Even more interesting, is that these premium brand products showed resilience in the marketplace. Lu Ann Williams, Head of Research at Innova Market Insights, states that “recent product launch activity reveals that US manufacturers are not giving up on premium products, despite the uncertain recovery. Instead, they are aiming to meet the demand for added-value encompassing better quality and offering consumers a momentary escape in stressful times.”

As an agency where “premium brands thrive,” Warren Douglas has seen the same acceptance among our own client roster, which are not new to the marketplace, but established brands. During the economic downturn, there has been a rise in requests for coupons, deals, etc. However, the majority of clients still see their customers’ loyalty to their superior, or premium, products.

We all know people can have a marketing hunch, but this recent study proves that there is data to back up that marketing belief that premium brands always sell no matter the economy. Makes you think your brand could stand to make sure it’s really seen as premium, doesn’t it?

Post based on a press release from PR Newswire, 6/9/2011.

• Agency Team Leader – The visionary who can layout the communications plan to fit the overall marketing plan and make sure that any tactic (promotion, coupon, giveaway) is in line with the overall objective, and monitors the “premium-ness” of all content; they can assign tasks, create personas, etc.
• Client Team Leader – The gatekeeper to the client side. They assign internal resources, provide approvals, and add industry insight and goal-shifts
• Teamsters – Those who implement the plan through scheduling the posts, replying to comments, etc. These people can be from either the agency or client side

Overall, one big obstacle between a team member and success is having the freedom to speak in the voice of the brand and for the brand. While it is ideal for the client to maintain control of these elements, it is not always practical to assign so much to one person, unless that is their only role within the organization. That’s why we at Warren Douglas work so hard to cultivate a relationship of trust with our clients by having guidelines, responses and cultural norms discussed at the beginning of any client/agency relationship. We take it as our job to make sure our premium clients are always seen in the best light.

Question: Do you have a social media team in place? What does that look like for your organization, and what have you seen as victories and pitfalls in social media management roles?

This post is second in a series. See other posts on this topic here.

Search engines are sophisticated and can determine when a page has been “stuffed” with keyword rich content and “black hat methods” to try and trick a search engine. It is very hard for a new website to rank well in search engines, and approaching this correctly the first time will help prevent future pitfalls.

Seven ways to boost your on-site optimization:

• Use keyword(s) at least once in the H1 tags on your website.
• Write relevant and useful content using keyword(s) at least 3 times throughout the content body. Using the keywords in different phrase variations works best. Just make sure the content makes sense and doesn’t feel like you are “keyword stuffing.”
• Use the keyword in title tag of the web page (Notice how we use the term “premium” a lot?)
• Bold the keyword in the body text at least once
• Use images that relate to the keyword(s), and use an alt tag for the image description.
• The URL page structure should have all keywords in it.
• Place keyword links throughout content, navigation, footer, and anywhere else there is content that could be used to link to other pages with keyword anchors.

Question: What methods are you currently using to optimize your SEO on-site?

This post is second in a series on Premium SEO. See other posts on this topic here.

Secured distribution? Check.

Market Need? Check.

Competitive Position? Check.

Appropriate Price? Check.

Now what? Cue the first planning meeting….

Long Pause.

Well, definitely a website.

Yep, and we’ve got to have good sales collateral for the trade.

We won’t sell anything without some awareness. How ‘bout a TV spot! No, wait, radio is cheaper. Or maybe a billboard? Those digital ones might be cheap…

Yeah, yeah, let’s do that! But wait, it won’t look cheap, right? I mean, we’re more premium than the cheap stuff…

What about a sales promotion? Or a sponsorship of something cool. No, I’ve got it – a promotion that leverages a sponsorship of something cool.

Yeah, with a viral video so we don’t have to pay for it!

Yeah! You know all social media is free, so we should definitely get on Facebook and Twitter too.

But we’ve got to track everything back to sales. We can’t do that without paying for social media, can we…

If you’re reading this blog, you have probably been in that meeting more times than you can remember. The organization is ready to launch a new product, steal market share, increase margins, etc., so the marketing team gets together to brainstorm. Everything is ready to go, and everyone just has to figure out how to tell the market that we are here to serve its unmet need.

It’s exciting! The possibilities are endless, and we all know that during a brainstorm “there are no bad ideas.” It’s fun! No spreadsheets here—just a whiteboard, some unhealthy snacks, excessive caffeine intake and the group’s collective imagination. Often times several good ideas come from these sessions, and the group leaves excited about the possibilities of putting together our new campaign.

Then the questions begin:

• How much of this can we afford?
• Our brand is premium. Are we doing things that a premium brand would do?
• What will management think?
• How can we sell in the new ideas?
• What’s the ROI? Can we even measure that for everything in our plan?
• Are there other metrics besides ROI that are important this year?
• Will all of this really help us meet our objective? Really?

At Warren Douglas, our strategy team guides premium brands through a deceptively simple four step process to answer these types of questions and provide a roadmap that shows the path from objective to tactics. Without a lot of detail, the four steps are as follows:

1. Define the Core Objective
2. Identify Measurable Goals
3. Articulate Strategies
4. Align Tactics

Check back to hear how these four steps can help make a strategy work for a premium brand—perfect for the proactive brand manager.

Question of the day: What have you found to be effective in making sure tactical plans will ultimately support the larger corporate objective for the upcoming plan?

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is a large part of the performance discussion of a website. To rank well in search engines, several tasks have to be completed—utilizing many man-hours to accomplish good optimization. (No good  marketing deed goes without some sweat and blood behind it. You were all excited because we put “free” in bold above, weren’t you?)

To start at the very beginning (a very good place to start), SEO revolves around keyword usage. Most brand managers don’t have a clue which keywords are appropriate for their brand. Well, we at Warren Douglas begin our SEO 101 strategy with these three simple tips :

• Determine which keyword(s) a premium brand should be associated with. This can be a hard, yet important, task because each brand could potentially have hundreds of associated keywords relevant to a search engine. If the main goal is to sell a product or service, then you want to rank for the keyword(s) that has the highest conversion rate.
• Tools to determine keywords can suggest keywords and project how much traffic will come from each keyword. One such resource can be found at Google AdWords.
• Long-phrased keywords (or keyphrases) are easier to rank with than short-phrased or one-word keywords. For example it would be easier to rank for Fort Worth Advertising Agency rather than Advertising Agency when practicing good Search Engine Optimization techniques.

As an optional tactic, if keyword research has not brought in the ideal solution for finding high-performing keywords for your premium brand, it is often a good idea to allocate resources for a paid online campaign. With this paid online campaign, ”purchasing” certain keywords and keyword phrases and monitoring the traffic for website conversions can help narrow the scope. This will determine which keyword(s) perform best before committing the manual resources for the full optimization plan.

Once keywords in place, which are highly relevant to the content within a website, there are a number of tricks (which will be revealed at a later date) to make sure these keywords are being used in a highly effective manner.

Though it may seem rudimentary, a lot of brands are unable to determine the best way to use social media to gain a positive return on investment. Or, even worse, just think of a great idea and don’t build it into the overall marketing strategic objectives of their brand. So, the best way to approach it is to concentrate on the strategies behind the actions, or tactics. Truthfully, this one streamlined marketing approach is what can separate a premium brand from the pack.

For a brand starting out in social media, it can be hard to define what kinds of strategies can be accomplished via social media channels. These often fall into one of the following categories:

• Brand Awareness – increase the awareness of your product, brand or offering
• Build Community – create a community of advocates devoted to your brand identity, values, and product offerings
• Customer Activation – engage with new users to funnel them to a sales channel to purchase a retail item
• Generate Leads – engage with new users to funnel them to a sales team to close the deal
• Customer Service – manage the existing relationship with up-to-minute responses and crises management

Social media can be overwhelming when considering it as a whole, so be sure to have strategic goals strapped tightly to any initiative to keep the creativity effectively aligned with overall objectives. While any brand can apply these principles, they are the building blocks upon which a premium brand must stand in order to execute and communicate with the premium consumer.

Social media is the easiest place for consumers to detect disorganization, fragmentation and plain lack of premiumness … for lack of a better word. But it is also a growing opportunity for premium brands to shine in these strategic categories when executed properly.

As part of the LinkedIn mentality, there comes a strict policy that only insiders to the organization are allowed to make this type of contact with a profile. When searching for connections, send one too many requests who claim they don’t know you (that would be a total of two, in actuality), and you are put on strict probation. However, now, for a price, LinkedIn will allow you to speak directly to the CEO of Kraft foods. I’m sure that PPC will be through the roof. However, it begs to leave the question as to whether the CEO of a company wants to see advertisements for agencies, new software products or accounting firms.

While this new initiative seems contradictory, we have to ask ourselves if this isn’t the latest trend in all social networking platforms, whether professional or not. Just like those clamoring to get their message in front of a higher-up to provide an opportunity to make a buck, so is LinkedIn using the opportunity to get in on the cash flow. Twitter already allows you to target profiles and inundate streams with direct messages pimping a brand, and you can’t help but wonder if that isn’t the next step in Google’s master plan of social search—integration with AdWords.

Bottom line is that while it seems we can’t get any sense of privacy even from networks that pride themselves on their privacy policies, it does seem that the age-old marketing principles of supply and demand are still at work. If you can supply me with a way to make my life easier at a click of a button, then you can demand a price for it, and should—no matter what your original point of differentiation may, might, maybe, could have been. All I have to say to LinkedIn is, good luck with this one …

You need look no further than Apple for proof of this. When cell phones reached their zenith, Apple presented us the iPhone. After they sewed up the new smart phone landscape, they turned around and introduced an entirely new category—the iPad.  Instead of resting on their laurels and simply issuing new colors of iPods or new sizes of Mac laptops, Apple regularly blows the market away with all-new stuff. And consumers react accordingly, by buying it all up as fast as they can.

Now, you might be thinking “sure, electronics are always innovating to survive; that’s nothing new.” But in Apple’s case it’s innovation in the purest sense—completely new categories of products that work brilliantly, look terrific, and are unlike anything we’ve seen before.  That’s innovation. Not just a new and improved screen technology or faster processor, but a whole new mousetrap.

And, great innovations by premium brands aren’t limited to electronics or software. Packaged goods are getting in on the act.  A recent article in Ad Age (Oct. 25, 2010) pointed out that innovative new premium products from Estee Lauder, Lancome and Procter & Gamble have found success.  As well, new shaving innovations from Schick and Gillette helped bring a 35% increase to the shaving category. Even the most basic of brands, Kotex, hit the jackpot with a premium-priced and newly designed “U” line of products. They saw a sales boost of 13% in one category and 57% in another.

So to those who own or work with a premium brand that could use a boost (and couldn’t we all?), consider stepping out of your comfort zone and making an innovative move within the category. You could be rewarded with some very premium results.

Recent Dell ads feature the new campaign, "You can tell it's Dell."

I’m loving how Dell’s latest advertising campaign is moving away from the dross of commoditized, price-featured ads toward something more premium. This week’s Adweek article reveals the latest campaign theme by Wunderman, “You can tell it’s Dell.” The campaign features innovation and design, adding a twist of Apple-esque “That’s so cool” mojo. I’ve got to believe that playing the low-price game in this space has taken its toll on Dell, and inspiring customers to love the brand because of its innovation in the PC space is a great strategic move.

Time will tell—and so will the product releases—whether or not the Dell brand will live up to the expectations set by this latest campaign. I say this after earlier today having passed the Apple headquarters, whose address is One Infinite Loop. That’s so cool.

One example: the major Gap debacle. After years of promoting the classic Gap logo, corporate management underwent a re-branding effort complete with new logo. As a soft launch, the logo on their e-commerce site was nonchalantly replaced. Backlash ensued! Via Gap’s Facebook Fan Page, every comment from housewives to Creative Directors bashed the logo. Apparently, Gap didn’t know that their logo was so iconic! As a result, Gap tried to defend this move, but fans would have nothing of it. They wanted the classic logo back. Gap has now decided to stick with old faithful and save themselves millions in replacing name tags and other collateral—not to mention further public humiliation.

Another example can be found within Proctor & Gamble. In a New York Times article, Marc Pritchard, global marketing and chief branding officer states,”we are at the start of one of the most exciting eras in brand-building history.” P&G, which is the world’s largest marketer by spending and known for extensive product research with branding processes envied the world-over, is taking branding and marketing cues from regular people via social media. For example, commercials that “were almost pulled” by higher-ups, were saved solely by positive comments about the spot in their social media outlets!

Social media is a great way to get your message in front of millions of consumers, but it also is a great way for consumers to get their message across to the brand. In this day and age, even after research, marketers still run the risk of alienating their consumers (Tropicana!). The value of immediate and substantial feedback from your most vocal brand advocates is almost priceless. Social media, though still very  much a buzz word, is beginning to prove that it has a place in legitimate marketing strategy—most of all among premium brands.