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BRAND BUILDING
• Brand Name, term, sign, symbol, design, or some combination that identifies the products of one firm while differentiating them from the competition’s.
• • Brands have a powerful influence on consumer behavior
• • Measured in three stages:
• Brand recognition Consumer awareness and identification of a brand.
• Brand preference Consumer reliance on previous experiences with a product to choose that product again.
-Brand insistence Consumer refusal of alternatives and extensive search for desired merchandise.
• Brands classified in a number of ways.
• Generic products Products characterized by plain labels, no advertising, and the absence of brand names.
-Manufacturer’s brand Brand name owned by a manufacturer or other producer.
• Examples: Sony, Pepsi, Dell.
• Private brands—brands offered by wholesalers and retailers.
• Account for one of every five items sold in the country
• Captive Brands
• • National brands sold exclusively by a retail chain.
• Example: Target’s sale of products by Michael Graves.
• Family and Individual Brands
Family brand Single brand name that identifies several related products.
Process of branding
It’s no secret that in order for a business to be a successful venture, it has to develop a brand that its potential target market becomes familiar with. Once this is done, it becomes easier for the business to grow and develop successful customer relationships while converting website traffic. Although many people think that building a brand is complicated, there are a few simple steps to follow in order to build a successful brand
• Decide what will be Branded and Research Your Target Market-Before engaging in the brand development process, it is important to do some research and decide what you would like to brand. Generally, you have a choice between branding a person, a company, a service or even a particular product. Once a decision has been made regarding what will be branded, it then becomes crucial to ensure that enough time is spent on researching your target market. Once this has been done, it is then essential to learn as much as possible about the product, service or individual that you intend marketing.
• 2. Compile Your Brand Definition and Position Your Offering-After researching your target market, it is then essential to take time to develop a brand definition that clearly explains what is being offered, and how the product or service you have to offer is different from what is already out there. It should also inform your target market how they will benefit from using it and what guarantee you offer to those who choose to use your service or product. From here, the next step is to win a place in the market for what you have to offer. This can be done by giving them solutions to problems or needs that previously could not be solved or met.
• 3. Develop a Name, Tagline and Logo-These three aspects are all extremely important in the brand development process as they help to ensure that your business or service offering stands out clearly among others who may have the same offerings. By designing a logo and compiling a memorable tagline, you can be sure that customers will be able to remember not only your business name, but also what you are able to do for them. Once this has been done, it is time to launch your brand and market the ways in which you can assist your target market in ways that no one else can.
• 4. Protect and Manage Your Brand-By offering consistent customer service and products, you will be able to manage your brand very well. Once the market is aware of the high quality goods or services that you have to offer, you will be well on your way to effectively mastering the brand development process. It is also important to ensure that any negative publicity is dealt with as professionally as possible in order to maintain the reputation of your brand.
Process of Branding
• Determine what you’re branding.
• Decide whether your brand will be your one-and-only or one of several brands in your organization.
• Research.
• Investigate everything there is to know about your product and the market in which it will compete.
• Position your brand.
• Define what makes your brand unique and how it will slot into an available space in the market and in your customers’ minds.
• Define your brand.
• State what your brand stands for, what unique benefit it provides, what it promises to consumers and associates, and the image that will permeate everything from your marketing communications to your product design, business character, and consumer experience.
• Develop your brand identity.
• Include all possible elements in your brand — brand name, logo, tagline, and other brand signature elements.
• Launch your brand internally first.
• Introduce your brand in-house before announcing it via publicity, advertising, promotions, and presentations.
• Manage your brand.
• Develop brand champions, deliver a consistent brand experience, understand your brand’s value, leverage your brand’s reputation — with caution, and protect your brand through usage rules and legal rights.
• Monitor, evaluate, and update your brand.
• Keep your brand relevant and credible in light of changes to your business.
Nine Branding Principles
• 1. Keep It Simple: one big idea is best.
• 2. Mass-produced word of mouth (PR) builds brands.
• 3. Focused brands are more powerful than diffused brands.
• 4. Somehow, some way, you have to be different.
• 5. The first brand in a category has a huge advantage.
• 6. Avoid sub-brands at all cost.
• 7. Quality is important, but not as important as the perception of quality.
• 8. Be consistent and patient. Building a strong brand takes time.
• 9. Put your brand definition in writing, otherwise you'll get off course.
• By following these steps, it is possible to develop a winning brand. Once you have achieved this, it may become necessary to adjust your branding approach on occasions to ensure that your company identity it is kept up to date.
Advantages of branding:
• Brand provides distinct benefits, promise, and delivers high level assurance to customer. Powerful brand has high brand equity, one of its measures extend to which customer willing to pay more for the brand. For example, if we compare specification between Dell Inspiron 15R and Apple MacBook Pro, both have have same specification, however, Dell Inspiron is more value for money but pricewise, Dell laptop cost¶s between $ 429-$450
• and Apple MacBook $880-1100,(Laptop computer, 2010) that huge price difference, that difference is called premium, which Brand enjoys by providing psychological satisfaction to the customer. A brand shows choice and social class of person and its value orientation. So the customer has to make choice between different brand on laptop, he chooses Apple MacBook for speed, design, reliability, durability , class and experience, although speed he can get in Dell but Apple MacBook has its own class and customer experience with a sense of durability and reliability.
• Customer choose BMW car can be speed, safety, reliability, and driving pleasure, the customer finds above mentioned values in BMW which helps customer to choose from other brands. Brand helps customer in decision making by building trust and assurance of standards. A brand helps companies in building strong customer base like e.g. Quaker Oats, McDonalds, Harley Davidson and Kelloggs. Customers are ready to accept line extensions like Apple and Microsoft. A brand provide customer and employees who works for them a feeling of pride, if someone is working with Infosys and Microsoft, company brand name motivates employees that they are working with some branded institution. Technology never remains same, its keep on changing, same like brands which keep on innovating to become successful. Consistently reinventing and remain on its promise is the quality of brand which customer appreciate. Loyal set of customer base helps brand to enjoy monopolistic advantage over a period of time. Customer enjoys quality of products and services because brands create healthy competitions among competitors which indirectly benefits consumers. For example, Gillette, Coca-cola,Brooke Bond Tea, Colgate toothpaste and other are leaders in their product categories, due to continuous innovation (Keller, Strategic Brand management, 2008).
Ten most innovative brands listed below.
• 1Apple
• 2 Google
• 3 Toyota Motor
• 4 General Electric
• 5 Microsoft
• 6 Tata Group
• 7.Nitendo
• 8. Proctor and Gamble
• 9. Sony
• 10.Nokia
• Source: (The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies,2010)
Advantages of branding:
• Branding helps in product identification which is a critical advantage of branding, and it helps marketers to differentiate product from competitors. According to Kotler and Keller, Strong brands help marketers in many ways, listed below: Source: (Kotler & Keller, Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, 2006)-
• Improved Perceptions of Product performance-
• Greater Loyalty -
• Less Vulnerability to Competitive Marketing Actions-
• Less Vulnerability to Marketing Crises-
• Larger Margins
• More Inelastic Consumer Response to Price Increases-
• More Elastic Consumer Response to Price Decreases-
• Greater Trade Cooperation and Support -
• Increased Marketing Communications Ef
• Possible Licensing Opportunities-
• Additional Brand Extension Opportunities
• Improved Perceptions of Product performance-
• Greater Loyalty
• Less Vulnerability to Competitive Marketing Actions
• Less Vulnerability to Marketing Crises
• Larger Margins
• More Inelastic Consumer Response to Price Increases
• More Elastic Consumer Response to Price Decreases
• Greater Trade Cooperation and Support
• Increased Marketing Communications Effectiveness
• Possible Licensing Opportunities
• Additional Brand Extension Opportunities
Disadvantages of Branding:
• Brands are very important for consumers as well as marketers but, nowadays, brand management is becoming more and more difficult for both. Consumer need to pay high prices as premium for brands, as well as for marketers, they need do lots of investment on advertising, Research and development etc in order to position their brand in current competitive world. Brand building and managing is very costly process and consumer has to bear the cost with companies of no surety of successful positioning of brand in market. Consumers trust brand blindly that why sometimes manufacture comprise with the quality to increase profits. Customer expectations are always high for brands and they expect the same positive response from company side. If customers get negative response from the companies brand dilution occurs where customers starts losing their interest in brand. None of the company affords brand dilution that why concept of internal branding with employees occurs in order to make them understand the values of brand and promises which brand makes with customers.
• Living in a global world, nowadays key business will India, China, Brazil and Russia. In order to make brand, as Global brand, marketers need to remove the concentration of west and focus on world as a global village (Aaker, 2010). Making global is not easy, it requires large investment both on advertising and promotions which indirectly going to increase the product price. Investment on Brand promotion is consider social waste which increase cost of production and making brand price higher. For example, Nike, Adidas and Puma, these brands are expensive than Slazenger, Umbro and Converse. All these brands make sporting cloths for youth and Nike, Adidas and Puma make huge investment on advertisement and other promotional activities but Slazenger, Umbro and Converse does not invest much on promotional activities that why they are cheap and in reach of everyone.
Corporate Branding vs. Product Branding
• Corporate branding involves marketing various products or services under the name of a company. Product branding, on the other hand, is a marketing strategy wherein a business promotes and markets an individual product without the company name being front and centre in the advertising campaigns or even on the product labelling. Management strategies for choosing which avenue to pursue or a combination of the two in branding vary by business and each approach produces results.
What is the common between brands D’Cold, Moov or itch guard. They come from the same
company, Paras Pharma ltd. Consider another brand Mr. Muscle, it comes from company called
SC Johnson. Most of the people are aware of the brands but very few people know the name of
the company which these brands come from. This is what separates product branding from
corporate branding.
Product branding strategy
• In product branding strategy, the product works as a promise to the customers, who will achieve special qualities by using the product than when using a similar kind of branded or non-branded product. Through its product/s, the company normally sends a message to its customer that by using its product/s one can not only attain satisfaction in terms of quality, but also achieve a higher social class. So to say, the product could be used to communicate and relate to a particular segment of society. The product stands distinct from the company and the consumer relates to the product rather than the company. Any incident that tarnishes the company’s image does not affect the product’s image. For example company’s CEO may get accused of assault or bad behavior on fellow co-workers. This may lead to dramatic drop in company’s image but will not affect the product sales as people do not associate the company with the product.
• A well-known example of a major U.S. company that utilizes product branding is Procter & Gamble with corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. They make beauty, personal care and household products, and many of the company's popular brands each have a dedicated website. Each product carries individualized symbols or logos and some have advertising slogans associated with the product alone, not mentioning the corporation or the P&G brand except in labeling.
Corporate branding
Corporate branding on the other hand uses company’s name as a product brand name. It tries to create product brand recognition by leveraging corporate brand equity .
LIC is a typical example of corporate branding, where each of its products are marketed under LIC brand, for example LIC’s Komal Jeevan, etc.
Asian Paints which used to follow product branding earlier with its products like tractor emulsion, ace, have recent brands like Asian Paints Royale, Asian Paints Utsaav having advertisements leveraging brand Asian Paints rather than individual products.
• The flip side of corporate branding is that if the quality of one product in the brand
• family is compromised, it could reduce sales of all the others. Corporate branding can take advantages of economies of scope by using one advertisement for several products.
• In case of new product launched by company, it can lead to faster acceptance by the target audience as the people are already familiar with the family name. A corporate branding strategy is generally useful when the company is already established brand in the market and people trust that brand. One of the trusted brands in Indian Market is Tatas which have multiple brands in multiple sectors leveraging the brand Tata.
• Often established companies, especially in Technology segment, launch products of either little or no innovation, without meaningful features in the consumers’ eyes. Consumers will associate the ‘lesser’ products with the company brand and hence they will be more receptive to the marketing message.
Drawback of corporate branding
• Drawback of corporate branding strategy is product may not be treated individually which may reduce focus on product’s unique characteristics. Also people may start relating company’s name with the product category. The biggest example of this is Xerox. People still refer photocopying as Xerox oblivious of the fact that Xerox is the company’s name.
• Amul is a unique case where product and brand are the same. P&G, HUL and Nestle, all of them use product based marketing. HUL and P&G are known for launching regional centric brands without any noticeable connection with its brand in other countries. They have following this mantra for more than fifty years. On the other hand, companies like Sony, Apple leverage their long established trust while communicating about their brands under one family.
• Whether its product branding or corporate branding, its quality of product of that ultimately defines success of the product. Product branding or corporate branding are just strategies which strengthen the product positioning .
7 Building Blocks of a Successful Brand
In Prima lBranding, Patrick Hanlon studies the worlds most successful brands and has come up with 7 elements which form the primal code of a successful brand. Hanlon’s seven elements are,
• The Creation Story – People love to hear about how something got started. New beginnings are exciting times and for a company or product telling the creation story is very important. If you listen to any interview of a company, one of the first things the questioner will ask about is how they got started.
• The Creed – The creed is the mission statement of the company. Who are you? And, what do you stand for? What is your mission?
• The Icons – Logos, symbols, and short sayings form the icons of a brand. These are concise descriptions of who you are? For McDonald’s it is the golden arches. For Nike it is the Swoosh.
• The Rituals – Rituals are the experiences you want to create when people interact with your company and your product.
• The Pagans – Pagans are you opposites – who you are not. It is important to not just define who you are, but defining who you are not is a very powerful branding message.
• The Sacred Words – Sacred words are the words you use over and over again to define yourself or your products. For Apple one of its sacred words is actually just the letter i – iMac, iPod, iPhone. For Starbucks you have tall, grande, and venti sized coffees.
• The Leader – Successful brands also have a leader or visionary who defines the company or products. These are people like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Rachel Ray. For my site, that would be me.
• When you take all seven of these together you get the primal code of a brand. The DNA of what the company or product is at its core.
• Brand Name, term, sign, symbol, design, or some combination that identifies the products of one firm while differentiating them from the competition’s.
• • Brands have a powerful influence on consumer behavior
• • Measured in three stages:
• Brand recognition Consumer awareness and identification of a brand.
• Brand preference Consumer reliance on previous experiences with a product to choose that product again.
-Brand insistence Consumer refusal of alternatives and extensive search for desired merchandise.
• Brands classified in a number of ways.
• Generic products Products characterized by plain labels, no advertising, and the absence of brand names.
-Manufacturer’s brand Brand name owned by a manufacturer or other producer.
• Examples: Sony, Pepsi, Dell.
• Private brands—brands offered by wholesalers and retailers.
• Account for one of every five items sold in the country
• Captive Brands
• • National brands sold exclusively by a retail chain.
• Example: Target’s sale of products by Michael Graves.
• Family and Individual Brands
Family brand Single brand name that identifies several related products.
Process of branding
It’s no secret that in order for a business to be a successful venture, it has to develop a brand that its potential target market becomes familiar with. Once this is done, it becomes easier for the business to grow and develop successful customer relationships while converting website traffic. Although many people think that building a brand is complicated, there are a few simple steps to follow in order to build a successful brand
• Decide what will be Branded and Research Your Target Market-Before engaging in the brand development process, it is important to do some research and decide what you would like to brand. Generally, you have a choice between branding a person, a company, a service or even a particular product. Once a decision has been made regarding what will be branded, it then becomes crucial to ensure that enough time is spent on researching your target market. Once this has been done, it is then essential to learn as much as possible about the product, service or individual that you intend marketing.
• 2. Compile Your Brand Definition and Position Your Offering-After researching your target market, it is then essential to take time to develop a brand definition that clearly explains what is being offered, and how the product or service you have to offer is different from what is already out there. It should also inform your target market how they will benefit from using it and what guarantee you offer to those who choose to use your service or product. From here, the next step is to win a place in the market for what you have to offer. This can be done by giving them solutions to problems or needs that previously could not be solved or met.
• 3. Develop a Name, Tagline and Logo-These three aspects are all extremely important in the brand development process as they help to ensure that your business or service offering stands out clearly among others who may have the same offerings. By designing a logo and compiling a memorable tagline, you can be sure that customers will be able to remember not only your business name, but also what you are able to do for them. Once this has been done, it is time to launch your brand and market the ways in which you can assist your target market in ways that no one else can.
• 4. Protect and Manage Your Brand-By offering consistent customer service and products, you will be able to manage your brand very well. Once the market is aware of the high quality goods or services that you have to offer, you will be well on your way to effectively mastering the brand development process. It is also important to ensure that any negative publicity is dealt with as professionally as possible in order to maintain the reputation of your brand.
Process of Branding
• Determine what you’re branding.
• Decide whether your brand will be your one-and-only or one of several brands in your organization.
• Research.
• Investigate everything there is to know about your product and the market in which it will compete.
• Position your brand.
• Define what makes your brand unique and how it will slot into an available space in the market and in your customers’ minds.
• Define your brand.
• State what your brand stands for, what unique benefit it provides, what it promises to consumers and associates, and the image that will permeate everything from your marketing communications to your product design, business character, and consumer experience.
• Develop your brand identity.
• Include all possible elements in your brand — brand name, logo, tagline, and other brand signature elements.
• Launch your brand internally first.
• Introduce your brand in-house before announcing it via publicity, advertising, promotions, and presentations.
• Manage your brand.
• Develop brand champions, deliver a consistent brand experience, understand your brand’s value, leverage your brand’s reputation — with caution, and protect your brand through usage rules and legal rights.
• Monitor, evaluate, and update your brand.
• Keep your brand relevant and credible in light of changes to your business.
Nine Branding Principles
• 1. Keep It Simple: one big idea is best.
• 2. Mass-produced word of mouth (PR) builds brands.
• 3. Focused brands are more powerful than diffused brands.
• 4. Somehow, some way, you have to be different.
• 5. The first brand in a category has a huge advantage.
• 6. Avoid sub-brands at all cost.
• 7. Quality is important, but not as important as the perception of quality.
• 8. Be consistent and patient. Building a strong brand takes time.
• 9. Put your brand definition in writing, otherwise you'll get off course.
• By following these steps, it is possible to develop a winning brand. Once you have achieved this, it may become necessary to adjust your branding approach on occasions to ensure that your company identity it is kept up to date.
Advantages of branding:
• Brand provides distinct benefits, promise, and delivers high level assurance to customer. Powerful brand has high brand equity, one of its measures extend to which customer willing to pay more for the brand. For example, if we compare specification between Dell Inspiron 15R and Apple MacBook Pro, both have have same specification, however, Dell Inspiron is more value for money but pricewise, Dell laptop cost¶s between $ 429-$450
• and Apple MacBook $880-1100,(Laptop computer, 2010) that huge price difference, that difference is called premium, which Brand enjoys by providing psychological satisfaction to the customer. A brand shows choice and social class of person and its value orientation. So the customer has to make choice between different brand on laptop, he chooses Apple MacBook for speed, design, reliability, durability , class and experience, although speed he can get in Dell but Apple MacBook has its own class and customer experience with a sense of durability and reliability.
• Customer choose BMW car can be speed, safety, reliability, and driving pleasure, the customer finds above mentioned values in BMW which helps customer to choose from other brands. Brand helps customer in decision making by building trust and assurance of standards. A brand helps companies in building strong customer base like e.g. Quaker Oats, McDonalds, Harley Davidson and Kelloggs. Customers are ready to accept line extensions like Apple and Microsoft. A brand provide customer and employees who works for them a feeling of pride, if someone is working with Infosys and Microsoft, company brand name motivates employees that they are working with some branded institution. Technology never remains same, its keep on changing, same like brands which keep on innovating to become successful. Consistently reinventing and remain on its promise is the quality of brand which customer appreciate. Loyal set of customer base helps brand to enjoy monopolistic advantage over a period of time. Customer enjoys quality of products and services because brands create healthy competitions among competitors which indirectly benefits consumers. For example, Gillette, Coca-cola,Brooke Bond Tea, Colgate toothpaste and other are leaders in their product categories, due to continuous innovation (Keller, Strategic Brand management, 2008).
Ten most innovative brands listed below.
• 1Apple
• 2 Google
• 3 Toyota Motor
• 4 General Electric
• 5 Microsoft
• 6 Tata Group
• 7.Nitendo
• 8. Proctor and Gamble
• 9. Sony
• 10.Nokia
• Source: (The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies,2010)
Advantages of branding:
• Branding helps in product identification which is a critical advantage of branding, and it helps marketers to differentiate product from competitors. According to Kotler and Keller, Strong brands help marketers in many ways, listed below: Source: (Kotler & Keller, Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, 2006)-
• Improved Perceptions of Product performance-
• Greater Loyalty -
• Less Vulnerability to Competitive Marketing Actions-
• Less Vulnerability to Marketing Crises-
• Larger Margins
• More Inelastic Consumer Response to Price Increases-
• More Elastic Consumer Response to Price Decreases-
• Greater Trade Cooperation and Support -
• Increased Marketing Communications Ef
• Possible Licensing Opportunities-
• Additional Brand Extension Opportunities
• Improved Perceptions of Product performance-
• Greater Loyalty
• Less Vulnerability to Competitive Marketing Actions
• Less Vulnerability to Marketing Crises
• Larger Margins
• More Inelastic Consumer Response to Price Increases
• More Elastic Consumer Response to Price Decreases
• Greater Trade Cooperation and Support
• Increased Marketing Communications Effectiveness
• Possible Licensing Opportunities
• Additional Brand Extension Opportunities
Disadvantages of Branding:
• Brands are very important for consumers as well as marketers but, nowadays, brand management is becoming more and more difficult for both. Consumer need to pay high prices as premium for brands, as well as for marketers, they need do lots of investment on advertising, Research and development etc in order to position their brand in current competitive world. Brand building and managing is very costly process and consumer has to bear the cost with companies of no surety of successful positioning of brand in market. Consumers trust brand blindly that why sometimes manufacture comprise with the quality to increase profits. Customer expectations are always high for brands and they expect the same positive response from company side. If customers get negative response from the companies brand dilution occurs where customers starts losing their interest in brand. None of the company affords brand dilution that why concept of internal branding with employees occurs in order to make them understand the values of brand and promises which brand makes with customers.
• Living in a global world, nowadays key business will India, China, Brazil and Russia. In order to make brand, as Global brand, marketers need to remove the concentration of west and focus on world as a global village (Aaker, 2010). Making global is not easy, it requires large investment both on advertising and promotions which indirectly going to increase the product price. Investment on Brand promotion is consider social waste which increase cost of production and making brand price higher. For example, Nike, Adidas and Puma, these brands are expensive than Slazenger, Umbro and Converse. All these brands make sporting cloths for youth and Nike, Adidas and Puma make huge investment on advertisement and other promotional activities but Slazenger, Umbro and Converse does not invest much on promotional activities that why they are cheap and in reach of everyone.
Corporate Branding vs. Product Branding
• Corporate branding involves marketing various products or services under the name of a company. Product branding, on the other hand, is a marketing strategy wherein a business promotes and markets an individual product without the company name being front and centre in the advertising campaigns or even on the product labelling. Management strategies for choosing which avenue to pursue or a combination of the two in branding vary by business and each approach produces results.
What is the common between brands D’Cold, Moov or itch guard. They come from the same
company, Paras Pharma ltd. Consider another brand Mr. Muscle, it comes from company called
SC Johnson. Most of the people are aware of the brands but very few people know the name of
the company which these brands come from. This is what separates product branding from
corporate branding.
Product branding strategy
• In product branding strategy, the product works as a promise to the customers, who will achieve special qualities by using the product than when using a similar kind of branded or non-branded product. Through its product/s, the company normally sends a message to its customer that by using its product/s one can not only attain satisfaction in terms of quality, but also achieve a higher social class. So to say, the product could be used to communicate and relate to a particular segment of society. The product stands distinct from the company and the consumer relates to the product rather than the company. Any incident that tarnishes the company’s image does not affect the product’s image. For example company’s CEO may get accused of assault or bad behavior on fellow co-workers. This may lead to dramatic drop in company’s image but will not affect the product sales as people do not associate the company with the product.
• A well-known example of a major U.S. company that utilizes product branding is Procter & Gamble with corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. They make beauty, personal care and household products, and many of the company's popular brands each have a dedicated website. Each product carries individualized symbols or logos and some have advertising slogans associated with the product alone, not mentioning the corporation or the P&G brand except in labeling.
Corporate branding
Corporate branding on the other hand uses company’s name as a product brand name. It tries to create product brand recognition by leveraging corporate brand equity .
LIC is a typical example of corporate branding, where each of its products are marketed under LIC brand, for example LIC’s Komal Jeevan, etc.
Asian Paints which used to follow product branding earlier with its products like tractor emulsion, ace, have recent brands like Asian Paints Royale, Asian Paints Utsaav having advertisements leveraging brand Asian Paints rather than individual products.
• The flip side of corporate branding is that if the quality of one product in the brand
• family is compromised, it could reduce sales of all the others. Corporate branding can take advantages of economies of scope by using one advertisement for several products.
• In case of new product launched by company, it can lead to faster acceptance by the target audience as the people are already familiar with the family name. A corporate branding strategy is generally useful when the company is already established brand in the market and people trust that brand. One of the trusted brands in Indian Market is Tatas which have multiple brands in multiple sectors leveraging the brand Tata.
• Often established companies, especially in Technology segment, launch products of either little or no innovation, without meaningful features in the consumers’ eyes. Consumers will associate the ‘lesser’ products with the company brand and hence they will be more receptive to the marketing message.
Drawback of corporate branding
• Drawback of corporate branding strategy is product may not be treated individually which may reduce focus on product’s unique characteristics. Also people may start relating company’s name with the product category. The biggest example of this is Xerox. People still refer photocopying as Xerox oblivious of the fact that Xerox is the company’s name.
• Amul is a unique case where product and brand are the same. P&G, HUL and Nestle, all of them use product based marketing. HUL and P&G are known for launching regional centric brands without any noticeable connection with its brand in other countries. They have following this mantra for more than fifty years. On the other hand, companies like Sony, Apple leverage their long established trust while communicating about their brands under one family.
• Whether its product branding or corporate branding, its quality of product of that ultimately defines success of the product. Product branding or corporate branding are just strategies which strengthen the product positioning .
7 Building Blocks of a Successful Brand
In Prima lBranding, Patrick Hanlon studies the worlds most successful brands and has come up with 7 elements which form the primal code of a successful brand. Hanlon’s seven elements are,
• The Creation Story – People love to hear about how something got started. New beginnings are exciting times and for a company or product telling the creation story is very important. If you listen to any interview of a company, one of the first things the questioner will ask about is how they got started.
• The Creed – The creed is the mission statement of the company. Who are you? And, what do you stand for? What is your mission?
• The Icons – Logos, symbols, and short sayings form the icons of a brand. These are concise descriptions of who you are? For McDonald’s it is the golden arches. For Nike it is the Swoosh.
• The Rituals – Rituals are the experiences you want to create when people interact with your company and your product.
• The Pagans – Pagans are you opposites – who you are not. It is important to not just define who you are, but defining who you are not is a very powerful branding message.
• The Sacred Words – Sacred words are the words you use over and over again to define yourself or your products. For Apple one of its sacred words is actually just the letter i – iMac, iPod, iPhone. For Starbucks you have tall, grande, and venti sized coffees.
• The Leader – Successful brands also have a leader or visionary who defines the company or products. These are people like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Rachel Ray. For my site, that would be me.
• When you take all seven of these together you get the primal code of a brand. The DNA of what the company or product is at its core.