Juan chen

Brand marketing

Bob Mullenbach

Oct 6^th 2008

  Basically this book is not hard to understand. My English reading so slow, so if I have more time, I can understand it better.

  This book has 2 parts, part 1 is “what the best brands know”, starts with the basics on branding.   It gave me the meaning of brand: a brand is something that lives in your head.  And a good brand says something different and relevant, that’s what I am thinking, and I want to talk about my brand ideas together.

  My sister and I are preparing to open an early education (0-3years old) center in China.   I looked on internet, and In there are only a few famous brands of early education centers. As a surprise, there’s no brand that puts teaching English in their advertisements (ads is one of the brand signal).That’s my branding idea; put English teaching to daily education. I am teaching Chinese for my host family and I am volunteering in a Chinese langue school; I notice that when the children are younger, they can learn better. Some young children (1.5-2.5 years old) they will learn second language by nature as their mother tongue. English study is so popular in China, almost all Chinese student start English learning at middle school, but not too many people are focused on babies’ second learning a second language.   Babies have more potential in language learning. So I believe when I go back to China, there will still be a big market. And this is what I really want work on.

In part 2, I want talk about chapter 6; get your employees engaged in the idea.  Employees are the first people in touch with normal customers; they realize every goal with the employer. On pages 137-138, the book also talked about the importance of engaging people on the brand ideas inside the company. “Brand engagement is not as simple as teaching employees a new language, but a new culture, a new set of behaviors.”This sentence reminded me of two points: first is that culture in a company is so important. Culture in the company is what all of the employees agree on and obey with the characteristics, values, management, purpose of the company.  In addition, culture in a company can motivate employees, engage their behavior and mind in the brand idea of the company.  Culture is the soul of a company .The second point is about my preschool center. I just thought about teaching English in daily life, I should put some western culture, manner, different living style in the study. Language is a tool, how to use it is what I really should consider.

  Naming a brand is really important, just like give baby a name.   Parents want the name to be special and simple; the most important thing is the name should be easy to remember!  Its first time for me to know my favorite “Google” is a coined name.  How creative! But If I name my preschool, I will still give it a real name. I feel it’s a risk to name a brand which has no real meaning, because it’s hard for people to know the brand at the beginning. (just my personal opinion).  Google, Kodak, FedEx already be known by people. A name of a brand should conform to its product, should be different from same kind of product and the name should be nice.  Some big company put their business all over the world, so they should give a nice translation. Like coca-cola in China, It is “可口可乐”, the translation kept coca-colas’ pronunciation and it gets a mean in Chinese: tasty and happy. What a good translation! The name is so sweet and happy, it makes people like it.

    Here comes my favorite part of this book: How to create branding signals beyond the name. First let me talk about the logos. A good logo is much more eye-catching than the words. You don’t need people tell you when you see the logo of BMW, you don’t need me to remind you when you see apple’s logo, even there’s no word. That’s the power of a logo,; giving you the first vision of a brand. The shape, the color, the designing is what you what tell your customers. You can give the direct feeling of your brand by this strongly, characteristic appearance. Then I’d like to talk about the advertisement. Advertisement is a very important way to brand. We can see ads everywhere in our life: news paper, TV, the body of trains (buses), website, walls.  The ads which I prefer are creative, funny and simple. There are a lot of things to talk on advertisement. How to choose an ad and how to broad it all should be pay attain, the most impressive advertisement for me is a iPod ads, just some shadows of people following the music and dancing. So easy, and so much passion. Making the audience wants join them .that’s what a powerful ads bring people.

   Marketing needs both knowledge and experience. Although I put some of personal plans on the paper, it’s just an idea.  I need to learn so many things. This book is about the basic of brand marketing, and I remember some of the definitions and the 5 steps when you trying to branding a brand. They are connected to each other.

   And I like the examples in this book; they give me a better understanding and from others successful example I know more about brand marketing. I learned from others’ experience.

第一次自己写这么多，真是难得。3个晚上的努力。

现在凌晨2；40am 2008/10/08