CREATING POWERFUL BRANDS (PART 2)

The Building Blocks of Brand Creation

The brand proposition is the statement of the functional and emotional benefits that a company believes its products or service offers to the consumer. Coca-Cola’s brand proposition is a mixture of functional benefits (taste, refreshment) and emotional benefits (good wholesome fun). 

Brand positioning is a description of those at whom the brand is aimed (the target audience) and where it stands relative to the competition. 

Brand identity (or brand image) is the aggregation of the words, images, and ideas that the consumer associates with a brand.  There is an increasing tendency to personify brands, and companies talk about brands personality and brand attitude.  This is particularly important in youth markets, in which consumers regard brands as statements of their beliefs and preferences. 

The Brand-Builder’s Toolbox

 Successful brand creation starts with products design. But is not just how the product performs, it’s also about how it looks.  In the fast-moving consumer goods sector, packaging is also a key source of differentiation, both as a powerful tool for creating brand identity and as a means whereby brands can stand out from the crowd on increasingly cluttered supermarket shelves.

Advertising is perhaps the brand manager’s most potent tool. Print and broadcast media not only represent a cost-effective mechanism for reaching mass audiences, they also have the power to influence consumer behavior. The press is a particularly effective medium for communicating complex messages while TV advertising, with its beguiling interplay of sounds and pictures, is ideal for building brand image.

In recent years, however, the brand manager’s task has become increasingly complex. Brands have proliferated, media have fragmented, and consumers have become more cynical.  Brand owners have had to become more innovative, constantly reinventing their brands to keep one step ahead of their competitors and their consumers. Technology such CNN, Fox TV, Al Jazeera, and other international media organizations, and the arrival of the Internet into more than 80% of our homes and the growing power and penetration of 5G mobile phone technology has facilitated increasingly sophisticated segmentation as well as 24 hour messaging and communication. With the power of database profiling technologies, many brand owners are being able to jump the chasm from a one-to-many to a one-to-one marketing model.  

Measuring Brand Equity

If brands are company’s most valuable strategic asset, it makes sense to take good care of them.  While it is difficult to prove a statistical relationship between advertising and sales because of the sheer number variables involved, it is possible to prove a relationship between advertising and awareness and between awareness and sales.  For this reason most companies track brand awareness levels, together with other measures such as brand loyalty and purchase intention.

It is also important to track brand image, to make sure that the differentiating elements of brand identity a company is attempting to communicate are being received accurately by the consumer. One reason for doing this is to gauge to what extent brand equity can be leveraged into line extensions or new products. Virgin is the classic example of this, with the brand now spanning airlines, trains, soft drinks, and financial services.

In recent years, many brand owners have attempted to assign an economic value to their brands on the balance sheet. This brand consultation company Interbrand has been at the forefront of this process, though the accounting profession has yet to fully embrace the concept. 

Brands In The New Economy

The Internet was heralded as the brand manager’s dream but a new more sophisticated, more pervasive and more personalized channel to consumer has taken the lead by virtue of its attractiveness – the 5G mobile phone. Like the Internet, it is instantaneous, enables direct one-on-one communication, is interactive, and is multimedia, integrating text, sound, and images. Its most unique feature is that it offers 24-hour access from virtually anywhere in the globe while mobile.

The Future of Brands

While brands are undoubtedly here to stay, there is growing evidence of a consumer backlash. Ironically it’s the Internet that’s encouraging consumers, sick of being marketed to by faceless corporations, to demand a dialogue to brand owners. Moreover, disgruntled consumers are using the Internet to undermine the brand equity that has been expensively created by these same faceless corporations. These voices of dissent range from the humorous to the more sinister.

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