The brand marketing and branding principles that matter most for a business firm. Hence planning for the same means smartness, marketing planning not includes everything from the scratch till the top. Planning taking into consideration the consumers will prove to be a successful strategy. Providing what consumers want should be the main aim of marketing. A company's brand is the interpretation of its image wrapped up into a single graphic, name, logo, or slogan. Consumers buy goods and services, not only because of the quality or ability of a product to perform as promised, but because of emotions products and services evoke. Branding is all about promoting the right perception to a target audience, which will convince that audience of the advertiser's promise to bring comfort, safety, security, assurance, a sense of well being, or social acceptance. Effective corporate Internet branding actually positions companies in a more effective way than any other media. Corporate Internet branding is much more than mere advertising. It's about evoking positive perceptions and emotions, establishing relationships, and consistently building customer loyalty through the amazing power of the worldwide web.
Brand marketing strategy and business strategy are like the left and right hand.
Your brand promise must be evident through:
Internal service quality; which drives employee satisfaction and commitment
External service quality; which influences customer satisfaction and retention
FOCVS
A word using the original alphabet of the Roman Empire consists of five key elements.
F – First
O – Opposite
C – Category dominance
V – Visual hammer
S – Second Brands
While deciding the marketing plan conducting a SWOT can help you get insights about your plan and its validity.
Strength
Strengths describe the positive attributes, tangible and intangible, internal to your organization.
Strengths capture the positive aspects internal to your business that add value or offer you a competitive advantage
Weakness
This includes lack of expertise, lack of access to skills, inferior service offerings, or poor location; it may also include factors that aren’t your control as your weakness.
Opportunities
They depict the external factors that affect your business. Opportunities are external to your business. If you have identified “opportunities” that are internal to the organization and within your control, you will want to classify them as strengths.
Threats
A threat is a challenge created by an unfavorable trend or development that may lead to deteriorating revenues or profits. Competition – existing or potential – is always a threat.
Sample SWOT of marketing plan
Strengths
Knowledge. Our competitors are retailers, pushing boxes. We know systems, networks, connectivity, programming, all the Value Added Resellers (VARs), and data management.
Relationship selling. We get to know our customers, one by one. Our direct sales force maintains a relationship.
History. We’ve been in our town forever. We have the loyalty of customers and vendors. We are local.
Weaknesses
Costs. The chain stores have better economics. Their per-unit costs of selling are quite low. They aren’t offering what we offer in terms of knowledgeable selling, but their cost per square foot and per dollar of sales are much lower.
Price and volume. The major stores pushing boxes can afford to sell for less. Their component costs are less and they benefit from volume buying with the main vendors.
Brand power. Take one look at their full-page advertising, in color, in the Sunday paper. We can’t match that. We don’t have the national name that flows into national advertising.
Opportunities
Local area networks. LANs are becoming commonplace in small businesses, and even in home offices. Businesses today assume LANs are part of normal office work. This is an opportunity for us because LANs are much more knowledge and service intensive than the standard off-the-shelf PC.
The Internet. The increasing opportunities of the Internet offer us another area of strength in comparison to the box-on-the-shelf major chain stores. Our customers want more help with the Internet and we are in a better position to give it to them.
Training. The major stores don’t provide training, but as systems become more complicated with LAN and Internet usage, training is more in demand. This is particularly true of our main target markets.
Service. As our target market needs more service, our competitors are less likely than ever to provide it. Their business model doesn’t include service, just selling the boxes.
Threats
Volume buying and selling of computers as products in boxes, supposedly not needing support, training, connectivity services, etc. As people think of the computer in those terms, they think they need our service orientation less.