What is a brand?

What is a brand?

Brand = Personality

A brand is defined as a business or a marketing concept that helps people to identify a company, product, or a person.

Let’s take a look.

Properly managed, the brand does eight things:

The brand represents the organization (has a purpose)

The brand embodies ethics, attitudes, and affiliations (has character)

Brand expressions create an image of the company (has a face)

The image of the brand is acquired meaning in people’s minds (looks matter)

The brand is an active agent

The brand evolves and changes over time (it is alive)

The brand is more emotional than logical (it is human)

The brand lives at the point of contact ( it’s the frontman)

It’s the face, the spirit, and the speaker that carries the character of the organization to the world. It’s a personality. If your brand was a person, who would it be? (Nancy Bernard) Strong brand awareness is a great marketing asset. The general rule of thumb for creating a brand is to keep it simple.

A clever company or product name that nobody knows how to pronounce or that is pronounced differently by different people is a disadvantage. Choose a name that is timeless and easy to recognize and remember. The same basic rules apply to a logo. Keep it simple, easy, and memorable.

It often appears that the logo is the only identifier on Nike products because it is immediately recognizable.

Apple Computer is known around the world with its snazzy name and logo, but only since the early 1980s.

Since the development of product names, logo design and packaging are important elements of your advertising strategy, pull the mindset of professionals into consideration. Not everyone is a designer or can come up with a dynamic style of their own. Let an outside design firm create your logo and packaging while you focus on what you do best.

Branding is the process of identifying a manufacturer’s name with its product by placing the trade name or trademark represented by words or images on the product or its packaging.

Branding has become one of the most important aspects of business strategy. However, it is also one of the most misunderstood. Branding is sometimes viewed as a purely promotional function. And many business executives and writers argue that branding is about product image management, a side quest that can be isolated from the core business of product management. This note presents an alternative perspective and argues that:

• Branding is a strategic view, not a selected set of activities
• Branding is critical to creating customer value, not just image
• Branding is a key tool in creating and maintaining competitive advantage
• Brands are cultures that circulate as conventional stories in society
• Effective branding strategies must address the four distinct components of brand equity
• Branding strategies must be “designed” in the marketing mix.

Marketing strategies start with the value proposition: the different types and amounts of value that the company wants to offer customers through the market offering. The value proposition is the value perceived by the company, the value that the company wants to “build”. in the product.

• In marketing, the value proposition is sometimes referred to as a positioning statement.
• In business, it is often assumed that the product’s value as measured by the company and the product’s value as experienced by the customer are the same. building a better product, customers will experience it as such.

Marketing breaks decisively with this assumption. Marketing emphasizes that customer value is a tangible fact, never an objective one.Value is shaped by customers’ subjective interpretations, which often have little to do with what the company considers to be the “objective” characteristics of the product. The brand is the product.

The verb “to brand” refers to all of the activities that shape customer perceptions, particularly the firm’s activities. Branding, then, is a management perspective that focuses on shaping the perceived value of the product as found in society.

What are the features of a brand?

1) Simple and easy to pronounce

The brand name must be understood and pronounced by all customer groups. The brand name is easy to pronounce for anyone speaking any language. easy to remember and recognize. The short and simple brand name is easily recognizable and remembered for a long time.

3) New and Attractive

The brand name chosen must be new and unique and not have been used by any other company. It must be attractive in order to attract a large number of customers. Such brand names must also be memorable.

4) Legal certainty Before selecting and using a brand name, it should be checked whether another company has already used the selected brand name. .If the selected trademark has already been registered and is being used by another company or company, that trademark cannot be registered with the company registry. It can therefore not be legally secure.

5) It must reflect the nature of the product A good brand name must be able to reflect the nature of the product.

6) Suggestive The brand name must be Suggestive. It must be such that the consumer, upon hearing the product name, can understand its usefulness.

Trademark

Trademark is the name, logo, letter, symbol, short phrase, word, or mark that you use to represent your product and differentiate it from others. Because your brand is one of the most important ways to establish a presence for your product in the minds of consumers, it is essential to branding. Its power is reflected in the fact that it is among the first objects that children recognize, remember, and often claim. – are logos for brands like McDonald’s and Taco Bell.

Register your brand. The trademark is copyrighted like copyright and service mark. Once registered, it is yours and cannot be violated.

Copyright protects only the words an author uses to express facts and ideas. Your company name is a trade name.

Trademarks, service marks, copyrights, and trade names are protected by law. While registration is important, the use of the trademark or trade name in the United States is just as important or more important. In other countries, sometimes only registration protects your trademark. Check with the authorities in each country where you wish to do business.

Brand Strategy

Brand strategy is an important part of the overall marketing strategy.Brand strategies meet business objectives by enhancing brand culture.Because brands, business contexts, and business goals are so diverse, there are no single rules for designing branding strategies. The systematic four-step process can be used to tailor strategies to appropriately respond to context specifics:

Step 1: Identify goals that the brand can address

Brand strategies are appropriate when the business goal is met through improvement can product value. Identify the main business goals of the product and ask the question: Is this goal customizable?

Although branding is often a key part of an effective marketing strategy, there are a number of business issues where branding is not particularly relevant. When a product is stuck in a weak position in a value chain, there is little the brand can do to fix the problem.

Since branding requires changing common conventions, it is inevitably a long-term project. And that’s why branding is often not a good tool for achieving short-term sales goals. Conversely, it is also important to ask whether non-branded strategies (eg. lower service costs, price discrimination through promotions) have unintended impacts on the brand.

Step 2: Map existing brand culture

Assess existing brand culture across the four components of brand equity (and also for influencers, if applicable). This assessment requires designing and compiling online market research with the four different components of brand culture.

Additionally, consider the company’s current brand strategy and identify where it deviates from the brand culture.

Step 3: Analyze the competition and environment to identify brand opportunities

Given the strengths of the brand and company, identify opportunities to improve brand culture relative to that of key competitors and identify opportunities to shore up any erosion that might allow competitors to move forward. However, there is a risk of branding solely with competitors in mind.

The most significant advances in brand equity come from identifying opportunities in the environment (consumers, technology, infrastructure, etc.) that competitors don’t have.

For example, new product technologies can offer significant opportunities to improve reputation, new information and process technologies (eg. Internet, customer relationship management) can improve relationships.

Value, changing customer preferences can create opportunities for different frames of experience, and shifts in society and culture create opportunities to offer new symbolism. It’s also important to account for changes in the category lifecycle.

The relative importance of the four components often changes over time.For a new category where consumers have little experience with the products and the technology is unproven, the values ​​of quality and relationship will be the primary concern. As the category matures and competitors are able to deliver core product values, experiential structures and imagery often become much more important.

Step 4: Design a strategy

A brand strategy describes the movement from the existing brand culture to the desired one and the logic for going down this path. Promising ways to improve brand culture considering both environmental changes and competitive benchmarks and finally the desired brand culture.

Ultimately, a strategy is only as good as the care and creativity with which it is implemented. This applies in particular to brand strategies, the implementation of which requires consistent “engineering” of the desired brand culture in all relevant aspects of the marketing mix.

A branding strategy requires an action plan that establishes what elements of the marketing mix will be used, how they will be used, and how they will be integrated to achieve a cohesive brand effort.

Branding is not limited to communication. On the contrary, all elements of the marketing mix contribute to the brand (and also destroy brand equity if not managed properly). And, of course, every element of the marketing mix must also serve a purpose other than branding (e.g. meeting sales targets for the next quarter). Therefore, managers must always balance brand goals with other goals.

Type of Brands

1) Manufacturer’s brand

A manufacturer’s brand is a brand that belongs to a manufacturer and/or is registered as a brand under the manufacturer’s name. For example, Colgate is owned by Palmolive India Ltd.

2) Private Label

A brand owned by a retailer is known as a private or private label. It is private because the maker is not identified. It is simply manufactured and marked by the manufacturer according to the specifications of the retailer.

3) Individual Branding

When each item or product in a product line has its own brand name, it is said to be an individual brand.

4) Family brand

If all products manufactured by a company are sold under a single brand, it is called a family brand. For example, Tata Group, Bajaj, etc.

5) National trademark

If the same trademark is used nationwide to market the products, it is a national trademark. Parle Products Pvt.Ltd. ; Cadbury’s India Ltd etc.

6) Regional Trademark

If a trademark is used and the product is advertised in a specific geographical area then it is a regional trademark.