Marketing defines who you are and how you present yourself to potential customers. One of the most important elements of a successful marketing strategy is branding.
Branding is the long-term process of creating an experience tied to your company and consumption of products. This experience differs from person to person. It is therefore essential to define a target population based on specific demographic factors to make your branding efforts as efficient and effective as possible. Efficient branding is the creation of a positive perception of values and characters represented by the brand name that complements your target demographic. This process involves researching, developing and implementing brand names, brand marks and trade characters. But the effort is well worth it!
Benefits of Branding:
– Effective branding enables the easy and quick identification of the company and product in a sea of competitors
– Branding creates loyalty
– Branding allows the establishment of premium pricing
– Branding guides the development of new products by defining a clear-cut frame work consisting of your company’s values
– Consistent and well-executed branding increases sales
The above experience must be communicated well. Effective and efficient communication is key to reap the benefits of branding.You need to craft the messages you would like to be received and send it out to your target audience.
The brand’s character and target population refers to a specific mix of communication channels. Choosing sub-optimal channels wastes your valuable resources, because it is a delivery of the message to people who are not receptive. Additionally, choosing channels that create a derivation from the perception of the branding can have damaging effects on your brand and your sales, because your potential and real customers will have a harder time identifying themselves with your brand and ultimately you loose that brand loyalty every strives to achieve. Brand loyalty is what allows your company to establishing premium pricing for your products, but that kind of pricing is difficult if your customer isn’t there to support this increased pricing.
To sum up, aligning branding and communications is a challenging long-term process, but it is well worth it.
