Product Brand Strategy
The three brand strategies commonly used amongst large firms for deciding which products will contribute to which brand names are Multi-product Branding, Multi-branding, and Private Branding.

Multi-Product Brand & Benefits
Multi-Product Branding, also known as family branding, or corporate branding is when a company uses one brand name for all of its products within a class. For example, the brand name Sony is used on most if not all of their products. Sony is the company or parent brand name, but you will also see it on televisions, and on their PlayStation series. The benefits of Multiproduct branding is brand equity return, lower promotion costs, and growing brand awareness. These benefits come about through the extensive use of your brand name over a wide array of product offerings. The idea is to take a brand name which has established itself in one product class and apply that brand name to another product, in another product class, expecting for the brand awareness to carry over. However, there is also a negative effect on the multi-product brand strategy.

How to Avoid Multi-Product Brand Issues
The downside of multi-product branding is that it will spread your brand thin. When a company spreads their brand thin the result is often a weaker brand image. The more a brand name is used on products of a different class, the greater the diluted effect on brand equity. In order to avoid the negative effects of Multiproduct branding, companies use sub-branding. Sub-branding allows a company to use the big brand name while giving each product a little brand of its’ own. For example, Gillette’s Mach 3 razor for men. The Gillette brand is clearly marked on the package so consumers associate the new Mach 3 with Gillette quality. This gives the Mach 3 a sub-brand and distinguishes it from other Gillette razors.

Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind. – Branding pioneer Walter Landor.

The physical value of your products may be easy to calculate, but your consumers’ perceptions are what really determine the value your brand and products have in the marketplace.

Because of this, your ability to build value into your brand and communicate that value to customers through your marketing is essential to the long term success of your company.

The benefits of building a good brand
Brand equity is the perception customers have of your products and services based on what they think of your brand. Apple, Google and Microsoft are all considered to have high brand equity.

It’s difficult to assign a monetary value to a brand, but no matter how intangible brand equity may seem, a strong brand reaps considerable business benefits from:

Awareness
Credibility
Reputation
Customer satisfaction
Those benefits serve as tools to marketers in the effort to attract that mindful consumer who wants to buy from a brand high in value.

The mindful consumer
In his TED talk, ‘The post-crisis consumer’, John Gerzema asserts that buyers are no longer in retreat (as they were during the economic crisis), but have become what he refers to as mindful consumers.

The mindful consumer is willing to buy, but craves value. In the search for value, they consider factors like:

Research. Sixty seven percent of the buyer’s journey is completed digitally meaning the mindful consumer wants and has a lot of information on their side about which companies have what they want.
Social proof. Having a great product isn’t enough. The mindful consumer looks to online reviews, peer recommendations and social media profiles for evidence of a well-liked product.
Identity and preference. Customers are mindful of a relationship between their purchase decisions and their identity. They are looking to make a purchase decision which suits their personal brand.

In this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic was when we reordered title tags to include brand names at the start, especially if you are a household name.

Here is what they thought:

While it was close, the majority of followers that responded believed the brand name in the front had a positive impact on organic traffic. Although it was a small sample size of followers, the majority were correct!

This change had a positive impact on organic traffic – read on for the full case study!

Decisions about where to include brand keywords in title tags have been around as long as title tags themselves, and there are good arguments for leading with the brand and good arguments for leading with more generic keywords. Many industries have this tension, but local search is a fascinating example to investigate – with some people looking for their nearest store of a particular type, and some people searching for a specific retailer.

There is a theoretical tradeoff between a better click-through rate at a high level when the brand is presented more prominently and potentially worse rankings for generic queries. The only way to be sure which effect wins out is to test it.

While title tag tests are straightforward, they can often yield surprising results regarding their impact on organic traffic. The powerful effect on both rankings and click-through rate is the main reason why our SearchPilot customers love to test their title tags.

Our case study this week goes back to the basics as we look at localized search queries. We recently tested adding the brand name to the beginning of the title tags on city level pages.

Back in 2013, iTunes announced it had hit 1 billion podcast subscribers and way back in 2011, Libsyn hosted over 10,000 shows, with over 1.6 billion downloads from 18 million monthly audience members.

The growth seen by podcast hosting services since Apple popularized the podcast in 2005 is very significant for businesses.

By now you probably get the idea: podcasting is a very big deal, and if you’re not tapping into it you’re missing out on a big chunk of your potential audience. Let’s get underway and take a closer look.

The podcast’s purpose

The purpose of a podcast is mainly to generate interest in your website. Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome cites podcasting as the #1 way people find his website.