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The Essence of Marketing
Marketing best defined as the science and art of creating and sustaining a mutually beneficial relationship between a brand’s Producer and the end Consumer. As a side note, the Brand can be a product, a service, a person, or an organization, while many times the company owning and marketing the Brand is not the actual…
Marketing, Branding, Brand Management – Definitions Explained
One can find a plethora of definitions of what is Marketing, Branding, Brand Management, or Advertising. Yet many of these are quite confusing and often inaccurate. Most understand marketing as promotional offers, preferably on social media. Some throw in the guerilla element to be cool. The impression one gets is that marketing is about hunting…
WHERE DOES BRAND BUILDING START
Building Your Brand starts with defining WHAT your Brand is. If you yourself can not summarize in few succinct sentences what your brand stands for and what it offers, no one else will. Not your consumers, not your customers, and not your agencies and suppliers. This is the prerequisite for unleashing your brand’s equity. Brand…
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Where does Brand Building start
Building Your Brand starts with defining WHAT your Brand is. If you yourself can not summarize in few sentences what your brand stands for, no one else will. Not your consumers, not your customers, and not your agencies and suppliers. This is the prerequisite for unleashing your brand’s equity.
Brand Equity Demystified
Brand Equity in financial terms means the extra value that can be generated from a recognized brand when compared to a similar product with no name recognition. If you are interested in full text-book type explanation, you can find out more about it here. In laymen’s terms however, consumers are more willing to pay a higher price for a brand that they recognize and trust based on their prior experience. And that represents value. Building your brand pays back in the created brand equity! Simple, straightforward, no rocket science. However, Brand Equity is not easy to create and is rarely developed overnight. It needs a systematic approach and does require quality time and work invested into Strategic Brand Design. Good News, it can be done, and the premium it pays back is there for the long-term – with proper maintenance and care.
Must-have to Build a Strong Brand
The cornerstone of your brand building efforts is a clear and succinct Brand Strategy Statement. This concise summary defines the Brand’s promise to its consumers, spelling out the primary functional and emotional Benefits it delivers. The document also provides a credible Reason to Believe, stating why consumers and customers should trust the promises the brand makes. It also defines the Brand’s personality, outlining what Character it would possess if it would be a real person. And lastly, a complete Brand Strategy Statement describes its Relations, who are the natural allies and friends, and who are the antagonists we would not want the Brand to be associated with.
The crafting of this document needs first and most a critical and honest look at the actual product and its producer. Before chasing consumer needs in the highest demand, one needs to analyze what the technology actually delivers, what is the functional benefit for the user, and what signals does the product provides that make the benefit delivery noticeable and credible. If the Brand is not delivering its promises, the value of its equity turns very fast into negative. It is also crucial to understand the brand’s place in the company’s portfolio, as well as its product performance vs competition.
Yet probably the hardest challenge in crafting the Brand Strategy Statement is to stay focused and choicely. The document should not exceed more than 4-5 succinct paragraphs, each containing 1-2 full, but crisp sentences. If it is longer, one probably did not make enough choices and listed too many Benefits, Reasons, Character traits, or Relations. The result of this, that instead of providing clear guidance, the statement confuses all involved. Creative agencies will not know which benefit to pursue and which to drop in the limited space and time of advertising copy, product development will not have guidance on which technological upgrade to pursue, and commercial departments will have no insights on what promotion can be relevant for their customers.
What’s Next
A well-crafted Brand Strategy will become the cornerstone of all other Brand Design efforts. It will be the starting point for the Visual Identity work, that defines the Brand’s look and feel in advertising, in artwork, on shelves, and finally in the consumer’s hands. It will determine the Brand Architecture vision and will be critical for qualifying the winning Initiative Path to the future. Brand strategic design goes hand in hand with work on Target Audience Definition.