The latter illustrates an important principle for building successful brand identity and product sales campaigns. A brand name that is appropriately non-traditional for its industry, product or service category will stand out in marketplace and reduce cost of marketing, sales and promotion. Distinctive names can contribute to success of marketing promotion and brand identity initiatives because they are more apt to be remembered. Further, a distinctive name creates perception of a distinctive product or service, while an ordinary name implies that you’re just another competitor. For successful brand marketing, it’s important to be distinctive—and sound it!

Naming a new product presents a variety of traps to be avoided. Many firms add corporate name or an umbrella name from a successful sister offering to gain quicker market acceptance. Our experience suggests that borrowing whole or half names almost always creates unnecessary baggage. New products and services are handicapped from inception if they don’t have benefit of a name that helps them to create a differentiated brand identity and also alters prospects’ perceptions of competitive products. A new product or service deserves its own name—one that will enhance its advertising, public relations and other marketing communications efforts.

Politicians are very canny about leveraging power of a good name. Legislators routinely give their bills names such as “Fair Trade Act” or “Clean Air Bill” to minimize opposition. Special interest groups like “Right to Life” or “Mothers Against Drunk Driving” use their names to rally support. If you don’t create a name that works for your organization or its products or services, you might have to emulate AFLAC and invest millions by putting an educated duck on TV to build brand identity.

The naming process provides an excellent opportunity to put power of marketing to work for your products and services. For financial services marketing practitioners, naming can be important first step in development of financial marketing communications and sales initiatives that build sustainable brand identity and competitive advantage. The right name serves as springboard for implementation of effective financial promotion, advertising and branding strategies. The better name, more potential it offers for effective, lower-cost financial services marketing solutions that can help achieve marketplace success.

Copyright © 2005 Suasion Resources Inc. All rights reserved. For additional information, please visit us online at http://www.suasionresources.com.

6) ‘Payment Processor’ - To collect money for your products you will need a payment processor. Make sure that you accept credit cards because most transactions will be made with them. But you should also consider other options as well, like accepting checks and money orders. And you may want to use PayPal. The more ways you can collect money more sales you’ll make. And if you’re selling a digital product you may want to use ClickBank.

7) ‘Autoresponder’ - If you want to make your internet business easier, then you’ll want to automate as much as possible by using an autoresponder. You can automate a lot of your every day business tasks leaving more time for you to concentrate on more important things. Here are a few examples: send out email advertisements to everyone on your list at predetermined intervals. Automate delivery of several different mini courses all at once. Send out sequential emails automatically whenever someone buys one of your products. Have all of your digital products sent out automatically. And with an autoresponder you can collect names and email addresses and add them to your list of customers and much, much more.

8) ‘Free Advertising’ - This may be a good way to start out if you are limited on funds. But this will be slower than paid advertising and will take a lot more time. And time is money so figure out how much you’re worth and monitor your time. If you are spending a lot of time with free advertising and not getting results you like, then you may want to try something else. Keep in mind when using free advertising someone else may also place their ad with yours and this is not very professional. Also when you join these free advertising lists it usually means everyone on that list can send free advertising to you. So you may get a lot of unwanted emails.

9) ‘Paid Advertising’ - You may get better results with paid advertising. And at first you may think blasting your ad to as many people as possible will make you most money. But this really isn’t a good idea for a couple of reasons. First a lot of people won’t have an interest in your product so they’ll probably not even read your ad. And second you may be accused of spamming which is something you never want to do. So always try placing ads with your specific targeted group. And always test your results to make sure that its cost efficient.

10) ‘Collect a List’ - This gets 5 stars. Start collecting your list of names and email addresses as soon as possible, add to your list often, and cherish your list because it will make you money over and over again. Whenever you need extra money you can send an email promoting a product to your list. So you’ll want to collect names and emails addresses by offering free e-books or a mini course, by having them join your newsletter and of course whenever they buy your great product.

And remember to always invest in yourself. Invest your money for quality information that will help expand your business, and invest your time to thoroughly read information.

Copyright © Duane Marx

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Duane Marx For a list of internet marketing resources and other free marketing tips please visit: www.internet-checklist.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as bylines are included.