Developing Your Brand Strategy
Developing a brand strategy can be one of the most difficult steps in the marketing plan process. It's often the element that causes most businesses the biggest challenge, but it's a vital step in creating the company identity.
Your brand identity will be repeatedly communicated, in multiple ways with frequency and consistency throughout the life of your business.
What is Branding?
A strong brand is invaluable as the battle for customers intensifies day by day. It's important to spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all your brand is the source of a promise to your consumer. It's a foundational piece in your marketing communication and one you do not want to be without. In this first week's lesson we will discuss and lay the foundational concept of branding, what it is and what it is not.
Define Your Brand
This is the first step in the process of developing your brand strategy. By defining who your brand is you create the foundation for all other components to build on. Your brand definition will serve as your measuring stick in evaluating any and all marketing materials and strategies.
Determining Your Brand's Objectives
Critical to effective brand management is the clear definition of the brand's audience and the objectives that the brand needs to achieve. How do you go about defining those objectives and putting a plan into place that will help you succeed in meeting them.
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Focusing on Your Target Audience
The power of your brand relies on the ability to focus. That is why defining your target market will help to strengthen your brand's effectiveness. Learn how to define your target market in this week's lesson of the Developing Your Brand's Strategy course.
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Brand Packaging and Identity
Branding is your identity in the marketplace, is yours saying what it should? Your company image is all about the appearance of your packaging. What is your company image saying to the marketplace?
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Brand identity
How the brand owner wants the consumer to perceive the brand - and by extension the branded company, organisation, product or service. The brand owner will seek to bridge the gap between the brand image and the brand identity. Brand identity is fundamental to consumer recognition and symbolizes the brand's differentiation from competitors.
Brand identity may be defined as simply the outward expression of the brand, such as name and visual appearance. Some practitioners however define brand identity as not only outward expression (or physical facet), but also in terms of the values a brand carries in the eye of the consumer.
Small business brands
Branding a small or medium sized business (SME) follows essentially the same principle a branding larger corporation. The main differences being that small businesses usually have a smaller market and have less reach than larger brands. Some people argue that it is not possible to brand a small business, however there are many examples of small businesses that became very successful due to branding.
Company name
Often, especially in the industrial sector, it is just the company's name which is promoted (leading to one of the most powerful statements of "branding"; the saying, before the company's downgrading, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM").
In this case a very strong brand name (or company name) is made the vehicle for a range of products (for example, Mercedes-Benz or Black & Decker) or even a range of subsidiary brands (such as Cadbury Dairy Milk, Cadbury Flake or Cadbury Fingers in the United States). |
