Three Steps Toward Successful Branding

Here are three strategies you can use to enhance your brand –

Use Project Photos – Your customers want to know one thing – Will they be satisfied when doing business with you? Persuade them with photographs. Ask a satisfied end user to take a picture of a building you supplied. Take the photo yourself, if you must. If you can, take another one with you and your customer in front of the building. Then post the photo in your distributorship where others can see. Photos get people talking and help portray happy customers – both those who know you and those who walk through the front door for the first time.

See Branding Opportunities Everywhere – People get into habits easily. Habits are the enemy of innovation, and you must do all you can to challenge your patterns. There are opportunities for branding yourself everywhere if you only look for them.

Educate your Customers – Much of the quality you build into every transaction is hidden from your customers. Your job is to reveal it.

Brand Success Through Integrating Marketing Resources – When you are driving a BMW and proudly turn the ignition keys for the first time in ‘the ultimate driving machine’, you are not only benefiting from a highly engineered car with excellent performance, but also taking ownership of a symbol that signifies the core values of exclusivity, performance, quality and technical innovation.

While we in the consumer, service and industrial markets have bought solutions to our individual problems, we have also paid a price premium for the added, values provided by buying brands. In addition to satisfying our core purchase requirements, we have bought an augmented solution to our problem, for which we perceive sufficient added value to warrant paying a premium over other alternatives that might have satisfied our buying needs.

The added values we sought, however, were not just those provided through the presence of a brand name as a, differentiating’ device, nor through the use of brand names to recall powerful advertising. Instead, we perceived a total entity, the brand, which is the result of a, coherent marketing approach which uses all elements of the marketing mix. There are hundreds of examples of well-known brand names that have failed commercially. There are even some, which are reviled by the public. Such unsuccessful brands are examples of a failure to integrate all the elements of marketing in a coherent way.

Thus, branding is a powerful marketing concept that does not just focus on one element of the marketing mix, but represents the result of a carefully conceived array of activities across the whole spectrum of the marketing mix, directed towards making the buyer; recognize relevant added values that are unique when compared with competing products and services and which are difficult for competitors to emulate. The purpose of branding is to facilitate the organization’s task of getting and maintaining a loyal customer base in a cost-effective manner to achieve the highest possible return on investment. In other words, branding should not be regarded as at a critical tool directed towards one element of the marketing mix, but rather should be seen as the result of strategic thinking, integrating a marketing programme across the complete marketing mix.

Neither is this a concept that should be regarded as more appropriate for consumer markets. Indeed, the concept of branding is increasingly being applied to people and places, such as politicians, pop stars, holiday resorts and the like, whilst it has always been equally relevant to the marketing of products and services. Strategic branding is concerned with evaluating how to achieve the highest return on investment from brands, through analyzing, formulating and implementing a strategy that best satisfies users, distributors and brand manufacturers. It is relatively recently that a strategic perspective on branding has emerged, with firms beginning to recognize that they are sitting on valuable assets that need careful attention, as we shall see in the next section.