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Branding InformationImportance of Branding: What's in a Name?
by:
William King
Stigmatisation
is mayhap the most important facet of any business--beyond product, distribution, pricing, or location. A company's brand is its definition in the world, the name that identifies it to itself and the marketplace. A model may be beautiful, but without a name, she's simply "that girl in that picture." Wherever
would-be Constellation
Jean be without Marilyn Monroe, or who would-be imagine Coca-Cola as simply a soft-drink manufacturer? A brand provides a concrete descriptor to customers and competitors alike, a name for a product or service to distinguish it from thing
else. Bob may run a hobby shop, but trying to advertise as "The hobby shop a guy named Bob runs down the street a ways" is business enterprise suicide. Each client wish have to describe the shop, who Bob is, and what the shop does every time causal agency asks simply about it. This does the process of recommending a nice hobby shop too more activity for the average customer, and far too more activity for a user looking for hobby shops on the Internet. A client looking up Bob's hobby shop wish have an easier time of it if he or she knows to refer to it as "Bob's Home of Hobbies," and the client can then refer others to Bob's hobby shop by name, increasing the potential advertising exponentially.
Developing a brand involves more than simply picking a catchy name and placing an ad in the newspaper--a brand is more than a unique string of letters denoting a particular product; a flourishing brand is a mnemotechnical
trigger that does a user
feel a certain way once
the brand is thought of. For those who drink cola-flavored soft drinks, which is more appealing on a hot day: a cold cola soda, or an ice-cold Coke? Coca-Cola has spent 100 years developing their particular brand of cola-flavored soda as a refreshing food and a seminal representation of a market segment. Coca-Cola has used a combination of direct marketing, give-away techniques, and multi-product cross-branding to bring home the bacon maximum brand recognition and visibility in not only its directly competitive market, but in markets as diverse as Coca-Cola proprietary
race cars and housewares.
Brand loyalty is an integral part of building a brand, as consumers ordinarily have a select of products in the same market segment, and so a flourishing institution wish move up with a way to support consumers re-buying their product or coming back to their location rather than going to a competitor. These brand loyalty-building efforts may move in the form of coupons, incentives such as many an grocery chains' technique of "grocery discount cards" or "loss leaders," meant to draw consumers into the store, wherever
they wish hopefully buy products on
with the discounted fare at a higher profit ratio. In exchange for these discounts and grocery cards, many an companies collect information simply about purchasing habits and average defrayment amounts, the better to tailor advertisements and better-focus futurity promotional efforts. Once a user
is hooked, brand loyalty tends to result in higher sales volume, as well as loyal customers being less sensitive to cost changes of their favorite brands (within reason, of course), as well as less sensitive to competitors' incentives. Studies have shown that it takes 5 times as more money to gain a client as it does to retain one. That's 5 times as more money as could have been spent on else things.
A brand is who your institution is, and what it is selling--it is as important as naming a baby, and should require the same figure of effort to develop it, but if done well, can mature into a flourishing and profitable adult.
© 2005, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.
Just simply about the Author
William King is the director of All Wholesale UK, Wholesale Pages and Wholesale-Canada. He has 18 years of experience in the marketing and mercantilism
industries and has
been small indefinite amount retailers and startups with their product sourcing,
promotion, marketing and supply chain requirements.
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