Brand It

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Copyright (c) 2009 Alan Gillies

A Company Brand is a specific method of conveying to your customers who you are and what you’re about. It is something that is custom designed to help people instantly identify your company at a glance. It might be the logo, tag-line, slogan – or any anything else like these. Brand is just as important for large organisations and small organisations. However, the route taken by these two extremes is not at all similar, mainly owing to the monetary constraints felt by the smaller organisations.

We generally associate brands with large companies, but keep in mind, a carpenter posting up small pieces of paper showing how and where someone can contact him is also a branding method. So, we can obviously see that branding is not a privilege reserved for only large companies, because even organisations functioning at a very small level can easily begin developing a brand. However, you should be cautious about choosing an identity too quickly, and when really considering a prospective logo seriously – test it out, and make it familiar with as many people as possible prior to investing any substantial amount of money into it. Also, hiring a professional to help you with the branding development will more often than not be an intelligent choice. For instance, building a website and blog or participating in various local business events are all very effective options which can greatly help you with your branding process. So, developing a brand is just as much a realisable endeavour for small organisations as it is for their large company counterparts.

Though market penetration is often taken as a synonym for effective branding, it should be understood that the number of people who know a brand by sight is just one aspect to be considered when weighing up whether or not you’ve got a really good company brand.

Associations with the people we regularly deal with as part of our business directly contribute to the building of our brand. We all have in our neighbourhood a family business which has been running since – we can’t even remember, and it hasn’t only survived, but thrived. This is possible because of the long lasting interactions which have been developed in their communities. So, a business such as this example is no less exceptional than a large-scale counterpart in terms of truly successful branding.

To conclude, developing a brand is not about attempting to make each and every person on this earth know your logo at a glance, but perfecting every conceivable business related task, right from the method with which you take an order to the wrapping of a gift. These things may need some changes, specifically in the way in which your organization operates – but once done, your business will take off in leaps and bounds towards a branding success. Small businesses need to break the mould relating to the concept of branding, and make use of every advantage to the fullest. The myth that “building a brand requires lots of money” and the idea that “large scale market penetration is synonymous with branding” are notions which need to be overcome if an up-and-coming branding success is to be achieved.

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Building a brand is more than just fixing a catchy name on a product. Brand is all about relationships—it is how customers feel about your product. That feeling will either incline them to use your product or pass it by for something else. What control does a marketer have over the minds and hearts of buyers? Marketing authority David Jobber has identified seven factors in building a successful brand.

While a seller cannot create the public’s perception of their product, the seller must influence opinion using strategic suggestions. This is called positioning, and to do it properly the seller must first identify the advantages of using the product or service. These benefits must align with the customer’s needs, wants, and desires.

If you are lucky enough to be the first on the market to offer a particular product or service you may have an advantage—initially. If your product is successful you can be sure competition will arrive shortly; however, it is possible for the first successful brand to create a clear position in the minds of customers before the competition enters the market. Whether or not your product is the first of its kind, your first challenge is to establish credibility. Consumers must take your product seriously if they are to develop trust and loyalty to your brand.

Of course, before customers will buy a product, they must know about it. Communications play a critical role in building brand. Initial effort will focus on building brand awareness. As awareness increases, brand personality will be important to develop. Reinforcing position will be an on-going challenge.

This is where the next factor of brand-building comes into play. No amount of hustling can cover for quality. Statistically, higher quality brands always outplay their inferior counterparts in the marketing arena. Part of building a brand is communicating to consumers the benefits of using your brand—and consistently delivering on that promise.

Brand values must be understood and accepted internally as well as externally. This means that brand building involves a certain amount of internal marketing and training, so that any face-to-face contact customers have with the product is consistent and positive.

Even with the best of marketing, brand loyalty takes time to secure. Therefore, a long-term perspective is required when investing in a brand. Initially building up the brand will be an expense. Any business venture is a risk. If there comes a time when a brand has become tired or its market has gone into decline, the business may need to work at repositioning the product to reflect the change in consumers taste. Repositioning is an important, and none too easy factor, in brand building.

These seven factors: positioning, credibility, communications, quality, internal marketing, long-term perspective, and repositioning, are critical to building brand value. A proper marketing plan will address each factor. In addition, the marketing strategy should be evaluated and updated at regular intervals.

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Americans love brand name products. They’ll pay just about anything for Levis jeans, Charmin toilet tissue and Heinz ketchup. Yet, they often snub lower cost generic products deeming them “unfit.” Considered inferior by the masses, generic products seem doomed for the clearance shelf. But why? Are name brand products superior? If not, than have we all been duped into thinking anything less than a labeled product is worthy of our attention?

Businesses initiated the concept of product branding more than a century ago in order to make it easier for consumers to differentiate between high-quality manufacturer products and their lesser known locally made counterparts. In the late 1800’s manufacturers devised a plan to help consumers recognize superior companies, and their product lines, by creating brand names unique to individual manufacturers. Customers could quickly and easily recognize their favorite products simply by the way it was packaged, labeled and advertised. That same branding technique now allows the world’s consumers to more easily recognize high-quality American-made products from less reliable ones on the open market.

The United States has a history of developing and selling that set us apart from other worldwide manufacturers, allowing consumers all across the world to know exactly what they’re getting. Brand name products have historically been linked to quality, which has also allowed them to command higher prices.

Consistency and quality is a benchmark of product brands. Well-known brands tend to exceed the sale of generics simply due to the trust they have garnered among customers. Once a customer connects with a certain brand or company, they are apt to go back again and gain when in need of their product.

Advertising too has a lot to do with the success of product branding. After all, a consumer is more apt to purchase a project they’ve seen on TV, heard a jingle for on the radio, and saw plastered on a highway billboard on the way to work, than a product they know little about, even if it is cheaper.

Branding an image or slogan may work well in traditional retail stores, but what about Internet sales? It seems that the branding of individual products is less important in Internet sales, than the branding of the actual site. Research has shown that online consumers are more interested in finding sites they can trust and that offer what they want and need at cheaper prices than in the actual brands being sold, which would indicate a need for e-commerce sites to spend more time marketing their sites more than their products.

As in the case of most marketing strategies, the goal is to find out what your particular consumer is looking for, and then giving it to them. While high-quality branded product is most important in traditional retail stores, today’s internet customer seeks a high-quality internet site above all else.

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