines for your website. They bring help in the form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by aligning your site with other high traffic sites. Backlinks are basically an endorsement of your website by the referring website. While certain types of backlinks are clearly better than others, as […]

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you probably realize that there is a lot of buzz surrounding Social Media. As a marketing tool, Social Media is still in its infancy and most companies are jumping into it without a clear understanding of how to use it and how it might benefit them. While it […]

Overview of Out-Of-Home Advertising When people think OOH the first thing that comes to mind are highway and freeway billboards. Billboards are certainly a large portion of total OOH expenditures but they aren’t the only component. You also have stationary media on benches, fences and walls as well as on many mass transit options including […]

Overview of Direct Mail Direct Mail is a form of “Direct” or “Direct Response” marketing. In effect, it is simply a customized piece of mail sent only to targeted consumers. It is called “Direct” because it circumvents traditional mass media and goes directly to the home or office of the consumer. Although measurements vary, it […]