Thanks a lot, gjosephus! I will certqainly give you a kudos for that reply. That's exactly what I was looking for: a succint definition, with some examples, sort of a road map to follow. I'm going to have to read more about branding. For our firm - Gnosis Arts Multimedia Communications -our brand ideation centers around the notions of 'knowledge and freedom'. We have a tag line, 'Once you know, then you're free!' We have a logo. That's all for now. I'm going to really think hard about differentiation, and how you describe and display that differentiation in words and images.

Thanks Eric. i actually had fun answering that question. Thanks for the Kudos.

Like any small business you may be under a financial crunch and don't have big dollars on a PR or large marketing program. I think you are closer than you think. I would use the Internet to do your branding. I would look at your company and think about its strengths. For example does your product offer something that other similar products don't offer? Does your product have a fine price point (although its never recommended to drop your pants on the release of a new product). Look at your competition and figure out what they are lacking or doing wrong. This is where the branding takes place. Begin marketing to their weaknesses and your strengths. Make their weaknesses your strengths. You must understand though its hard to rebrand a product and company so when you do it make sure you are 100% committed to the branding process. There is much more to it obviously but as a general overview do what your competition is doing better. Market that! Good luck ------- LawLeaf - A lawsuit funding company

Thanks for that detailed response, Lawleaf. One of those 'ideas' is brewing. I had a thought on this this morning: offer current and previous clients (for a fee) access to our Intranet. Our Intranet is a somewhat disorganized 'storage closet'of very valuabe information on business operations, product offerings, service methodology, data nd research, etc. Obviously, this might be harmful to us to give out. But the idea is to associate our core brand ideation with this 'privileged' access to our Intranet for our 'Gold' members, if you will. Our brand ideation: Once you know, then you're free. Giving greater knowledge and freedom to businesses through our services. To promote that brand: Valued clients get privileged access to our Intranet; they will see info, data, resources, that NO ONE else but our staff sees. Is this a good idea, bad idea or what? Again it was one of those entrepreneurial, wake you up at 5AM, not hardly thought out yet, ideas :)

And... It conveys differentiation because, I haven't yet seen any company give non-employees access to it's Intranet, in order to try to give clients knowlegde for self-empowerment of their business. That seems to me to be a novel enough idea to truly differentiate a product or service offering.

Are you sure about security issues? I dont know if giving access to my Intranet to anybody is a good idea...

Yes, I know. I've thought about that. But we really don't put anything inside our Intranet that is of a secure nature. But you're right, I am having second thoughts about it. I have stopped running the branding ad campaign until we as a staff had agreed on it. Thanks, traged

Branding is very important. Me and my husband has spent plenty of hours doing the SEO on our online store. I write articles,free press releashes,facebook,etc. just to get our business noticed. We can see all this work pays off. I know from years of experience that no new business gets to the top over night. You have to give the business everything you have, and then once it is off and running good then it won't be as intense.

I had also read that article by Aaron and found it interesting. This is one of the most insightful articles about online branding that I've come across, as it provides details on the options like social media and advertising to give you an idea where to start. This post was edited to remove a commercial link. Read more about discussion best practices on Business.gov.

As starter of this thread, I am now returning some months later to post some results and anecdotal evidence about our branding efforts. As I mentioned in the thread, we have been trying a new idea for branding: the Gnosis Arts Community Intranet. The Intranet is where we house many of our effective, valuable Internet marketing strategies, tactics, tips and techniques. It talks about our Wikipedia writing process, PPC campaign management, has a (small but growing) code library, a few PhotoShop tutorials for non-designers. In short, there's a ton of really good information that a person would probably have to spend weels or even months scouring the Web to find. Our brand strategy was to open this Intranet up to our valued customers. Customers who purchased certain services would be granted VIP access to our Intranet (you need a username and password to access the Intranet). Our reasoning was that, no other companies were doing this; no others were being so open with their most effective 'trade secrets', if you will. As a result, this would help to create differentiation and uniqueness - two essential branding concepts. My first attempt was to run display/banner ads for this Intranet service. This proved to be unsuccessful. After a few additional attempts to market this brand, I sort of put it on the back burner to focus on other operational items. I had sort of resigned myself to the belief that the 'Community Intranet' idea was really going nowhere. But recently, we've acquired two excellent accounts that have resurrected the Intranet-as-branding idea. The clients - both patrons of our Wikipedia writing services - wanted 'Wikipedia tutoring', so to speak. That is, they wanted us to teach them how to write Wikiscript, all the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia publishing, etc. So, I told them that, as 'VIP' clients of Gnosis Arts Multimedia, they had already been granted privileged access to our Intranet, where we discuss such matters in depth. I gave them both the username and password to the Intranet and assured them that it would cover the majority of questions they had and information they really wanted. One of our clients - the CMarie Marketing Group - was so impressed by this that she wrote us the following review: 'Not only 'the only', but also 'the best' Connie, CMarie Marketing Group (guest) 24 May 2010, 16:47 -0-400 You are not only probably the only service of this kind, but also the best. You know exactly how to write, submit, and get posted on Wikipedia. I have a list of more client projects ready to send to you.' And for the other client, offering the Intranet as a 'free' add-on helped our sales team make the sale. And, according to our internal analysis, we have seen a slight, but noticeable, increase in the weekly average of mentions of our brand(s) across the Web. Now, this is not solely due to the Intranet, but now I am no longer seeing the idea as a failure, and as more of a success.