Subject: Importance of Branding: What\’s in a Name?

> Branding is perhaps 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 just
> \”that girl in that picture.\” Where would Norma Jean be without Marilyn
> Monroe, or who would imagine Coca-Cola as just 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 anything 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 financial suicide. Each
> customer will have to describe the shop, who Bob is, and what the shop
> does every time someone asks about it. This makes the process of
> recommending a good hobby shop too much work for the average customer, and
> far too much work for a user looking for hobby shops on
> the Internet. A customer looking up Bob\’s hobby shop will have an
> easier time of it if he or she knows to refer to it as \”Bob\’s House of
> Hobbies,\” and the customer can then refer others to Bob\’s hobby shop by
> name, increasing the potential advertising exponentially.
>
> Developing a brand involves more than just 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 successful brand is a mnemonic
> trigger that makes a consumer feel a certain way when 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 beverage 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 achieve maximum brand
> recognition and visibility in not only its immediately competitive market,
> but in markets as diverse as Coca-Cola branded race cars and house wares.
>
> Brand loyalty is an integral part of building a brand, as consumers
> usually have a choice of products in the same market segment, and so a
> successful company will come up with a way to keep consumers re-buying
> their product or coming back to their location rather than going to a
> competitor. These brand loyalty-building efforts may come in the form of
> coupons, incentives such as many grocery chains\’ technique of \”grocery
> discount cards\” or \”loss leaders,\” meant to draw consumers into the
> store, where they will hopefully buy products along with the discounted
> fare at a higher profit ratio. In exchange for these discounts and
> grocery cards, many companies collect information about buying habits and
> average spending amounts, the better to tailor advertisements and
> better-focus future promotional efforts. Once a consumer is hooked, brand
> loyalty tends to result in higher sales volume, as well as loyal customers
> being less sensitive to price 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 much money to
> gain a customer as it does to retain one. That\’s 5 times as much money
> as could have been spent on other things.
>
> A brand is who your company is, and what it is selling–it is as important
> as naming a baby, and should require the same amount of effort to develop
> it, but if done well, can mature into a successful and profitable adult.
>
> © 2005, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.
>
Article by: imzee