What Latvia can Teach You About Branding

You can't brand your way out of being an asshole.

In an innovative move to keep pessemistic outlooks from damaging the perceived health of the Latvian economy, the Baltic state merely arrested bearish economists according to Wall Street Journal.

Latvia was admitted into the EU in 2004, and does a brisk trade in the kind of production and assembly jobs inherent in many blue-collar economies: agricultural machinery, textiles, vehicle assembly lines, etc.

But no matter how cheap its labor, how industrious its working class or how enticing its tax and land incentives--Latvia has dedicated itself to maintaining a suspicous commercial brand. And there is a lesson to learn here for all corporate marketers.

The communications component of your marketing mix deals with putting your best foot forward in key markets--and doing it in a way that supports your organizational objectives. But no matter how many business-friendly ad campaigns, PR stories or outreach efforts Latvia invests in over the next decade, they might as well take that money and burn it in a barrel.

If your service is bad, your products poor, your positioning ineffective or your operations flawed--good brand management will only soften the blow or buy you a little time. You can't spin your way around bad business practices for long.

Congrats to Jennifer L. Johnson at Total Safety

Congrats to Jennifer L. Johnson, the newly appointed Corporate Marketing Director at Houston's Total Safety.

Johnson will handle Marketing, PR and communications responsibilities. She's helping her team assemble a new catalogue and beef up the Total Safety website, according to a recent article in the November issue of the American Marketing Association's Marketing News magazine.

In her brief time there, she has already had a go at introducing video techniques into the company's marketing plan, filming the CEO for an employee program to "introduce him to people who've never seen him," and therefore help humanize the company.

Shaky Economy Great Time to Refine Budget

Growing your marketing budget right now is a tough sell. Sometimes the money just isn’t there, especially in a place like Houston with an engineering and finance culture (and oil hovering just over $50 a barrel, down from almost $150 this past July).

So now what? Before you sign of on a smaller budget, or continue with business as usual, consider putting every single 2009 marketing initiative in your marketing plan under the microscope.

Yes, this includes the things you’ve done EVERY year since you’ve been on board, and, yes, even the newsletter with employee babies and dead deer that nobody ever reads unless they’re the one who had the baby or shot the deer.

Ask yourself:

+ Where, specifically, is this effort contributing to the balance sheet?
+ How does this effort improve revenue, profits or conversion rate?
+ In what way does this project help differentiate the company and its offerings?
+ Is this effort an investment in longer-term value? How do I know?
+ Where do I need to focus our marketing resources for longer-term growth?

It sounds obvious, but many marketers take on or continue a host of projects for political or historical reasons, or simply because that’s the way it’s always been (before they were hired).

A shaky economy and slowing growth in the energy sector are great reasons for Houston marketers to clean deadwood from their marketing plans, tweaking budgets to run leaner on less.