Strong brand identity is not that easy when the Game is constantly changing!
It’s a content war where the strongest brand wins.
Here’s how to join them!

What it actually means to build a brand in the first place?
Branding is a word that gets tossed around a lot in the marketing industry. The only problem? Nobody can seem to define what a brand is.

The concept of branding and its importance:

A Brand Concept is a general idea and an abstract meaning behind the brand working as its true essence and character that gives the consistency to the brand and curates a distinctive identity in the market and in the minds of the consumers.
mmm, what?
Branding is an emotional feeling about a company that makes them seem like the better choice against their competition.

Yes, that simple.

But how can we turn momentary sentiment into something tangible?

There are many types of branding strategies in marketing that will make that happen.
strategies are vary based on target audiences, marketing campaigns, and budgets.
And by choosing the right brand strategy you will have the potential to build brand equity and settle its place as an established brand, other companies apply more than one strategy to increase the odds of a successful campaign.

Done your research? your target audience is defined? ready to roll out your new product launch?

Let’s take a quick note of these four different brand strategies and get an idea of what to expect in a successful marketing campaign.

Tried all that and still aspire for more development?
here are simple steps to develop brand strategy by identifying three core components of your business to use as a planner for marketing tactics:

Step one:
⦁ Purpose: This explains why you are in business and the specific customer needs you achieve.

Step two:
⦁ Consistency: Be able to define what allows you to provide your services day in and day out.

Step three:
⦁ Emotional Impact: This is what helps create a bond or a connection between you and your customers

You have to test the brand strategy so it can develop this impact and build upon it.

How to define your brand

By defining what your brand is you create the foundation upon which all other components are built. Your brand definition serves as your measuring stick in evaluating ​marketing materials and strategies
from what your office looks like to what your ad says to the color and font of your business cards to the design of your website.

Defining your brand objectives

Critical to effective brand management is the real definition of the brand’s audience and the objectives that the brand needs to achieve. Ask yourself two main questions:

What is it that you want your brand to do for your company?
What do you want others to know, feel and say about your products or services?

Discovering and pulverizer your brand barriers

When creating your brand strategy for a product or service it is important to carry out a careful analysis to spot potential barriers. These barriers also are known as market conditions, and they can keep your product or service from being successful.

Focusing on your target audience

The power of your brand count on the ability to focus.
That is why defining your target market will help to strengthen your brand’s effectiveness and performance.

The key is knowing who your target market is. and knowing your audience so you have to ask yourself:

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How old are they?
What is their income range?
What are their occupations?
What other interests do they have?

Brand Packaging and Identity

Branding is as identifiable to your customers as your face is to your family. It’s how people see you in the market.
Your company image is all about the appearance of your packaging. What is your company’s image saying (i.e., conveying) to the market?
If your packaging doesn’t uniquely represent your ​business, change your packaging.

Branding is often seen not important to the managers because it’s difficult for them to see the material benefits.
Operating without a brand strategy is a recipe for accepting the less. Without a brand, a business lacks an identified purpose. And without a purpose, a business can’t stand out from the competition.

At the end after the Brand Strategy
Together with your competitive positioning strategy, your brand strategy is the essence of what you represent.
Great brand strategy helps you communicate more with your market, so follow it in every interaction you have with your potential customers and current customers.

“What is the branding strategy you use the most?”

In 2005, Professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne launched a revolution in business strategy by encouraging companies to evacuate shark infested waters.

Their book, “Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant.”
suggests companies are better off searching for ways to gain “uncontested market space” over competing with similar companies.
These new spaces are described as “Blue Oceans,” compared to the struggle for survival in bloody “Red Oceans” swarming with vicious competition. The Blue Ocean Strategy represents the simultaneous pursuit of high product differentiation and low cost, that way making contest irrelevant.

So, what is the blue ocean strategy?

Blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, that’s why making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.

In the classic book “Blue Ocean Strategy” Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne coined the terms ’red ocean’ and ‘blue ocean’ to describe the market universe.

Red oceans are all the industries in existence today, the known market space. In red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known.

Companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market space gets crowded, profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities, leading to cutthroat or ‘bloody’ competition. Hence the term red oceans.

Blue oceans, on the other hand, denote all the industries not in existence today, the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid.

In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. A blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential to be found in unexplored market space. A blue ocean is vast, deep, and powerful in terms of profitable growth.

Kim explained in an article on Forbes, “Our study shows that blue ocean strategy is particularly needed when supply exceeds demand in a market. This situation is applying to more and more industries today and will be even more prevalent in the future.”

Discovering Blue Oceans

While avoiding the use of Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter’s name, Kim and Mauborgne attack the famous “five forces” market analysis head on. Porter’s model looks at specific factors that help determine whether a business can be profitable based on other businesses in the industry.

Supporters of Kim and Mauborgne’s strategy would say this is a tactic that promotes merciless competition, remaining in the red waters.
The key to extraordinary business success, the authors say, is to redefine the terms of competition and move into the “blue ocean,” where you have the water to yourself. The goal of these strategies is not to beat the competition, but to make the competition irrelevant.

To discover the Blue Ocean, Kim and Mauborgne recommend that businesses consider what they call the Four Actions Framework to reconstruct buyer value elements in crafting a new value curve. The framework poses four key questions:

⦁ Raise: What factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
⦁ Reduce: What factors were a result of competing against other industries and can be reduced?
⦁ Eliminate: Which factors that the industry has long competed on should be eliminated?
⦁ Create: Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?
These four keys forces companies to examine every factor of competition, guiding leaders to discover the assumptions they unconsciously make while competing. They can then search for blue oceans within their industries and make the shift.

Blue Ocean in practice

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Kim Said: “Just think of its initial blue ocean shift in book retailing that separated it from the pack with its offering of the largest selection of books in the world, good prices, automatic confirmation of buyers’ orders, its useful selection on ‘people who bought this book also bought,’ and first hand reviews on what readers found useful or not in a book.”
He Pointed out how Amazon has shifted from an online retailer to a digital platform that sells practically anything.

Amazon isn’t always successful in creating blue oceans, however. According to Mauborgne, it failed in a few instances against Zappos, eBay and Apple.
Mauborgne Added: “In each of these cases, the companies Amazon went up against had all created blue oceans of their own, and whenever Amazon tried to imitate them, they failed. The lesson here is that the best defines is offense, and the best offense … is to make a blue ocean shift and create your own blue ocean. Imitation is not the path to success, especially in the overcrowded industries most companies today confront.”

Another company that created a blue ocean shift is Home Depot, which made an original value-cost frontier that led to the multibillion-dollar DIY market, according to Kim.
Also, Kim added: “When they saw Amazon encroaching upon their space, instead of competing head on, they doubled down on offering what Amazon could not, knowledge and advice to complete complex do it yourself projects such as renovating your bathroom on your own.”

At the end, the origin of the terms red and blue oceans comes from The book Blue Ocean Strategy “How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant.”

This book is recognized as one of the most iconic strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. It presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans.

Have you read the book yet?

God’s heaven on Earth, everything is fine, people are living their lives, tourists are in too, animals are saved in their homes.

Then, on 20 November 2019 A large fire broke out on Yorke Peninsula and threatened the towns of Yorktown and Edith burgh.
Yes, we know Australia has always had bushfires, but 2019 is like nothing we’ve seen before!

Scientists say the lack of moisture in the landscape is a key reason this year’s bushfire have been so severe and the climate crisis is behind the lengthening of the fire season.
In addition, record low rainfall has contributed to a continent scale emergency that has burned through more than 5m hectares and alarmed scientists, doctors and firefighters

As the area burned across Australia this fire season pushes beyond five million hectares, an area larger than many countries, stories of destruction have become horribly familiar.
People have been killed. Balmoral, in the New South Wales southern highlands, is the latest community affected in a state where up to 1,000 homes have been destroyed. A third of the vineyard area and dozens of homes were razed in the Adelaide Hills. It is too early for a thorough examination of the impact on wildlife, including many threatened species in the fires’ path.

The NSW Rural Fire Service says the scale of what has burned in that state is unprecedented at this point of the fire season. The firefighting agency in the state worst affected.

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A slightly larger area burned across the 1974 calendar year, the difference is, those fires were of an entirely different nature: above average rainfall before the fire season meant fuel in the outback was unusually plentiful, and fire burned through well-grown grasslands in the state’s far west.
But, this year’s fires are further east, where people live, and have been fuelled by a vast bank of dry fuel following the country’s record-breaking drought. Soil moisture is at historic lows in some areas, and rainfall in the first eight months of the year was one of the lowest on record in the northern tablelands and Queensland’s southern downs.

What does the science say?

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David Bowman, director of The Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania, says the most unbelievable thing about this fire season is the continent-scale nature of the threat.
Bowman says: “The geographic range, and the fact it is occurring all at once, is what makes it unprecedented, there has never been a situation where there has been a fire from southern Queensland, right through NSW, into Gippsland, in the Adelaide Hills, near Perth and on the east coast of Tasmania. And one of the less explored issues, though it has begun to receive some attention in recent days, is the economic impact of having prolonged fires that affect so many Australians.”

He says: “I’m not quite certain why anybody would want to be claiming fires have been like this before. It’s concerning as it is a barrier to adaptation. To deal with these sorts of fires the first step is to acknowledge the scale of the problem.”

Ross Bradstock, from the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, points to the Gospers Mountain fire, which started in a lightning strike north-west of Sydney in late October, as evidence of how this season differs from what has come before.

But he says it was almost certainly the largest single ignition-point forest fire recorded in Australia and, for mid-latitude forests, possibly the world. He says it is bigger than any in California and Mediterranean Europe.
“We can find no evidence of forest fires of that size anywhere, you just don’t see fires of this size in these parts of the world because you do not usually get the extreme dryness and unrelenting nature of the weather.”
Two months in, Bradstock says the Gospers Mountain is a monster, “just unimaginably big” and near impossible to contain unless there is substantial rain.

What about the smoke? What about the pollution?

The smoke that has choked Sydney, Canberra and other centres and towns in recent weeks has produced pollution up to 11 times greater than the engraved the level for human health. In Sydney, the air pollution has been hazardous for at least 30 days.
NSW’s director of environmental health, Richard Broome, said: “an unprecedented emergency from a smoke point of view, We haven’t seen conditions like this in Sydney, certainly in anyone’s memory that I’ve spoken to”

Dr. Kate Charlesworth, a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, said: “There is early evidence that the number of people turning up at hospital emergency departments needing help is higher than usual. there was no safe level of air pollution, and that the most vulnerable in the community babies, children, the elderly and people with pre-existing disease were the most likely to be affected.”

Climate change, what is the role it plays?

As we know, greenhouse gas emissions do not cause bushfires, but they play a demonstrated role in increasing average and extreme temperatures and contribute to the extraordinarily dry conditions affecting eastern Australia.
Scientists cite the near absolute lack of moisture in the landscape as a key reason the fires have been so severe.
Studies have found the climate crisis is lengthening the fire season.

As Australia’s fire season is more overlapping with that in California, making resource-sharing more difficult, it is also running simultaneously across the country.

What about the Animals?

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Australia is in the midst of an animal extinction crisis and the loss of almost 20 unique species in coming years is inevitable, already three native species had been wiped out in the past decade.

That’s the dire warning following the release of a damning interim report about the inadequacies of current environmental laws.
A Senate inquiry report released found the current approach to wildlife protection was incapable of stopping the spiralling rates of extinction and recommended a complete overhaul of legislation.

Suzanne Milnthorpe, national nature campaign manager at the Wilderness Society, said: “The evidence is clear Australia is in an extinction crisis, We’re number two in the world for species loss, and if we keep turning a blind eye to major threats to wildlife like deforestation, even iconic animals like the koala will go.”

Well, that’s all was before the bushfire’s crisis of 2019,
Millions of hectares have been lost, with a tragic impact on wildlife and flora.
Among the destruction, the efforts of volunteer firefighters, residents and animal rescuers have stood out, with acts of heroism that have saved many animal lives. A few have become emblematic images of this year’s terrible fire season.
However, the Animals victim numbers are still rising, and the danger of species extinction is certain!

Who is fighting?

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The majority of these fires are burning in regional and rural areas where volunteer firefighting services are the chief firefighting organizations. The New South Wales Rural Fire Service has around 70,000 members, but most of them are performing unpaid work to protect the lives and homes.

American and Canadian firefighters and fire experts have been flown in over the past month to help control the blazes. Over 100 US firefighters have been flown in, with more flying out on Jan. 6.

A report by the BBC suggests approximately 3,000 firefighters are on the ground every day battling blazes.

The Australian government announced that would be sending in military support including the country’s largest warship, HMAS Adelaide, to help evacuate regional communities on Victoria’s coast. Additionally, 3,000 army reservists were asked to assist in fire recovery efforts. Four extra water-bombers have been leased to provide additional air support.

Let’s not forget about the efforts of volunteering heroic work of the residents and animal rescuers that have stood out, with acts of courage that have saved many humans and animals lives. Some of them have become symbolic images of this year’s terrible crisis.

How can we help?

A number of organizations and volunteer services are aiding in the firefighting and recovery efforts for affected communities. Whether you want to help the firefighting organizations, wildlife or just provide somewhere to sleep. Or if you can’t do any of this You can just:

Increase Awareness! You can tweet and share and post this story, and dozens of others all across the web.
More eyeballs = more help.

Tell us how you raised awareness to help Australia?