BRAND STRATEGY MANAGEMENT MUST
When creating your brand strategy for a product or service it is important to perform a careful analysis to determine principal barriers that you may come in contact with. These barriers are also known as market conditions that can keep your product or service from achieving success.
For example they could include the following:[/b][/b]
Competition[/b][/b]
Timing[/b][/b]
Financing[/b][/b]
Location[/b][/b]
Lack of Demand [/b][/b]
In order to be prepared to face these obstacles or barriers it is important to spend time doing a careful analysis of your product or service. This analysis will assist you not only in the development of your brand, but also in the positioning of your product or service.
A careful and thorough analysis will assist you in answering the following questions:
Do you have a niche market? What problem does your product or service solve or need?
How should you determine the price of your product or service?
Who are your potential customers and where can you find them?
Who are your biggest competitors? What can you do better than them?
How should you advertise? Where will you find your target market? Will you use new media or traditional media?
Now that you have your questions where do you start your market analysis research? Starting your research is actually easier than you think, but it will take time. You will need to dedicate hours to this research in order for it to be useful and effective.
Let's start by visiting some very popular Internet websites that you can use for your market research:
Is there a great demand for your product or service? Find out by using Overture's keyword suggestion tool. By typing in key terms you can see how often your product or service is searched for on the Internet.
Who are your competitors? Investigate them online by using the Profusion Tool. This search tools enables you to drill down to your search topic and even has the ability to notify you when your competitor change or updates their website.
Kellogg has enjoyed nice success expanding the Special K brand. Among other things, its become almost a default product to buy for baby boomers when they get a bad cholesterol report from the doctor.
But as the food company readies a rollout of breakfast bars (good idea), and protein water (call the brand police), I think Kellogg will run up against what every ambitious consumer marketer eventually faces: a case of brand extension greed.
I’ve seen this movie before. Starbuck’s Jo magazine and CD burning stations, the $90,000 Volkswagen Phaeton, Everlast cologne, Coke Blak, Dell consumer electronics.
I can’t know that Special K water will flop. I haven’t even seen the advertising yet. And there have been some brand extensions, whose failure I would have bet the mortgage would fail, that have succeeded. Did anyone predict the success of Dannon bottled water?
But there is a mystique around vitamin and fortified water. And the big red Special K logo doesn’t quite cut it in my boomer circles. Now, if Kellogg undercuts the price of the hipper more happening brands and products in this segment, they might just get somewhere. I can only imagine the mark-up on “vitamin” or “protein” water.
Ideally, a good brand serves to enhance a sound infrastructure with a solid reputation. Branding is not a magic wand; it cannot provide a quick fix to a company’s problems or compensate for any shortcomings. Branding will help very little if your internal operations and cultural personality are opposite what you are trying to convey to the outside audience. Your internal brand personality is just as important as the external message. The average customer is not going to purchase a product or service without feeling comfortable with the company offering it.
Consumers have become alert to the “fluff” in advertising. They are also on the lookout for companies that outright lie. When-not if – the public finds out it has been deceived, the company in question will have to deal with a backlash-and the damage may very well be permanent. The best way to maintain good public relations during the brand building process is to run an ethical business. Public relations involve sharing information with the public, and that creates problems when you have something to hide. So…make sure you’re not running your brand in a way that requires you to keep secrets from any of your publics-customers, employees, shareholders, and so on.
No matter how persuasive your ad campaign or how hard-working your sales staff may be, neither can move an inferior product, coupled by a poor image, off the shelves. If a company does not does not live up to consumer expectations, negative word-of-mouth will eventually be its undoing. An eye-catching logo that represents an uninspired company or a substandard product will be quickly sniffed out by savvy buyers. In this case, branding can work to drive customers away.
In destination branding symbolic properties of brands matters more than its functional properties according to consumers and crucial to have a greater and sustainable competitive advantage. To promote destination brands companies usually go for experiential marketing campaigns. Value added services also enhance a destination brand and generate a positive word-of-mouth. Furthermore, like functional and symbolic capabilities, heritage and values, and Psycho-social match counts for destination branding. It is a kind of branding that can be controlled through target consumers’ personality profile and unique traits.
A brand which is widely known in the marketplace acquires brand recognition. Where brand recognition builds up to a point where a brand enjoys a critical mass of positive sentiment in the marketplace, it is said to have achieved brand franchise. One goal in brand recognition is the identification of a brand without the name of the company present.
When creating your brand strategy for a product or service it is important to perform a careful analysis to determine principal barriers that you may come in contact with. These barriers are also known as market conditions that can keep your product or service from achieving success.
For example they could include the following:[/b][/b]
Competition[/b][/b]
Timing[/b][/b]
Financing[/b][/b]
Location[/b][/b]
Lack of Demand [/b][/b]
In order to be prepared to face these obstacles or barriers it is important to spend time doing a careful analysis of your product or service. This analysis will assist you not only in the development of your brand, but also in the positioning of your product or service.
A careful and thorough analysis will assist you in answering the following questions:
Do you have a niche market? What problem does your product or service solve or need?
How should you determine the price of your product or service?
Who are your potential customers and where can you find them?
Who are your biggest competitors? What can you do better than them?
How should you advertise? Where will you find your target market? Will you use new media or traditional media?
Now that you have your questions where do you start your market analysis research? Starting your research is actually easier than you think, but it will take time. You will need to dedicate hours to this research in order for it to be useful and effective.
Let's start by visiting some very popular Internet websites that you can use for your market research:
Is there a great demand for your product or service? Find out by using Overture's keyword suggestion tool. By typing in key terms you can see how often your product or service is searched for on the Internet.
Who are your competitors? Investigate them online by using the Profusion Tool. This search tools enables you to drill down to your search topic and even has the ability to notify you when your competitor change or updates their website.
Kellogg has enjoyed nice success expanding the Special K brand. Among other things, its become almost a default product to buy for baby boomers when they get a bad cholesterol report from the doctor.
But as the food company readies a rollout of breakfast bars (good idea), and protein water (call the brand police), I think Kellogg will run up against what every ambitious consumer marketer eventually faces: a case of brand extension greed.
I’ve seen this movie before. Starbuck’s Jo magazine and CD burning stations, the $90,000 Volkswagen Phaeton, Everlast cologne, Coke Blak, Dell consumer electronics.
I can’t know that Special K water will flop. I haven’t even seen the advertising yet. And there have been some brand extensions, whose failure I would have bet the mortgage would fail, that have succeeded. Did anyone predict the success of Dannon bottled water?
But there is a mystique around vitamin and fortified water. And the big red Special K logo doesn’t quite cut it in my boomer circles. Now, if Kellogg undercuts the price of the hipper more happening brands and products in this segment, they might just get somewhere. I can only imagine the mark-up on “vitamin” or “protein” water.
Ideally, a good brand serves to enhance a sound infrastructure with a solid reputation. Branding is not a magic wand; it cannot provide a quick fix to a company’s problems or compensate for any shortcomings. Branding will help very little if your internal operations and cultural personality are opposite what you are trying to convey to the outside audience. Your internal brand personality is just as important as the external message. The average customer is not going to purchase a product or service without feeling comfortable with the company offering it.
Consumers have become alert to the “fluff” in advertising. They are also on the lookout for companies that outright lie. When-not if – the public finds out it has been deceived, the company in question will have to deal with a backlash-and the damage may very well be permanent. The best way to maintain good public relations during the brand building process is to run an ethical business. Public relations involve sharing information with the public, and that creates problems when you have something to hide. So…make sure you’re not running your brand in a way that requires you to keep secrets from any of your publics-customers, employees, shareholders, and so on.
No matter how persuasive your ad campaign or how hard-working your sales staff may be, neither can move an inferior product, coupled by a poor image, off the shelves. If a company does not does not live up to consumer expectations, negative word-of-mouth will eventually be its undoing. An eye-catching logo that represents an uninspired company or a substandard product will be quickly sniffed out by savvy buyers. In this case, branding can work to drive customers away.
In destination branding symbolic properties of brands matters more than its functional properties according to consumers and crucial to have a greater and sustainable competitive advantage. To promote destination brands companies usually go for experiential marketing campaigns. Value added services also enhance a destination brand and generate a positive word-of-mouth. Furthermore, like functional and symbolic capabilities, heritage and values, and Psycho-social match counts for destination branding. It is a kind of branding that can be controlled through target consumers’ personality profile and unique traits.
A brand which is widely known in the marketplace acquires brand recognition. Where brand recognition builds up to a point where a brand enjoys a critical mass of positive sentiment in the marketplace, it is said to have achieved brand franchise. One goal in brand recognition is the identification of a brand without the name of the company present.