Branding Fundamentals

Concept of Branding

• “If you want to stand out in an insanely crowded marketplace, branding is the only way you are going to do it.”

Tom Peters, Business Writer, ‘The Encyclopedia of Brands and Branding’

• Brand is a need of post-industrialized society. With industrialization and mass production, products made in one part of the world is available to sell in another part. To differentiate between two products ‘brand’ became the means of personalization.
• People identify the makers through brand and put faith in their product.
• World across people put faith in Sony, Honda, Nike, Singapore Airlines etc.
• Brand is a proprietary, visual, emotional, rational and cultural image that we associate with a company or a product.
• Branding is about building positive awareness and recognition.

Brand and their Associated Perception

• Volvo – Safety
• Nike – Michael Jordan or, “Just do it”
• IBM – Big Blue
• Tata – Reliable
• Godrej – Homely, Comfortable

Branding and Marketing

• Branding is believed to be the most sustainable marketing tool.
• Branding is quite different and much more than fancy logos, clever slogans and other such items. Branding is about:
• Adding emotion and trust to the product and services to simplify the customers choice.
• Creating Relationship between brand and customers to ensure customer’s loyalty
• Creating aspirational life style based on this relationship
• Extending the relationship to other products and services
• Charging a premium price for product and services, based on the combination of emotions, relationship, lifestyle and values. E.g:- Apple’s Iphone

Difference Between Marketing and Branding

• Branding is strategic. Marketing is tactical. Branding is pull. Marketing is push. Marketing may contribute to a brand, but the brand is bigger than any particular marketing effort.
• Marketing is actively promoting a product or service. It’s a push tactic. It’s pushing out a message to get sales results.
• Branding is not push, but pull. Branding is the expression of the essential truth or value of an organization, product, or service. It is communication of characteristics, values, and attributes that clarify what this particular brand is and is not.
• A brand will help encourage someone to buy a product, and it directly supports whatever sales or marketing activities are in play, but the brand does not explicitly say “buy me.”Instead, it says “This is what I am. This is why I exist. If you agree, if you like me, you can buy me, support me, and recommend me to your friends.”

Good Product vs Need of Branding

• It is argued that if a good product is developed, it will sell by itself. However brand professional consider it just the beginning of the success story.
• A carefully developed brand strategy has to be in place to enable a company to transform its products and services into powerful brands, creating new brands for its target markets and position the brand strongly in the competitive market place.
• A brand is a company’s most important and enduring economic assets.
• In the era of social media, the power of shaping brands is shifting away from the brand managers and is increasingly affecting the role of brand in simplifying customer search.
• Therefore brands are need to be considered as a dynamically evolving entity.

Journey of a Brand

• Brand is a name, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller\’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.\”
• It takes years of dedicated effort to build and then sustain the brand.
• The journey of a brand from a me-too product to a power brand, is shown below:

Brand Planning

• A brand is everything that helps someone to build a positive or negative image about a company. It conveys the belief and what an organization is stand for.
• It includes logo, tagline, appearance, brochure, website, how an organization treats their employees, suppliers and customers, what they promise and what they deliver and ultimately what people feel and say about it, not what an organization claim about themselves.
• It is important to clearly communicate the value proposition of an organization to the customers.
• Branding begin with an understanding of four key elements:

1.Primary target customers

2.Competitors

3.Product/Service mix

4.Advantages