Branding, Brand Management and Winning

David Byrd : Raven Call
David Byrd
David Byrd is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer for Raven Guru Marketing. Previously, he was the CMO and EVP of Sales for CloudRoute. Prior to CloudRoute, He was CMO at ANPI, CMO & EVP of Sales at Broadvox, VP of channels and Alliances for Telcordia and Director of eBusiness development with i2 Technologies.He has also held executive positions with Planet Hollywood Online, Hewlett-Packard, Tandem Computers, Sprint and Ericsson.
| Raven Guru Marketing http://www.ravenguru.com/

Branding, Brand Management and Winning

Yesterday during IT Expo, the first annual CMO Summit was held for about 100 marketing executives attending the show. The first speaker, (whose name was not on the invitation), spoke well but missed the mark for many of us. First, Broadvox, like many attendees is a B2B business. Branding for us is very different from that of a B2C or consumer focused company. Second, most of us are not Fortune 100 companies and we cannot cover our entire market at anytime given the cost. However, a few points were universal, the most important being to understand your target market and focus your brand definition to support selling into that market and defining the nature of your company.

The second speaker, Shawna Vercher, was more broadly appealing. The best of that presentation was communicating the importance of an integrated brand management strategy using multiple media types with dedicated personnel and tools. Interestingly, Broadvox has a dedicated Internet marketing guru and we coordinate our efforts from this blog to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Shawna suggests using online tools to track your comments or events affecting your brand on a 24 hour basis. I agree. A key tool for us is to use Google Alerts to track comments regarding Broadvox, key company personnel and our competition. It’s cheap, it’s effective and today it is necessary.

My first presentation today is too influence VARs to “Sell into a Growth Market”. It is part of the Telecom Reseller Week track and the target audience will be the channel partners that support many of the companies represented here. IT Communications is one of the few undisputed growth markets. Shifting from PRIs to converged T1s and Ethernet is the way to make money. Selling IP PBXs with SIP trunks is a winning strategy. Including cloud computing solutions such as hosted communications broadens your markets and places you in the center of an exciting discussion on how applications and services will be delivered. My point is this. The recession is over. Stop failing strategies and embrace the new. SIP Trunking, Unified Communications, hosted services and cloud computing are the new.

My second presentation is as part of a panel discussing Hosted and Premises based solutions.  I have discussed that a lot in this blog so I’ll end with this. It is not hosted “versus” premises, it is hosted “or” premises. Wining is the goal. Generating more revenue is one way of measuring that success. Support your prospects and customers by identifying which best fits them and then offer that solution.

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Feedback for Branding, Brand Management and Winning

1 Comment

Sounds like an interesting conference. You're right that marketing and branding B2B is very different than B2C. The emotion behind purchases made in B2C really drives a lot of the branding and marketing, that emotion is just not there with B2B.

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