Branding

Marketing is very important to the success of any business these days.  One important part of marketing is branding.  Branding can be identified as "name, term, sign, symbol or design.”  You need to understand the needs and wants of your costumers.  You need to do research on what your costumers again need and want.  Branding is a fundamental need to your marketing campaign, one that you don’t want to miss.  It is essential.

With so many companies out there you need to be above the rest.  There is more to branding then just logos and pretty designs.  It is about interaction and claiming your voice.  First you can start by determining what your business is known for.  Think of a certain product or service that stands out.  You need energy behind your brand.  

You need to interact with your audience.  Keep in mind what your brand will look like in 5 years or 10 years.  Don’t be too specific or too generalized.  Being too general overthrows the purpose of having a brand and being too specific prevents the brand from expanding the market.  You need to have consistency in your brand to keep your customers coming back.  The effectiveness of your brand will keep them coming back.  A strong brand is again essential and invaluable to your marketing campaign. 

There are two types of branding personal and internal.  Which is right for your company?  Personal branding can be an indication that this person is an expert in their field.  Personal branding is simpler then company branding mostly because it is easier to sell what you believe in.  So by becoming a pro or expert in your industry you got the handle on personal branding.

You can spend so much time coming up with a marketing plan, and by messing with logos and taglines.  Marketing starts from the inside out.

Product Management

What’s the secret to building products people want to buy?  Well, first you should understand what product management is.  In a few words product management is building, helping, simplifying, collaborating - (sometimes) crying and leading.  So weather you are shipping websites or watches the goal of product management are the same, “helping a team build a products that’s loved by the company,” says HunterWalk, former director of product management at Google.

There are questions you have to answer like who is also making you product, who is buying you product and what are their needs.  So you need to spend more time on sales and marketing.  Hard marketing are activities that engage the customers.  Hard marketing is the essence of what product management is.

“Product management becomes critical when your prospective customers need you to sell them more then one thing in order to become paying customers,” says Alan Ying of Growth Factor.  It’s hard to do product management well, because executing product management takes such organizational tactics “that good intentions almost never make it out the other side intact,” continues Ying.

Product management is successful when a team, one team that reports to one leader this team must work with sales people, support staff, developers, business developers, accounting, legal and marketing.  When a company starts out product management is mostly performed by the founder, because he or she has the strongest product vision.  As the company grows so should the product vision.

So by being the founder of your product start becoming a whole Product Manager.  Start thinking end to end.  Learn everything for the sake of your product and then do everything for the sake of your product, because it’s your baby.  Don’t expect others to raise it for you.  So as it has been said, suck it up.  That’s right suck it up and do your job really well.