Branding and Its Role in the Present Market Scenario
The term ‘Brand’ has been bandied about a lot and in turn it has
taken a life of its own. Nowadays any big company such as Coca-Cola,
Apple, Samsung are all known as brands.
So, what is a brand exactly?
A
brand is a symbol that will help differentiate your concept from the
rest of the concepts present in the market that you compete in. At its
core, a brand is a standard set by the best of the best from each market
segment and what the consumer can expect when they initiate a
transaction with such companies.
Another alternative for
the definition of a brand is as given by David Ogilvy, a renowned
advertising executive, wherein he states that a brand is the intangible
sum of its attributes. This definition has been widely accepted by all
professionals in the market because there are a lot of attributes to a
brand that cannot be seen nor touched or heard. One such example would
be the emotion a product evokes when it reaches the hands of a consumer.
The
whole association of an emotion to a brand is not some new discovery,
lots of brands do this to help their consumers evoke their brand when
they feel the emotion outside of contact with their products. Brands do
not directly tell their consumers what it is that they should feel when
they interact with their products but they subliminally feed this
emotion into their consumers via the message and other marketing
activities they take on.
Some examples of emotions being
attached to brands could be a sense of childlike joy and magic for
Disney, feeling of thrill and an adrenaline rush could be associated to
the Red Bull brand, and finally a sense of curiosity for Google.
Another
factor that comes into play for a brand is that the intangible sum is
not the same for every consumer. Each consumer has their own emotions
but they are generally directed towards it by the brand, hence the brand
identity of a company isn’t necessarily a static one as it can take on a
personal meaning depending on the consumer that interacts with it.
Branding and Marketing Campaign Designs
Marketing activities that a company does present a great
opportunity to direct consumers in the direction the company wants them
to move in. This is so because every interaction a consumer has with the
brand will help them reevaluate the perception they have towards that
brand. Hence there are two things to keep in mind when marketing
campaigns are designed for a brand:
1. Consistency
Inconsistent content being put out by a brand will lead to its
audience having a hard time figure out what the message really means.
The goal of any marketing campaign undertaken by the brand should be to
help make it easy for audiences to come up with an impression of the
brand as well as understanding the qualities the brand represents. For
this to happen all messages that are to be put out during the course of
the campaign have to be consistent and in tune with the messaging the
brand wishes to portray.
2. Delivering on Promises
Almost all branding is rooted in meeting consumer expectations.
It is for this reason that marketing campaigns being undertaken by the
brand must portray accurate expectations and not overstate them to the
audience. Doing so would only lead to a negative outcome for the brand’s
image. Another factor to keep in mind when deciding on the messages
should be to not overstate the features of the products being sold by
the brand.
Branding as a concept is here to stay and
companies in the future will do more of such activities to help them
stand out from their competitors. Further inclusion of consumer
interaction will be emphasized upon to build the identity of an
approachable brand for the people, by the people.