Brand Marketing Strategy

A brand is the emotional and psychological relationship you have with your customers. Strong brands elicit thoughts, emotions, and sometimes physiological responses from customers. Since every brand is distinct, you must also utilize varying approaches in communicating the brand's message across to its target market. This requires creativity and a certain level of sensitivity to the needs of your prospected customers.

One of the best ways to establish the prominence of your brand in the market is by remaining consistent with the message that is conveyed by your marketing efforts. Refrain from claiming to produce bold and large scale promises. Your customers will easily remember when you fail to deliver in those promises. You could easily lose that reputation that took you years to build. Therefore, you need to pay attention to exactly what you need to do if you want to turn that trust you have created amongst your customer base into increased sales.

If you are not sure how to do this, you can take hint from other highly successful brands in the market. Study how they utilize their brand and what strategies they employ to get more people drawn into their brand.

watch video on how to use brand marketing strategy to keep customers

If you decide that you want to appeal on your customer's emotion as your business branding strategy, then you need to consider various aspects that'll make it work. One way to effectively do that is share a story. This story could be fictional or not, but it should have some relation to the brand you are trying to campaign on. The idea here is to be able to produce some sort of personal improvement or progress by using the product.

If possible, base the emotional campaign on the brand itself, not just on the product. That way, you'd be able to produce a distinct campaign that will easily set you apart from competing companies. Then, whatever this message that you use in your campaign, try on remaining consistent with that. You can use different methods and campaign variations, but the message must remain the same in all of your brands.

Finally, as you go forward in your business efforts, try to learn more about effective business branding strategies to expand the reach of your brand in the market. And remember that, sensitivity to your customer's needs and using your brand to address that is one of the most effective brand marketing strategies you can employ to improve your business.

Marketing In A Recession

A marketing campaign will be put to test in a receding economy. Indeed, when businesses are competing for what remains of the market, you have to double your efforts at making the brand enable your business to thrive. A very important issue in these times is to never discount the impact of quality and improving value statements. A good business brand is one that can withstand an economy in recession. In today's times wherein majority of the world is suffering from financial crisis, small and big businesses are feeling the impact of this downturn.

Consumers change their buying patterns during recession, but business owners must remain committed with their marketing strategies. However, you need to make slight and appropriate changes, such as increased sensitivity to this new buying attitude exhibited by consumers. In time of recession, people tend to buy based on logic and needs, rather than impulse or perceptions. Therefore, you have to maintain or improve the kind of value, property, and benefits that your product promises its consumers.

Applying the following practices can keep your business running in this down economy:

Be open to potential new customers:   In times of recession, people are in the process of re-evaluating their spending habits. This is your opportunity to come into the picture and offer your business as a possible solution.

Do not change your brand identity:   Doing so will reduce the trust you have built on the customers and will also ruin your reputation. You can try to restructure the messages you are trying to deliver but make sure that it stays within the context of your basic brand identity.

Improve your advertising campaign:   Your advertising campaign must highlight quality, economic benefits, and real benefits as opposed to appeal to their superficial concerns. You can do this by focusing or asserting yourself on consumers largely affected by recession by offering better value on your products.   

 Add value to product:   If your business' products are mostly high-end (i.e. a product that is one of the most expensive or advanced in a company's product range, or in the market as a whole) do not simply revert to dropping prices. Instead, try improving the value and quality of your products so that customers will have a better quality spending habit.

During times of recession, you have to stay committed in helping your customers attain quality service and products that add more value to their money. This will warm your way to their pockets and keep your business afloat in the stormy waters of recession.

Brand Slogan

A slogan typically consists of a short sentence or a phrase that serve to reinforce the business name or logo. It is an advertising statement that describes what your brand is all about. Some slogans have an attitude like MTN’s “everywhere you go” or a statement of what they are trying to accomplish like Xerox’s “the document company”. There’s a lot of confusing slogans out there so being concise and precise is crucial for an effective slogan for branding.

Slogan is often dismissed as an element for effective branding methods, which is also the reason why even a potentially good business name fails to deliver. Its purpose is mainly to enhance and boost the name or provide a tiny glimpse of what the brand promises to deliver. Even simple words or phrases can go a long way when it works well with your brand.

Therefore, you need not just produce a creative slogan but an intelligent one. The purpose is mainly to capture the consumer's attention and produce interest about a given product. It enables your audience to stop and think about the possibilities offered by the brand. Depending on your marketing plan, you can utilize a slogan to appeal to either the needs, attitudes, or emotions of the consumers. Therefore, you are trying to compel them to make an action, which in this case is to purchase the product to avail of the benefits it offer.

Business owners must be able to differentiate advertising from business slogans since they serve different purposes. The business slogan is more important since it concerns the brand identity. It impacts your distinction in the market and the power of your brand. On the other hand, advertising slogans are created for a specific marketing objectives and over a short-period of time. It is more concerned over influencing a consumer's immediate reaction to a given product while business slogan reinforces the reputation of a company as part of its branding efforts.

Branding A Company

A brand is not just a logo or a name, it represents your business identity. Therefore, it is a crucial part of the startup process for any business. Branding strategies are employed to provide the fundamental steps and recognize the valuable tools that will help create a strong business brand. In general terms, a strong brand is one that people recognize and believe to deliver good quality. Have you ever found yourself at the grocery choosing one product over the other because it is the more recognized or trusted brand?

There are many different definitions of a brand, the most effective description however, is that a brand is a name or symbol that is commonly known to identify a company or it’s products and separate them from the competition. A well-known brand is generally regarded as one that people will recognise, often even if they do not know about the company or its products/services. These are usually the businesse’s name or the name of a product, although it can also include the name of a feature or style of a product.

The main benefit of branding is that customers are much more likely to remember your business. A strong brand name and logo helps to keep your company image in the mind of your potential customers.If your business sells products that are often bought on impulse, a customer recognising your brand could mean the difference between no-sale and a sale. 

It is therefore a branding strategy's objective to recognize what could turn your business into a trusted brand name. How can you make people trust your brand and its reputation? What should you do to communicate the objective and mission of your company? What is the message you are trying to send out to produce loyal customers? A sound business branding strategy will aim to find answers to these questions before you can establish a brand for your company that would excel in the market. 

For beginners, think of a logo that will readily hint consumers about the nature of your business such as whether you are in the food, automotive, or telecommunications business. Hence, choose images that are associated with the nature of your business and the products they will be used to represent.  Coming up with a name for your business goes hand in hand with creating a logo that will identify your company. When it comes to logos, always opt for something unique. Logos will be utilized in your advertising and marketing campaigns, so it must be well-recognized. While you might think that your logo is simply an obligatory thing, you need to ensure that it is on all of your communications, on your website, on your company’s sign if you have one and more. While having a professional logo is a nice thing, it’s far more important that your customers equate the logo you do have with your company. 

Once you have the logo that you want, you can think of a slogan that will reinforce the message you are trying to communicate to the consumers. As long as you keep this part brief and straightforward, then this can be an effective branding tool for your business. This tagline will serve as an additional touch to the main message you are trying to give, thus giving you an edge over your competitors and highlighting the unique experience or service that consumers will be able to avail of. 

As with logos, colors and images can be used to establish the identity of your business. Colors depict a corresponding set of emotions as well. Therefore, you need to carefully pick out exactly what type of color you are going to use in your logo in accordance with the image and personality of your business. Try to conduct a little bit of research about the different qualities of color types so you can determine exactly what best to use for your company.

When communicating your company brand into the market, highlight the services that only you can offer. If you can guarantee a service that none of your competition can, then you create an edge on your customers over the same businesses. Then, you can use that as a chief marketing strategy to draw more people into your business. An example of this would be a time guarantee on your delivery services, if you're in the food business. 

Employing these business branding strategies will effectively help boost your company's campaign and be that much closer to your desired business success.

Brand Planning

Branding itself is a way to build an important company asset, which is a good reputation. Whether a company has no reputation, or a less than stellar reputation, branding can help change that. Branding can build an expectation about the company services or products, and can encourage the company to maintain that expectation, or exceed them, bringing better products and services to the market place.

There are basic models utilized in the process of brand planning. Each of them will cover different scopes and aspects of the process to create a sound branding strategy. Aside from the ability to postulate methods for arriving at a specific brand idea, these models will also help businessmen understand the behavior of consumers in terms of their responses to a brand, which is helpful in adjusting old branding strategies or acquiring new ones. This write up will focus on two basic models of brand planning.

These features are key in managing and reviewing brands, which are necessary steps that must be taken by any company in their branding efforts. These models are not directly linked but one does impact another.

Brand Placement

This model takes into consideration your effort to create an image that will have its distinct position in the market. Firmly establishing your brand will assist your target market to easily remember and opt for your line of products. This is one aspect of your brand planning wherein you must focus on creating superior brands that will eliminate your competition. Here are steps you need to look into:

This is the first step wherein you begin to identify other brands you are competing against. Then, define the parameters of your own brand against your competition. This will enable you to focus your efforts.

Secondly, your objective is to introduce attributes to your brand that will enable it to stand out from competition. You must also introduce elements into your brand that will produce in the mind of your consumers or target market the perceived quality of your brand. 

And finally, you must establish a slogan for your brand that will aim to reaffirm the position and values of your brand. It aims to articulate the message of the brand and what it promises to deliver to the consumers.

Brand Value Chain

This model is more focused on the financial impact of your branding efforts. The basic idea of this model is that the value of the brand consist in the customers, so that is where you should be focusing most of your brand planning strategies on. To be above your competitors in branding you must pay attention to the needs and wants of your customers and prospects. You do this by integrating your brand strategies through your company at every point of public contact.