It’s easy for you to start talking about the products or services your company offers, but how do you talk about your company itself? It’s not enough to promote one of your own brands, companies must brand themselves as employers.

Brett Minchington, Chairman/CEO of Employer Brand International, defines your employer brand as “the image of your organization as a ‘great place to work’ in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passive candidates, clients, customers and other key stakeholders). The art and science of employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement and retention of initiatives targeted at enhancing your company’s employer brand.”

Companies brand themselves as employers to convey to the world why their workplace is appealing in hopes of attracting good workers, which is especially important during the economic slowdown. As companies cut costs, getting the best people in the right jobs is even more crucial. Additionally, as companies expand into foreign markets competition for skilled workers increases.

While there are many ways to approach employer branding, one of the most important things is knowing who you are. Create a brand based on your company’s mission and objectives. The book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies demonstrates that companies with consistent, distinctive and deeply held values tend to outperform those companies with a less clear and articulated ethos. Product lines, profit strategies, cultural tactics, and organization structure can change – but a core ideology should not.

Your employer brand is who you are, and how others—both employees and potential candidates — view your company. Communicating your organization’s mission and values will attract and engage the like-minded talent who will directly affect your bottom line.

When was the last time you said: “I’m going to go use a search engine to look up information on tonight’s event.” The answer to that is either never, or sometime circa the early 2000′s, but since then it’s more than likely that most Americans say “I’m going to go Google more information on tonight’s event.” And that is my friend is brandverbing.

Companies like Xerox, Hoover, and even Google have gone to great lengths to avoid their brands becoming verbs, but why? When a brand becomes a verb you know that it has reached mass market consumer recognition, so wouldn’t becoming so engrained in society that your brand becomes part of the language be the ultimate degree of success for a brand?

So while others have fought hard to keep their brand from becoming a verb others are spending a lot of time and resources to make sure their brand is used as verbs by consumers in everyday life and conversation. Enter: Vanguard; an investment company who in 2010 began a highly visible campaign to turn their brand name into a verb.

The move by Vanguard shows that they too recognize the significance and potential payoff for their brand to be used in everyday language just like Xerox or Google has now experienced. And unlike a brand becoming genericized like asprin, zipper, and escalator (yup, these were all trademarked brand names at one point) a brand that becomes a verb is more appealing than its generic counterpart and has less risk in losing its brand appeal. Seth Godin, American author and speaker, said: “people care much more about verbs than nouns. They care about things that move, that are happening, that change. They care about experiences and events and the way things make us feel. Nouns just sit there, inanimate lumps. Verbs are about wants and desires and wishes.”

So if what Godin says is true, every brand should strive to be a brandverb when appropriate. After all a brand is more than a product or logo, a brand is about an experience and the expectations we have of that brand. So if becoming a brandverb will incite those feelings then what’s the big deal? These days I believe becoming a brandverb is not a kiss of death but the mark of success.

Social media is a great way to help promote a brand because of convenience and connection. Social networks are unlike other marketing platforms because they offer brands an easy access to target audiences, and the ability to maintain online relationships. An online brand profile allows a company to introduce its brand identity, and make the brand more present in consumers’ everyday lives.

The biggest platforms that will help bring the most traffic to a brand are Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Facebook offers a limitless amount of space to promote a brand, with room for wall conversations, updates, photos, video, pictures, interests, and more. Though Twitter and Linkedin are a bit more limiting in what you can share with your audience, they are equally as powerful as Facebook for engaging interaction and forming an online identity.

Consistent updates on Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin will help flesh out your brand’s profile. Followers can learn about news updates, comment on posts, and offer other insights that may help your brand be the best it can be. The unique quality about social networks is that they build a community and thus a loyalty around your brand, which is valuable for staying relevant and attractive in any industry.

One of the most valuable things social media has to offer a brand is the ability to associate with other brand names online. Partnerships can increase visibility to a wider audience, and leverage a brand into new markets. Alternatively, if a brand targets a specific market or a certain audience, there are niche social media sites to explore. For example, if your brand is a diaper company, it would be advantageous to follow or even start a mommy blog, to get feedback on what mom’s think about your products.

In the past, brands have just been names and logos, but now they trigger online conversations, bringing more life and interaction to a brand’s identity. Not only can you see what consumers say about your brand, but also what they say about competitors. Following a competitor’s profile page can help a brand to monitor the direction of its competitor, and stay up-to-date in the market.

In a brand-centric world, social media can really help a brand distinguish itself and maintain a fresh image. The social media-scape is still new, allowing room to innovate the ways in which it’s being used. We should be seeing some interesting social media initiatives from brands in the near future!

Contributed by: Emily Hassell

As “the hot dog wars” battle on between Sara Lee Corporation and Kraft Food Inc. in a Chicago courtroom over misleading package designs, I think it’s time to take a deeper look into packaging and why it is important enough for these two companies to battle it out in court.

While a brand must employ a successful strategy throughout many different touch points including advertising, identity, and web presence, it is packaging that could most directly have an impact on a brand’s sale. No longer is a product’s package merely a means of protection during transport from point A to point B, but an increasingly important factor in product’s success. A well-marked package will get a customer to pick up a product and take a closer look, which ultimately puts you one step closer to making that sale. This is why it is so important to have an interesting and compelling package design.

Kristin Everidge, Manager of Visual Branding at Addison Whitney, says “People are drawn to products with interesting packages because it suggests that what’s inside is equally appealing or different.” Package design can enhance a brand through unique structures, sustainable materials, cross promoting other products and building brand awareness through shelf displays and planograms that wow consumers during their weekly shopping trips.

Packaging is a vehicle that reflects the product’s brand and image. To ignore the importance of packaging in today’s market is your own product’s death. Package design should be a continuous investment to evolve with the ever changing world that is packaging.

But what makes a great design? I asked Kristin and these are her top five elements of a great package design (in no particular order):

1. Shelf Presence/ability to grab attention quickly
2. Effective informational hierarchy
3. Inspiring materials and structure
4. Functionality
5. Clean & crisp design (images, typography, and functional information)

So do you think you’re immune to the power of package design? I think the real answer would surprise you, next time you’re shopping the aisles of your local Target, take note of the products you grab and how compelling their designs are compared to the products you left behind…