Brand Marketing: from marketing student perspective

Today, many markets are overpopulated with both large and small companies and overexposed with marketing messages. This has made for a difficult landscape to get a marketing message noticed. And with the rising costs of getting a new product or service ready for the market, it has become even more important to cut through this clutter. The one sure-fire way of doing this is by having a corporate branding strategy.

Corporate Branding:

Powerful corporate branding can equip most any new product or service with instant credibility and value that simply can’t be reproduced with any sort of product-focused marketing campaign. That is why it is vitally important for any serious corporation that wishes its product offerings to be successful to create and protect a strong corporate brand.

How do you do that? Well, first throw away the notion that branding only involves marketing, i.e. putting an image out there. Yes, it involves that, but a huge part of it also entails relations with investors, media, competitors, government and others. By the way, don’t confuse corporate branding with corporate identity, two completely different things. Corporate identity involves a company’s logo and design strategy only. It is merely a component of an overall brand strategy.

Successful corporate branding is all about establishing a long-term vision for a company and crafting the company’s operations to meet that objective. Some companies that do this well include Microsoft, Intel, Singapore Airlines, Disney, CNN, Samsung and Mercedes-Benz. The kind of brand strength these companies enjoy takes a long time and a lot of work to establish, and there’s a lot of research and tracking to maintain. But it’s not as difficult as it sounds. Today, a company of virtually any size can use the same sophisticated branding research tools the big boys use.

Why is it important to worry about these kinds of things?

Because a strong corporate brand adds depth and value to a company’s product offerings. It’s also a public statement of the company’s culture and values. For Eg, HSBC bank, one of the world’s largest banks, has the tagline “The World’s Local Bank,” which both represents the size of the bank, but builds on its purported focus on individual people.

Search engine rankings, usability, Flash web design and Web site stickiness have each had their time in the limelight as the most important element of web marketing. One last important piece of the web marketing pie is brand marketing.

Why Brand Marketing ?

Brand marketing is the art/science of making the right impression on prospects. It’s the active process of discovering, developing and bringing the right image or identity of your company to the marketplace. Too often, clients are focused on the later stages of the brand identity development process, such as the presentation on a Web site or advertisement in a magazine. Effective Brand Marketing is a complete process of researching the market and developing an image for your corporate identity, and then engineering its presentation at optimal times and places.

Since search engine users are looking for a specific product or service, having your well-constructed brand presented in search engine listings, is perhaps one of the best brand impressions you can make. At Brand, marketers bring together all the elements of good brand development and deliver it to a specifically targeted audience who is ready and willing to see it. That’s market timing at its very best and only the Web offers that kind of high quality, measurable marketing.

What are the elements of brand marketing?

• Target market research: collecting information on prospect needs and preferences
• Features and benefits: identifying target prospects are interested in and which will move them to   purchase
• Brand presentation: designing a web page that maximizes the impact and impression of your business.
• Brand experience: creating a Web site or other advertisement that makes the users meeting with your product or service memorable, fun or useful.

Conclusion:

The new economy laced with the pace of the advancements in technology has changed the meaning of competitive advantage. Gone are the days when innovative products used to be the source of competitive advantage for a company. Today, any new invention can be copied within a matter of days. Moreover, this is the era of outsourcing, where companies can outsource all possible elements of business functions. In the age of total access, ‘brands’ are the only assets of a company that cannot be easily copied or outsourced. A strong brand is the most important asset of a company. It can be nurtured and relied upon in today’s competitive environment. So, branding is far from dead, and it is very much alive though it is changing in form and presentation.

Tags: Brand Marketing, Business, Corporate Branding, Marketing