WHY GO FOR BRANDING?
As products become increasingly similar, companies are turning to branding as a way to create a preference for their offerings. Branding has been the essential factor in the success of well-known consumer goods such as Coca Cola, McDonald's, Kodak, and Mercedes. In fact, these brands are worth many times more than the book value of the property used to make these brands.
The act of associating a product or service with a brand has become part of pop culture. Most products have some kind of brand identity, from common table salt to designer clothes. In non-commercial contexts, the marketing of entities which supply ideas or promises rather than product and services (e.g. political parties or religious organizations) may also be known as "branding".
Now it is time for more industrial companies to start using branding in a sophisticated way. Some industrial companies have led the way... Caterpillar, DuPont, Siemens, GE. But industrial companies must understand that branding goes far beyond building names for a set of offerings. Branding is about promising that the company's offering will create and deliver a certain level of performance. The promise behind the brand becomes the motivating force for all the activities of the company and its partners. Thus if Motorola promises six sigma quality, then everyone at Motorola is driven to create and deliver this level of performance.
Thus branding is the road that a company must travel to define what it wants to be excellent at and how its offerings differ from competitors. Branding is the outward expression of the company's earlier decisions on positioning its products and articulating its value propositions to buyers. When branding works, the sales people enter the offices of customers already well-known and respected who stand ready to give them a hearing.
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Brands were originally developed as labels of ownership: name, term, design, symbol. However, today it is what they do for people that matters much more, how they reflect and engage them, how they define their aspiration and enable them to do more. Branding efforts should never stop. Just like in sports, teams need to get better in order to compete at or above the level of their competitors, so to in the matters of establishing a good brand image in the minds of the consumer.
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Branding begins at all levels, from the logo to the words written on a website and the information released in the public market place.Brands can quickly become tarnished with even the smallest of issues. Sometimes, a company can bring it on themselves by aggressively trying too hard to market themselves through negative aspects instead of promoting the positive attributes. In recent times, legal issues can even become a spoiling of a brand image.
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Take for instance a company the size of Microsoft, that has a market capitalization of $300 billion dollars, has recently tried to flex its legal muscles by claiming patent infringement of the open source community. Never mind the fact, that they have not filed a lawsuit, nor have they stated what the patent infringements are. While these are legal issues, it is wise to take a look at the impact from a brand image
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Powerful brands can drive success in competitive and financial markets, and indeed become the organisation’s most valuable assets.
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