Three Rules To Business Success: Keep it cool, fun and exciting!

We can all agree that the success of a brand depends on many factors. Factors ranging from price and recognised quality, to exposure and feeling. Feeling, is something we all pick up on. The feeling to hold a product, the feeling to own a product, the feeling to show your friends a product, and certainly the feeling to simply be around a product. This feeling of excitement, fun and coolness is something Apple have brought in to they're brand and business resulting in extremely successful results.

Apple is a world famous company. It has a net worth of 406 billion US dollars and the biggest following of fans, press and excitement in the world. Apple sells a variety of electronic devices aimed at the consumer, from the iPod, iPhone and iPad hand held mobile device's to the iMac and MacBook computer systems. We can all learn a little bit from apple as it produces a wave of urgent excitement and coolness every time it releases a new service, product or software. This wave and immense expectation from fans has been built up over many years, and it can be explained in 3 simple points.

History

Apple has a history lasting several decades. A history which has been built up from exciting and quality news and products. Apple has had an extrodinary life, imagine it like a wall. A wall built up of bricks of every color! Apple's historys has been an exotic one, built up of many important and strategic decisions, announcements, products and people. This draws an urge of excitement as people come to see the newest brick of its wall of history be laid. This is why it is a big event for all fans of the company, and along with the huge amount of interest and fans, comes the press wanting to get in on the action and excitement, delivering to their viewers.. what they want to see and read.

Shop fronts of perfection. 

Apple has created a personality of perfection that is felt threw out its shopfronts online, offline and on packaging. It has a simplicity about it, but also a quality feel. The shops it has, often boast a supreme amount of quality compared to surrounding shops. This draws the customers in and makes buyers feel as if they are part of a new special club.

Its online shop front is cool. Its simplistic but cool and sleek at the same time, matching the shop front of its offline stores. The packaging of its products. Both the disposable packaging and hard cases are beautiful for all of Apple's products. They are clean, sleek and cool!

A general sense of love and excitement is felt and passed around by all.

Finally Apple seems to give out an essence of love and excitement to all of its fans. Its a company that is classed as 'cool' with the younger generation and is a company that gets spoken about as if its the popular kid at school! Its this coolness and well spoken about attitude and feeling it gives out that makes it have this amazing book of success and excitement. As this success and excitement carries on, the ball will keep rolling and Apple's great wall of history will keep getting built.

We can all learn from Apple and its efforts to be cool, made up on quality, love and excitement. Maybe to look in to other businesses like Apple, we can all then look into our own and see where we have been going wrong, and where we can make improvements.

What do you think? I'd love to hear your opinions and examples below in the comments!

3 Ultimate Online Business Branding Strategies

Business branding can be hard thing to accomplish. It can be a very complicated thing to achieve that needs many hours of thinking and doing. Once you've decided how your branded business should look to the target customer, you then have to decide how your going to achieve this look. To do this you need to take a specific route and choose from a range of branding strategies to get the best results for your business.

Online Business Branding

My Personal favourite way of branding and marketing my business is to use online branding strategies. Branding and marketing your business online can be very cheap and can have great, lasting results. My three favourite ways of branding threw the internet is threw online internet marketing, online video marketing and online social marketing.

Online Internet Marketing

Online internet marketing is a way of marketing that almost every business uses these days. Internet marketing is a way of marketing your business via a website or blog. You could start a free blog using blogger or word press and announce any changes or interesting information (like a summer sale) to your customers. You could also make a website advertising -- and informing people about -- your business and its products/services.

Online internet marketing offers a lot and it doesn’t cost very much if you do it yourself; but if you don’t have time to create and optimize a website you can always pay a website developer to do one for you.

Once you have a website or blog built make sure it is branded as well; website branding/blog branding is very important. The branding of your website/blog can reflect your business, thus give the same impression of your business to the reader. Make sure the branding of your website/blog works with your ideal business branding.

Online Video Marketing

Online video marketing is an interesting and fairly new way of business promotion and branding. Video branding is simply done by making a video and posting it to video sharing sites like YouTube. You should brand your video -- just like your website and business -- by talking about a unique product, keeping the videos similar by using the same backgrounds and person speaking as well as a logo -- and/or website link -- on your video.

A video marketing campaign can be used not only for business branding but also business marketing and product/service promotion. Using video is very simple, cheap and can go viral within days; if it’s a good video you’ve made.

Some good advice for online video marketing is not to smother your video and viewers with promotions but give the viewer something of use and interest, this will help win over they’re trust. If your product is related to skin care and acne treatments you could do a video called “10 ways to reduce acne” and spend 5 minutes talking about how to reduce it and then in the last 30 seconds say something like “for increased results - use these 10 tips and my acne cream,; which is available at … “. If you pair both Internet and video marketing together this can be very good strategy as you can then direct the view over to your site where they can buy your product. 

Online Social Marketing

Online social marketing is a bit like blogging. It is another way of getting the word out about what’s happening in your business. You can use sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to market your business and/or website. It is harder to brand your self and your business on a social site; but it is possible by taking care with the tone you use, the pictures you display and what you offer; don’t spam but offer information of value like tips, advice and special offers on your products/services.

Bringing the 3 strategies together…

All of these online branding strategies are effective and cheap, they can all bring increased custom and interest to your business and its products/services. I recommended using several or all of these strategies to get the best results for your business branding and promotion.

Have any thoughts or questions? 

Leave them below in the comments!