Branding is a major issue in product strategy. On the one hand, developing a branded product requires a huge long-term investment, especially for advertising, promotion, and packaging.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

TO

BRAND MANAGEMENT

AND

IMC STRATEGY

1.        INTRODUCTION

Branding is a major issue in product strategy. On the one hand, developing a branded product requires a huge long-term investment, especially for advertising, promotion, and packaging.

Brand Management

If a brand is not effectively managed then a perception can be created in the mind of your market that you do not necessarily desire. Branding is all about perception. Brand management recognizes that your market's perceptions may be different from what you desire while it attempts to shape those perceptions and adjust the branding strategy to ensure the market's perceptions are exactly what you intend.

What is brand?

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of these, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.

The word "brand", when used as a noun, can refer to a company name, a product name, or a unique identifier such as a logo or trademark. Today's modern concept of branding grew out of the consumer packaged goods industry and the process of branding has come to include much, much more than just creating a way to identify a product or company.

Branding today is used to create emotional attachment to products and companies. Branding efforts create a feeling of involvement, a sense of higher quality, and an aura of intangible qualities that surround the brand name, mark, or symbol. In essence, a brand identifies the seller or maker. Whether it is a name, trademark, logo, or another symbol, a brand is essentially a seller’s promise to deliver a specific set of features, benefits, and services consistently to the buyers. The best brands convey a warranty of quality.

The level of marketing efforts depends on factors like product quality, size of the market, firm’s familiarity with market, firm’s resources, and growth of the market.

The benefits of a strong brand

Here are just a few benefits you will enjoy when you create a strong brand:

  • A strong brand influences the buying decision and shapes the ownership experience.

  • Branding creates trust and an emotional attachment to your product or company. This attachment then causes your market to make decisions based, at least in part, upon emotion-- not necessarily just for logical or intellectual reasons.

A strong brand can command a premium price and maximize the number of units that can be sold at that premium.

 

  • Branding helps make purchasing decisions easier. In this way, branding delivers a very important benefit. In a commodity market where features and benefits are virtually indistinguishable, a strong brand will help your customers trust you and create a set of expectations about your products without even knowing the specifics of product features.

  • Branding will help you "fence off" your customers from the competition and protect your market share while building mind share. Once you have mind share, you customers will automatically think of you first when they think of your product category.

  • A strong brand can make actual product features virtually insignificant. A solid branding strategy communicates a strong, consistent message about the value of your company. A strong brand helps you sell value and the intangibles that surround your products.

  • A strong brand signals that you want to build customer loyalty, not just sell product. A strong branding campaign will also signal that you are serious about marketing and that you intend to be around for a while. A brand impresses your firm's identity upon potential customers, not necessarily to capture an immediate sale but rather to build a lasting impression of you and your products.

  • Branding builds name recognition for your company or product.

  • A brand will help you articulate your company's values and explain why you are competing in your market.

2. Integrated Marketing Communications approach

A critical part of marketing is communications—and the most effective and productive way of managing this effort is through concept called Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). The four “Ps” from Marketing, but it is worth seeing how they relate to the four “Cs” from the customer’s perspectives. The first “P” is product, but really this is all about the customers’ needs and wants. Which goods and services customers are looking for, what are the features/benefits in demand, what might be unfulfilled needs? The second “P” is price, but in fact, this has more to do with the cost to the consumer. What is their perception of value, how much are they able/willing to spend? The third “P” is place (or distribution), but what this means is the convenience to the customer to obtain the product. Where will it be sold, are there distribution channels, is the process simple and secure? And last but not least, is promotion; this is how we communicate with our customers. To promote yourself effectively, you need to understand your customers and their perspectives.

There are many possible objectives for promoting an organization—create awareness, stimulate demand, identify prospects, retain customers, combat the competition, etc. Whatever the objective, a good rule of thumb is to remember that your promotional efforts should capture the customers’ attention, create interest, generate a desire and define an action to satisfy that desire—also known as AIDA.

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Integrated marketing communications is a way of looking at the whole marketing process from the viewpoint of the customer. It involves the coordination of all promotional activities—media advertising, direct mail, personal selling, sales promotion and public relations—to produce a clear, unified, consistent and compelling customer-focused message about the organizations and its product. Databases, the Internet, and other sources have enabled us together powerful information quickly. Therefore, marketing communications are less mass-market oriented (broadcast) and more segment-oriented.

An effective IMC process comprises the following steps:

Identify the target audiences—this requires a well thought out market segmentation ...

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