Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Brand Aid


Checking out other blogs and emails, I saw this on marketingprofs.com and it got me thinking how Saelig features in these topics (maybe you should do the same?):

Brand Aid

Clarify your position. "The first step to building brand equity is to define your positioning," - the single thing your company stands for to your customers".

We like to be known for bringing unique OEM products to the attention of our customers (principally American engineers) - with excellent technical support and ethical business practices. To our vendors, we like to be known as part of their home team, with extremely effective market-creating abilities.

Tell your story. Give your position an external expression through your best corporate stories—an insight that led to the company's inception, the extraordinary measures you took to satisfy a customer or how your big breakthrough happened.

Saelig was created by an engineer for engineers - but we need to do a better job of telling the stories of how we frequently go "the extra mile" for our customers.

Bring it to life. "Make sure that the way your company looks and feels to the outside world matches that truth," he says.

We have to make sure that we operate with our customers' interests in mind at all times, while also satisfying our suppliers' needs.

Build the brand. You can make an impression before your customer ever initiates a transaction. O'Toole cites a naming consultancy called Igor that publishes at its Web site a free 100-page guide on its methodology.

We've had some nice feedback from engineers who like our innovative newsletters and interesting product mix. We trust that we're becoming known as a company that wants to make our customers "happy, prosperous and blessed".

The Po!nt: "These are practices you don't need a billion dollar marketing budget to emulate - you can start today."

Could we be doing more to build our image? Sure, but I'm encouraged when we get emails, or comments at shows, from customers who've followed our progress from the early days of 1988 when we just sold one product - a Forth-based controller board.

1 comment:

Steve Stroh said...

Alan:
I've followed Saelig's ads for years and lusted after many of your products. I just recently became aware of your blog, and added it to my RSS reader, so I'll see new articles whenever you post them.

I suggest you add RSS feeds for your various marketing activities - the newsletter (which I didn't find a link to read or subscribe), press releases, new products, etc. If you don't have a way to do those, it's a pretty simple thing to cut and paste the info to a blog - perhaps a new one.

Also... Blogger makes it pretty easy to put the blog under your own domain, so you could have multiple blogs / RSS feeds for the different marketing items.

Thanks,

Steve Stroh