Strategies for branding development 1. What is product and what is brand 2. Why is branding important 3. How do we build successful brands 4. How do we manage Brands In order to properly evaluate brands and branding theories, we should explain the difference between products and brands. A Product is a physical good, service, idea, person, or place that is capable of offering tangible and intangible attributes that individuals or organizations regard as so necessary, worthwhile or satisfying that they are prepared to exchange money, patronage or some other unit of value to acquire it.
A Brand is a term, symbol, name or combination of these, which is used to identify the goods or services of one seller or a group of sellers and to differentiate them from the products and services of the competitors. The brand identifies the maker of the product. Let’s take the cola drink for example. Any manufacturer can produce that drink, but only the Coca-Cola Company can produce Coke. Branding is not a new phenomenon, in fact they have been developing for more than 100 years and nowadays they are legally accepted as intellectual property.
But apart from other intellectual properties like patents a copyrights, brands don’t have expiration date. Today, marketing recognizes 3 main types of brands: manufacturer (that make the products like Coca-Cola), distributor (huge wholesalers like Kingsbury or HIM) and generic brands (show only product information required by law. Known as White carton’ goods and is typical for plain flour or pharmaceutical products) 2. With their development, brands are gaining more and more market importance as they are providing benefits both for consumers and producers.
Brands advantages for consumers are: Based on consumer experience, Branding helps people to identify the products and services that satisfy their needs and wants and to avoid those brands that don’t meet their taste. Reduce levels of perceived risk and uncertainty of the product, helping the consumers to proceed to buying the stock. Branding helps consumers to make fair estimations about products quality in markets that are unknown for them. Strong and well known brands usually offer good quality and consumers trust that brand and buy them.
In that way they save shopping time and also know what they can expect from those products in levels of satisfaction. Inform consumer about the source of the product. How branding offers benefits for the producers? It helps them differentiate their brand from the other products in the market and make it recognizable for the consumers. In that way there will be fast purchase choices when consumers recognize ten product. Alternately, managers try to create strong relations Ana loyalty to the consumers to the extent that they will be willing to accept cross- products and brand extensions (new products).
Another advantage of Branding is hat it allows manufacturers to set price premiums. For example manufacturers like L’Oreal will sell their products at prices about 20% higher than the average price for such product and in that way gain more return. Those excessive returns would be reinvested in product development, making the products better and more competitive on the market. 3. In order to build a successful brand, we need to follow a complex series of steps that depend on what our company is doing. First we start with deciding on the name of the brand.
It has to be short, easy to pronounce by anyone from any part of the oral. Additionally, we have to register our brand name in order to make sure that it will not be used by competitor companies or we are not using a name that is already registered. We have to advertise the brand to the consumers in order to create brand awareness. Like when consumers think of buying cat food they think of Whiskers. Furthermore, we may use the name of the brand in the name of the products to show that this product or service belongs to our company like Ford Transit or Virgin Atlantic.
Name can also be distinctive and showing product functional benefits in the name (Right Guard) Sometimes companies may not have enough money to advertise its products in the media. It is a good idea for such companies to put what their products do in their brand name like ‘Cling Film’. Then it comes to quality, product differentiation, price and competitiveness. 4. Once a company has been branded, it has to consider its branding policy. There are three main branding polices: individual, family and company. Individual: when each product of the company is independently branded.
In that way companies can approach different markets with different names and one brand fail will not affect there brands. Family: when all the products use company name in order to win customer trust. Corporate: when different brands adopt single umbrella brand like Tests. They can easily use their huge names and market power to extend and win new markets without paying a lot for advertising (mars and ice-cream). At the same time fail in one area can cause problems in the whole organization (in financial brands HASH) also should be careful which market they target (Harley-Davidson). Licensing (Disney), Co-branding (Microsoft and NSP)
