Every now and then, tech B2B companies need to ask if their brands are still effective in the marketplace: effective in communicating value to clients and customers; and effective in capturing the essence of the company. In short, does the brand walk the talk?

As Kerry discussed in Tuesday’s post, McBru recently turned its branding process on itself. We discovered our brand identity did not capture what we’d become, and did not reinforce our value to the market. So we refreshed our brand, and rolled out a new visual identity and logo, seen most directly in our website.

But to state the patently obvious, a logo does not a brand make. We took this opportunity to look for other ways we could streamline and underline our brand communications – and walk our talk.

One very down-to-earth example: use QR codes to streamline the design of our business cards. Social media and mobile computing are giving us all kinds of contact points. How many of you have found room for your Twitter handle on your card? For our global market, we assumed that our business cards are most useful for sharing an online contact or phone number. So we print only those on the front, and then include ALL the contact info in a Vcard printed on the back. We stick our logo in the center of the QR code because? well, it looks good.

Another refresh example is more ambitious. We regularly flex the power of social media to share content and make connections for our clients. Our new online strategy takes this practice to the next level: positioning our content and conversations across the social channels in which they fit best, and leveraging that activity within a streamlined, responsive website design. From Pinterest to LinkedIn, SlideShare to Google+, McBru is walking just how you’d think a full-service, integrated tech B2B agency would walk.

When it comes to your brand, does your company walk the talk? Does the brand convey who you are today, and who you are becoming? Can your customers and prospects get an accurate picture of what you can do through your brand?

How about doing a brand workshop in order to start asking these questions?  Give us a call and we will help you get started!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2013 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.