Brand is nothing but an image of company, which company is portraying in the market. Though brand is not only related to an image, there are few other things related to brand like the message/promise company is spreading. We can recognize top brands like Nike with an image of “right tick” and a message or tag line “just do it”, likewise Apple, LG, Ford, McDonald’s and more. Brand is the most important weapon for a service or product which takes time to carve with expertise but once it carved then it becomes the most striking strike. Branding is among the best technique in Business to Business (B2B) marketing and creates an independent place for your business in this competitive market.
When the business main and specific goal is to stay in the market for a long term the most important thing that they want to maintain is “Brand”. A well-planned brand strategy has an effect on your business and most important the image of your product or service. A brand is more than just a logo and graphic elements.Brand strategy is among the formal strategy utilized by the business to generate a specific image of product and service in the eyes of their potential and current clients. Big companies like Coca-Cola or any smaller firm can also take benefits from an effective brand strategy.
Vision: The vision behind the brand strategy is just having an idea or desire to make your brand reach to an extent in upcoming years.
Values: The value can be the tag line which represents the core value of your business and does not going to change.
Story: Stories tend to connect with the consumers quickly, it is journey of your brand from inception to what it stands now.
Positioning of Brand: This is the very first step in your brand strategy as it defines the place and target market area for your business branding
Name Selection for Brand: Choosing a name for your brand is an immensely difficult task to perform, as there are many things to consider like it should be unique, identifiable with your product and easy to remember.
Sponsorship of Brand: In this step a series of major decision making tasks are executed which then result the way company is going to distribute the brand.
Development of Brand: This is the last but most important aspect of a brand strategy as with time your product and its target market develops. So to match up with the time and requirement you also need to make efforts to develop your brand among your consumers in order to achieve more consumers but stay tuned with the existing consumers too. You can use an existed brand and re-evolve it or you can create a complete new brand based on the demand and market requirements.
Development of Coco Cola Brand in these years
Now a days branding is the most crucial phase of any business, no matter whether the business is small or large or B2B or retail store. Brand is equally important for all businesses. Brand has to be gel with your promise with your potential market, which make them aware about the quality they should expect from your service and product, and portrays how you are better than your competitors.
Many other things that your brand depicts include the value they are going to enjoy from your brand whether you are offering low-cost high value product/service or a high-cost high quality option, and it also represents your target clients based on the script using in your branding. Your business logo is the first phase of your branding, use it wherever possible on the items likes, t-shirts, packaging materials, on your website and customizes it on mugs and many other options are available.
Generally, brand strategy comprises of 4 basic steps which is explained earlier. Here is a quick overview about brand strategy which involves Positioning, Naming, Distribution and Continuous evolving of brand. A fully planned and reliable brand strategy gives you strong brand equity. It helps in capturing the market and gives you the opportunity to charge more for your brand as compared to their identical brands available in the market.
The brand equity generally has an impact of both emotional attachment and attainable quality. For an instance let's consider Adidas, as it relates it product with well known athletes with a strategy than individuals will consider their emotional attachment regarding the athlete while dealing with the brand and it is certain to high extent.
Nike Vs Adidas Branding
A Series of step is involving in creating an effective brand known as “Branding Ladder”
How the prospect is going to think, percept and react towards brand
An effective brand is also consider based on branding blocks like:
Desire to recognize the area of strength & weakness
It assists in offering help for advertising techniques
Customer can have the joy of greater brand utilization, loyalty and affinity
Get better purchase help and after support
Generate Licensing chances
Enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of advertising communication
Defining your business brand is exactly like the self-discovery. This task cab be very hard, very time consuming and tedious. These are few question that you need to answer to define your business brand:
What is the mission of your company?
What are the features and advantages of your offered service or product?
What image your businesses possess in the current market scenario?
What qualities your product portrays that you want to highlight?
Conduct a detail research about the requirements, the ways and desires of your potential and existing clients, and don’t just think that you know everything, do research about what your customers really think about your business.As soon as you define your brand, then follow these tested ways to get the word out about your brand in the market:
Get a logo: It is a graphical representation of your business, place it everywhere possible.
Script a Proper Brand Message: What you want to spread regarding your brand should include in your branding script.
Brand Integration: You should integrate your branding with every piece of your business which at some point of time comes in contact with your customer like email signature.
Create a Voice: The voice of your company should represent your brand, in should visualize in your mails, in all imagery materials, whether available online or off line medium.
Brand Tagline: It is a composition of few key phrases represents your business, as of Nike has “Just do it”.
Maintain Design Templates: Create a design similar to your business, maintain color scheme throughout your website, on logo, feel and appearance of your website.
Stay Loyal: You must stay loyal to your promises which you are claiming in your brand script with your customer throughout your branding strategy.
Stay Consistent: Follow all the above mentioned steps and stay consistent with your vision, mission, brand script and everything which has a role in your branding or brand strategy.
Now a day's branding is not just about graphic and a logo, it has evolved a lot. The business is now considering their overall customer desires, their logo, their business site, and social media interaction while consider their branding.
Brand Provide a stable Assets
Branding provides a competitive Advantage
Brand sets customer expectation
Brand provides economic value
Purpose of Branding
Be consistent in your approach
Add some Emotions
Be flexible with your target
Involve your Employees
Stay Loyal towards your brand and consumers
Generate Competitive Awareness among your target consumer base.
This is what actually branding means and you are now aware about all the essential terms related to branding and what you need to create an effective and achievable brand strategy, as it affects every area of the business. This article helps you to create an unbeatable brand strategy which further helps your business to grow in this competitive age.