UMaine Business Students Offer Public Brand Development Seminar
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — This is a quiz. Think soft drinks.
Did a bright red label with “Coca-Cola” in white script come to mind?
Coca-Cola is just one of thousands of corporations that spend billions creating, protecting and promoting their brands, hoping to ensure that their names and logos will come to mind when consumers decide they want what that the business sells.
Nantucket Nectars, “the juice guys,” are a much smaller company from Massachusetts that proves “you don’t have to have the budget of IBM” to come up with a catchy line to make people remember you, according to marketing students from the University of Maine School of Business.
The UMaine student chapter of the American Marketing Association will host a marketing and branding seminar for the public on April 19.
From a house-painter to a lawyer, a restaurant to a hospital, almost every business that sells a service or product needs a “brand” or image to distinguish it from other businesses and to create a meaningful “promise” to consumers, according to the students and their faculty advisor Harold Daniel, associate professor of marketing.
The students are inviting more than 100 local business and non-profit managers, in addition to all students with an interest in business marketing, to hear four experts speak about success through effective brand development and management.
The forum, titled “Strategic Brand Management — Practical Perspectives,” is from 7-10 p.m. at the Donald P. Corbett Business Building on the Orono campus. It also will provide an opportunity for managers of local businesses and non-profits to meet with business majors to get marketing advice and possibly assistance in promoting their products or services.
“The intent here is to provide a service to the business community and to the students, to provide an educational experience that people will learn from,” Daniel says. “This will be something that they can take back to their businesses or their dorm rooms, and say, ‘Hey, this really applies.'”
The investment of time and the $5 fee for businesses is negligible, considering the value of the information being presented, says Tim Lough, a marketing major from Winthrop and a member of the student marketing organization. The fee for students is $1. Fees offset expenses and will help with future seminars.
“The ideal person to come to this is the person who doesn’t have a marketing background,” says Daniel, noting that a third of Maine’s economy is supported by small businesses and independent sole proprietors, often operating alone or even working from home.
Every business with something to sell needs to manage its brand or reputation to do two basic things: To let people know what is available, and to leave a clear, consistent impression about the quality of the business or the product, according to Daniel and Lough.
Even one-person businesses that live or die by the owners’ reputations engage in branding, whether they realize it or not. Daniel suggests that brand identification, creation and promotion are important to all businesses since they need to be recognized and remembered.
“Branding is the shorthand, I tell my students,” Daniel says. A logo or image that represents a business is like its identification. “It’s a signature,” he says, “that stands for a whole raft of other important information for a person.”
The slate of speakers includes:
Tony McKim (UMaine, 1988), president of First National Bank of Bar Harbor, who will speak about how principles of brand management guide his company’s operations;
Paul Golding, communications director for Day One, a non-profit adolescent substance abuse rehabilitation center in Cape Elizabeth, which achieved significant success through re-evaluating and revising its brand image;
Nathaniel Bowditch, assistant director of the Maine Office of Tourism, who will speak about the importance of branding for the state and the research that has lead to the development of the “It Must Be Maine” advertisements;
And Kim McKeage, UMaine associate professor of marketing, who will discuss retail branding and branding transcendental places, a valuable topic for retailers and other businesses in the tourist industry.
Also participating in the seminar will be Stefa Normantas of Giraffe Marketing and Leigh Fulda (UMaine, 1997) of NAI The Dunham Group, both members of the Portland Marketing Association, a professional chapter of the American Marketing Association.
Students in Daniel’s marketing management classes in the past have undertaken several effective service-learning projects — helping a California technology company with its marketing strategies, doing a study for the creators and distributors of the former Fresh Samantha juice company, which started in Maine, and currently helping the Bangor Symphony Orchestra with marketing and business planning.
Further information about the seminar can be obtained by calling Daniel at (207) 581-1933 or emailing another student organizer, Elizabeth Duran at Elizabeth.duran@umit.maine.edu. The seminar is being held in the large lecture hall, Room 100, in the DP Corbett Business Building, next to the Maine Center for the Arts.