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About this lesson
Branding should be a constant component of your marketing strategy. Press releases are a great tool to build your brand credibility.
Exercise files
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Branding Through Press Releases – Part I61 KB Branding Through Press Releases – Part I - Solution
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Quick reference
Branding Through Press Releases – Part I
Press releases are a great tool to build your brand credibility.
When to use
Branding should be a constant component of your marketing strategy, and can be reflected in the content, logo and boilerplate of your press releases.
Instructions
Brand credibility can be conveyed in 4 ways:
- Logo or image: non-verbal communication; the logo should convey professionalism and be displayed in every press release as familiarity increases liking.
- Marketing campaigns: the pricing and warranty of a product affect customers’ perception of its quality (e.g. a press release could announce an extension of the warranty of a product to increase brand credibility).
- The vision of an organisation: the values, the future and the purpose of a brand (e.g. if a technology report announces that in 10 years time 70% of vehicles will need to be electric to reduce pollution, state how the vision of your company is going to fit in with this change in the environment).
- Internal operations: how the company is going to deliver its vision and whether it has achieved what it had set out to do (e.g. business and performance reports).
- 00:05 Press releases are a great tool to build your brand credibility.
- 00:10 There's so much we need to discuss about branding.
- 00:13 Your brand credibility can be conveyed in four ways through press releases.
- 00:18 By using the logo or the image and then through marketing campaigns,
- 00:23 the vision of an organization can be shared as well as a couple of internal
- 00:27 operations that can be made known.
- 00:30 So, let's go ahead and look at each of these in detail.
- 00:34 The first way of communicating credibility is actually non-verbal and
- 00:38 that's just through a logo or an image.
- 00:41 Now given that this communication happens at a subconscious level,
- 00:46 the logo should be designed so as to convey the professionalism of the company.
- 00:52 A poorly designed logo, it goes without saying,
- 00:55 it will make people dismiss something outright.
- 00:58 So the logo should be included in a press release,
- 01:01 as well as on the company's website and on the product.
- 01:05 People will become familiar with this logo.
- 01:08 And eventually, they will come to prefer it over other brands.
- 01:12 Hence, why consistency is so important.
- 01:15 Now if you look at the new BP logo, it was launched back in 2000.
- 01:20 It was originally designed to win over environmentally aware customers.
- 01:25 And to achieve this aim at the time, what they did was they changed the slogan.
- 01:30 British Petroleum into Beyond Petroleum.
- 01:33 So, the greenness of the logo certainly communicates at
- 01:38 a subconscious level and it did achieve that result.
- 01:42 Now if you look at marketing campaigns, brand credibility is communicated
- 01:47 also verbally, for example, through the marketing campaign.
- 01:51 So here, the pricing and
- 01:53 the warranty of the product will affect the perception of the customers.
- 01:57 In fact, I relate quality directly to price.
- 02:01 So depending on the success of the marketing campaign, these aspects will
- 02:06 increase or can actually decrease the credibility of the product and the brand.
- 02:10 For example, a press release could actually announce an extension of
- 02:15 the warranty of the product and that will in turn.
- 02:18 Increase your brand credibility.
- 02:20 Let's take a look at the vision of the organization.
- 02:23 Brand credibility is communicated through the vision of the organization and
- 02:28 this should be clearly stated on on the website, and
- 02:31 in press releases where possible.
- 02:33 For example, there's the boiler plate area within a press release that gives
- 02:37 us an opportunity for that.
- 02:39 Really, there's three main aspects of the brand vision here.
- 02:43 We've got the values that will characterize us as a brand.
- 02:47 This is the companies beliefs about how business should be conducted.
- 02:51 For example, honesty or prioritizing customers needs and so forth and
- 02:56 then we've got the brand vision for the future and
- 03:00 they should spend ten years ahead showing how the company and
- 03:04 its products will fit in the changed future environment.
- 03:08 And then of course, we've got the purpose of the brand and this is not solely
- 03:13 related to profit, rather we should state how the brand is going to make the world
- 03:18 a better place and any of these aspects can be used to frame the press release.
- 03:23 For example, if a technology report announces that in ten years time,
- 03:28 70% of vehicles will need to be electric in order to reduce pollution.
- 03:33 How is the vision of your company going to fit with this change in the environment?
- 03:40 Now internal operations is interesting,
- 03:43 because brand credibility is communicated through internal operations and
- 03:48 this must reflect quite clearly how the company is going to deliver its region and
- 03:54 whether it has achieved what it had set out to do.
- 03:58 Business and performance reports are equally suitable topics for
- 04:02 the press release.
- 04:03 This will increase the brand credibility,
- 04:06 as well as provide some publicity on the matter.
- 04:09 Now if we look at the example of BP again following the deep water arise and
- 04:14 oil spill that was back in 2010,
- 04:17 BP actually developed a great deal of effort to regain brand credibility.
- 04:23 However, to truly live up to this green vision that they portray and
- 04:28 the green vision was to explore new ways of living without oil.
- 04:33 BP should not have invested in Deepwater Horizon and
- 04:36 continued to produce fossil fuels in the first place.
- 04:39 In fact, far from being authentic, their branding merely consisted in
- 04:44 creating a new acronym to appeal to environmental individuals.
- 04:49 The question is did they deliver on that?
- 04:51 So the crisis altogether with the discrepancy with BP's brand vision and
- 04:57 what they actually did may well, of course, a big loss for this company.
- 05:02 So this is certainly something to think about and I would encourage you
- 05:07 that you consider branding as part of your press release strategy, and think
- 05:12 every step of the way how can we also act in good faith towards our own brand.
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