Marketing - the importance of brands

Branding strategies can change the minds of customers if implemented properly.  

The most important part of marketing is the brand management. All the businesses must need unique brands in order of getting success. Some people think, branding is only for big companies. This is not true every business whether small, medium sized or start-up needs brands that give them identity and represent their image. 

Brand is the name, symbol, logo, character or anything that represents the product/service. It makes you unique and differentiated from your competitors. Whole the marketing concept runs around brand – from the product, price, and place to promotion. Branding is the process of creating unique, positive associations in the consumers’ mind relative to the brand. And for creating these associations, we need to promote our brand and position in the best way. 

So first starts from the product – 1st P of marketing, you need a specific logo and slogan for your product. While developing logo and tag line for your brand must keep in mind: easy spell and recall, simple, memorable, attractive, not more than two words; tag line can be a sentence too. After designing logo and slogan for your brand, there is a need to do test – trial. You can do sample marketing for your brand. You set the price for your brand – 2nd P of marketing. The trail marketing also helps you lot in setting the best price. You need to position the brand in a best possible way. Positioning strategy contains; POP (points of parity) and POD (points of difference). For getting the best results, focus on developing POP’s similar or match to competitors’ PODs. So, you can get the uniqueness by offering POD’s. Then distribution strategy (Place) comes – 3rd P of marketing. You can either work on intensive distribution – maximum coverage, every where or selective distribution – segmenting, where you have most customers, alliances, few places or an exclusive distribution – niche, authorized dealer, only one or few. The 4th P of marketing, Promotion is contributing in every stage of marketing. You need to continuously build awareness of your brand in the target market in order to get the results. The 4th P of marketing related to the communication strategy or communication mix – need advertising, personal selling, sales promotions and public relations. And all these are the tools of promoting brands; your brand’s success depends on your marketing communication strategy. By implementing a good mix of communication strategies, you can get the top place in consumers’ minds. 

Brands can make or break your business; good brands are the source of new product lines. You can use your brand for leveraging the strengths of your other products and services. A one single brand can make you leader in the market and provide sources of expansion in new categories and even in new businesses too. 

Branding is all related with research; research of company, market, competitor and the environment. Track your brand’s strengths and weaknesses of weekly basis. Treat branding as a separate department having professionals for every brand you have. Prioritize the associations your customers have with your brands and put more focus on top associations that are unique and different. Try to develop relationship with your customers. Increase customer equity through brand equity.

Must think, Branding is the philosophy of changing minds.