Brands

Brands are about you, not me

Brands are about people not products.

Brands are about the customers and not companies.

A great brand is one that you want to live your life by, one that you trust and hang on to when everything aroun you is changing, one that articulates the type of person uou are or want to be, one that enables yoou to do what you couldn't otherwise achieve.

Forget what used to happen, today it is what brands do for the people that matters much more, how they reflect and engage them, how they define thier aspiration and enable them to do more. Powerful brands can drive success in the competitive and financial markets, and indeed become he organization's most valuable assaets.

Yet there are few great brands around.
Most brands are still labels, relying too strongly on the brand names and logos, and focused too heavily on the companies and product that they help identify. They are articulated through superficial starplines and deliverd through generic service. They make promises that their companies struggle to deliver, often failing to even attract attention, and rarely gaining the trust of the special customers.

Powerful brands have the ability to cut through the noise and competetiveness of the markets and to engage and retain the best customers in a way that delivers superior financial results in the short and long term.

.....Posted by... BhArTeNdRa SiNgH

Sometime back I read about this concept in Brand equity called Time Value of advertising. How more and more advertising is being developed focusing on how the product can save you time. The housewife of today being a working mother would rather order in Pizza than slog in the kitchen. This would ensure that she get some quality time with her family. Similarly take Instant Coffee, the housewife of yesteryear would have been thought of as lazy if she used a product like that, now she is just considered smart.We can see this phenomenon everywhere this generation would rather buy readymade clothes than go to the darji,they would rather use the low cost airlines ( proof is how well the airlines are doing) and pay a little extra than use transport that takes longer.

This concept makes a lot of sense in today's fast paced busy world. Using time as a positioning platform is smart. There are so many service parameters also designed around time, 1 minute for a MacDonalds Burger and 30 mins delivery of pizza. If I put myself in the position as a consumer I too would consider time as value for me. Time versus money tradeoff is skewed heavily towards time where the new generation Indian consumer does not mind spending money and lots of it too save time.Thus, we can see how trends are changing.We need to be quick enough to keep pace with it.

Chriselle B- PG Batch 2

Brand extensions:

A brand is probably the most important business asset; it may be valued at 5-50% of the total value of the company or even above in some cases.
Brand management has become quite a complex issue today and as brands get bigger and more important, there is a tendency to milk more out of the star performing brands.

However brand extensions do have their pitfalls and may jeopardize a company’s competitive position, it can lead to clutter, confuse a consumer thereby affecting his choice.

Some Examples:

Colgate recently tried experimenting with ready to eat meal products!!!

Levis attempting an equally ludicrous proposition by seeking entry into men’s suits

But brand extensions do have a positive side to them, It is cheaper to extend a brand rather than create a new brand , it is less risk and more cost effective.

DAVID TAYLOR states in brandstretch that 'brand extensions are typically 23% more successful, 34% cheaper and 61% better at driving a repeat purchase' .

When considering brand extensions the following questions must be considered:

Where to extend
What to extend
How to extend

Therefore clarity of thought, consistency, thorough risk analysis, benefits offered and value created all need to ensure that the extension fits the business objectives.

Some Examples Of companies that have embraced brand extension rather successfully are:

BMW: A brand well known for its premium priced saloon cars immediately saw an opportunity in the high growth Sports Utility Vehicle segment and launched the X series SUV.

Another equally good example for brand extension is Virgin which also happens to be one of the most diverse brands in the world, with respect to travel virgin has its flagship Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Express for the discount traveler, Virgin Blue in Australia and also operates two UK rail franchises and sells tour packages through Virgin Holidays.

In the fast changing markets today extensions are simply the moving centre of gravity of business as both the market and the customers advance.

Excerpts taken from Marketing Genius, BrandStretch

NIKHIL SHARMA (E BIZ)

Does Marketing create or satisfy demand?

In today’s age when you have a marketer for every conceivable and inconceivable need, should marketers aim only at SATISFYING needs? Marketing Guru Philip Kotler defines marketing as meeting needs profitably and says that it deals with identifying and meeting human and social needs. In the 21^st century when you have marketers selling you a piece of land on moon and even in the virtual world, (and YES people are buying!!!) should the definition of marketing be confined only to meeting and SATISFYING needs OR rather be expanded to one which CREATES demand and new markets for the company.

Let us try and understand this using example of the much hyped Apple iPod. Do people really need a portable digital music player? If you want music on the go there are the Walkmans and Discmans and if you thought chugging the cassettes and CD’s were a passé, you have your mobile phone which are MP3 capable and have expandable memory. Just when you thought that customers wanted an all in one mobile phone, you have Apple coming up with massive Ad campaign promoting their portable music player, the iPod. Did it sell??? Oh boy, Steve Jobs was laughing all his way to the bank.

This makes me think was Apple satisfying a latent need or was it creating a demand for its products? A research had indicated that people didn’t want to carry multiple devices for music, photography and calls. They wanted an all in one solution. If Apple was to go by this finding, iPod wouldn’t have seen the light of the day. So what made iPod sell? – A carefully executed marketing strategy by some of the best marketers in the world. The launch of the iPod was a true show of the marketing ingenuity of Apple – a revolutionary click wheel design made available in funky colours secured the iPod’s place in the ‘must haves’ list of everyone. They also provided a range of services along with the product like the podcasts and iTunes to make the ostensibly difficult task of synchronising the device with the PC a breeze. And Apple didn’t stop there, like all great brands with continuous product innovations iPod cut flab and then came the iPod Nano. Men, women and children everyone wanted to flaunt their iPods, iPod clones started showing up and Apple even started promoting it as the perfect corporate gift!!! A product which was thought to not have a market went on to be the top industry grosser. Of course iPod was lucky to have come from a company like Apple which is known for its innovation and futuristic designs. But one cannot ignore the fact that Apple was able to CREATE a market for iPods in a generation which was moving towards the unification of devices.

Leading management guru Peter Drucker once said: “There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him so well that it sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available.” At first I thought this was too idealistic to be true. But didn’t Apple create a product that fit so well for us (or rather they made it seems so!!!) that they literally CREATED a demand for their products. No wonder Steve Jobs has been dubiously credited of being able to talk his way to people’s wallet.

Probably it is time to rewrite the definition of marketing to make it more inclusive!!!

Posted by: Rocky Paul