I was reading a post on the importance of branding and evolving your brand over time as your business grows. All excellent points if a bit simplistic for today's hyper-complex marketplace. Actually, let me rephrase that. It's not a new hyper-complex marketplace, but like Wall Street, many are starting to be able to see the guys behind the curtains. We may not know all he hidden paths to success in a B2B digital-social-media marketplace, but we're starting to draw useful maps.
Branding identities go much farther than logos, palettes and slogans. Product names (think Pt Grey), tone (funny, technical, market leader/gorilla), application/industries, even the trade show booth, etc. And while branding is essentially a distillation of a company's persona, it's really a platform for the activities that generate real growth, which are a combination of inbound and outbound marketing activities efficiently integrated with sales...a simple enough supporting clause by itself, but one that the Internet, SEO, SEM, SMM, sales and marketing metrics, etc., have made exponentially more complicated (and fulfilling, if you're a data hound that really wants to 'know' the customer.) If you're like most machine vision companies, and stay somewhere near the beginning of Stephane's post, well...'simplicity' can be blissful...for a while.
