Adam Corbally Talks Markets - July 2013

As a market trader I was always a bit bemused when people told me they were in ‘Marketing’.

The power of marketing and branding really came home to me when I was asked to address some business leaders at Tower Hall in London recently, on promotional merchandising. Items like pens, caps, books and sticky notes, all these depend on the power of branding and how it has to be out there available to the public. If you get your brand awareness right then it can work for you 24/7, selling your product or service all over the place even when your stall isn’t open and you aren’t trading. Of course, we all know why branding works, but what makes one brand more powerful than another and how can businesses apply this power to their own products and services? So, I started looking at the successful brands that carry this power to the marketplace and reap the rewards of instant recognition.

Take Facebook – it was no different as a business model than MySpace and Bebo, but it got the brand image just right, it was out there and accessible and it kept evolving and changing as any successful business needs to.

Likewise Twitter, with its bird, which is an icon that says the brand with no words whatsoever and that has given the brand its place in the market head-and-shoulders over the competition.

In the UK we have our own spectacular banding success with Innocent smoothies, founded by three Cambridge University graduates, Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright. If they had come to me 10 years ago saying they had a brilliant business idea that is a fruit juice smoothy I would have said, “That’s a rubbish idea and it’s been done many time before - it will never work!” But the reason Innocent did work was because they got the brand and the marketing just right and they got it into the right places. A friend of mine did some promotional work for them recently in Leicester Square, giving away 5,000-litres of smoothies and money off vouchers. While the UK fruit juice market was worth £4.1Bn in 2010, it is the power of the Innocent brand that sets it apart from the others. Compare that to the competitors at the time when Innocent launched who were also doing smoothies, companies like Schweppes and Tropicana. These were chiefly known for other products; sparkling mixers for Schweppes and orange juice for Tropicana. Innocent comes along and brands itself as THE maker of smoothies. Couple that to the ‘innocent’ approach of juice with zero additives and a product that provides not one, but two of your five-a-day fruit or veg requirements and the product looks attractive for the time-hungry modern professional. Even the packaging is simple and cool, with inclusive messages including ‘pop into Fruit Towers and tell us what you think’ – simple, open and cool for people of all ages. Naturally, one strong brand then gets bought out by another big brand – the daddy of them all, Coca-Cola, the most recognisable brand in the world. If you saw that logo anywhere in the world you would know what it stands for and what it sells. You are just as likely to see that brand name on a T-shirt, a cap, or a football as you are to see it on a bottle or a tin can. How can we, as market traders, apply this to our own businesses? I’ve done this myself with my Union Jack logo, which I use on all stationery, wall planners and calendars and of course vans, which are whizzing round the county every day - and I dare say that when people in my town see my logo, they instantly associate it with quality fruit and veg. I invested a lot of my own time in creating this logo to make sure that it was instantly recognisable and it worked. The name and logo has to be short, snappy and fitting to what products or services you can offer, then get your brand out there through social media and promotional merchandising. The reason why Innocent and Coca-Cola use merchandising is because it works and drives home the message and the brand. So, go on, get branded and get out there!

You can catch up with my own brand at www.Adamcorbally.co.uk Twitter @TheAdamCorbally

www.markettradenews.com

www.facebook.com/markettradenews

www.twitter.com/markettradenews