All posts by : paulinajohn

What do you need to know in transforming your product or business into a brand?

Now that you understand what your brand personality is, different types of brand architecture to adopt and how your branding process affects brand equity and value, we will round up our branding series with what you need to know when you are finally putting your structure together to grow your business or product into a brand. You want to build a reputable and strong brand? Look no further because we have got you covered.
Building a brand may seem difficult and intimidating but after reading this, it becomes way easier. Now let’s get going.

Benefits of having a strong brand include;

• It encourages customer loyalty
• It connects customers emotionally, because they share the same value and beliefs as the brand
• It gives you an ideal platform from which to extend your offering or range.

5 Steps in building a strong brand.

1. Start by defining your brand: defining your brand entails knowing what your business is all about, reviewing the products or services you render , pinpoint the space it covers in the market and researching the emotive and rational needs of your customers.
2. Dig into your current identity: A better understanding of your current brand will position you in a better way to building you brand identity and research ways of how your customers perceive your brand to be, this is will help you further in building your brand because your brand has to share your customers belief and values.
3. Complete your brand strategy: Strategize on where you want your brand to be and the necessary steps in achieving your aim. This entails details such as mission, purpose, Vision , brand voice, personality, logo, colour and so on.
4. Identify your competitors: This is a very important step in building your brand, know your competitors and what they offer, make your brand a unique identity for your customers to see the difference.
5. Design your individual elements: Your elements are what defines your uniqueness and this include colour, trademark, logo, photography, illustration, design system, etc.

Building a brand requires having a lot of insights about your product and those that need it. It can be daunting but if you set your mind at it, you definitely can achieve it. A worth-the-while digital agency like inclide will definitely make your brand building journey easier.

Talk to us now, get instant reply and the best of brand consultation services for your business.

How do you find this post? Informative? Drives you towards taking progressive action for your business? Let us know in the comment section.

To view brand equity and brand value as the culminating effects or the measures of branding effectiveness is not out of place. With these two measures, you can tell if a company’s whole branding process has been successful and promises long term benefits or not.

For brand equity, it is concerned with how you have set up your brand to look in the eyes of your customer while brand value is about the financial stance that results from this positioning your brand currently has in the eyes of your customer, such that if anyone is to buy the brand, this financial effect will be the determine factor. If consumers find your brand highly valuable, then whoever may be looking to buy your brand accepts it as such and vice versa.
In continuation of our branding series, we will discuss these two key factors of branding in details and, en devour to establish the relationship between them and how that could specify the success or failure of your branding process. Let’s begin with brand equity.

BRAND EQUITY

Brand equity refers to how the branding process has positioned the product in the eyes of the customer. I.e when considering brand equity, you want to ask questions like, “has the branding process made the product become a household name among its targeted customers? especially in line with awareness and credibility when put side by side with a customer’s need I.e., does it meet a key customer need?”
Brand equity also involves brand association. How has the brand related with it’s consumers so far? has the brand at any time, created a negative impression or feeling in the mind of the consumer towards it? The customer’s report on this really matters. Let’s say a product is branded to be 5 times more effective than its conventional fellows. If the consumer does not find it so, then the brand personality or attributes attached to that product is seen by the consumer as a lie. A customer may not like how a product functions or is not connected with the brand personality of the product, or even the values of the organization. It is not surprising to see the nature of customer service in some organizations causing current customers to leave and/or preventing potential customers from doing business with them. The Branding process, no matter how good, may not be able to help salvage this situation rather, such situations pose huge threats to the branding process itself.

Then, brand equity also involves customer loyalty. The simple explanation to this is that, a customer would rather purchase and use your product even when there are less costly options, because he/she believes that your product is quality. Infact, customer loyalty is to the point where the customer will not even bother considering other options or puting prices side by side at all. He/she already believes your product is superior. I for one believe that Ariel contains more bleach property than any other detergent so, whenever I want my whites to come out sparking after washing, I do not mind the product being more expensive than its counterparts, whether from the same or different organizations. We proceed to brand value.

BRAND VALUE

Consider a product which does the exact thing you bought it for and, no matter how many times you’ve had to buy it, it serves that very purpose with the same high efficiency. If there were 10 persons including you, who perceived this product the way you do, and you all were in the position to advice a closely acquainted business man looking at buying over that product to his company, I can guess readily that if you all were to be genuine in your appraisal of the product, based on how relevant it has proven to be to each of you individually, the buyer can begin to see the product as a goldmine and be willing to beat off as many competitors by offering the right price for its purchase. Therefore, brand value, implies the financial stature of a particular brand. I.e how much profit can the brand generate? If someone wants to buy the brand, how much will it cost the person? it is the financial gains/loss of effective/ineffective branding as the case may be. So, brand value is purely the money aspect of the branding process.
Brand value becomes expedient during mergers and acquisitions. The amount paid to buy the brand in question is dependent on the unit of cash flow that it presently brings the company due to degree of customer patronage and market share. If unit of cash flow is high, the brand sells off at a higher price. If otherwise, the brand sells of at a lower price.

The Brand equity-Brand value Synergy.

There is a meeting point between this two qualities of the branding process because brand equity can very much determine brand value. When brand equity is positive, that is, when consumers bear a high regard of the brand, there’s higher patronage thereby, increasing market share for the brand. This results in more revenue generated for the company and consequently, more unit of cash flow from that particular brand. For a thriving brand like this, the situation during mergers and acquisitions, for both buying and selling company is usually win-win. The selling company is able to cash out at a very profitable price and the buying company too is at an advantage to leverage on the already existing positive vibes among consumers concerning the brand, not only in the marketing strategy for the brand but also for their other products/brand. For brands with negative brand equity, the situation is, almost always otherwise.

You want my advice on how to effectively prevent these branding errors that could grow into disasters? Entrust all your digital marketing needs into the hands of a reliable digital marketing agency like Inclide.com and see how your business runs with top-notch effectiveness. Click on the ‘contact us’ bottom for a conversation with our 24/7 service representative. If you have been following our latest posts on branding, having read this one, you should be able to establish clearly how interwoven the elements of the branding process are and how one foot put right or wrong can make it mar the entire structure. If you haven’t, you’re just a click back to each ‘previous post’.

How did you find this week’s post? informative and right for your business? Let’s get your opinion in the comment section.
See you next week for another dose of wellness for your business’s online presence.

As a build up on our last post, which was about branding and brand personality, we delved deeper into understanding the impact of a change in brand personality vis-a-vis attributes, logo, or any other form of identity perceived by the customer to be unique to a brand or product, without proper consideration and analysis, and we stumbled on the catching stories of two different brands, Snapple and Starbucks, who had their fingers burnt in the brand personality change act.
And since we have your business at heart, in this post, we will be sharing with you the mistakes that were made, and how situations were remedied, for your learning pleasure. So, let’s begin with Snapple!.

The Snapple merger blunder.

The Snapple drink had an interestingly quirky personality. Comes in 52 or more different flavors, contained in a glass bottle with a top, that made a pop! sound, which says it’s going to be a good drink!. When Snapple started around New York City and its environs, the drink was first found in mom-and-pop stores, then it began to get into grocery stores.
The drink came at a good price and gave customers that ‘you-and-me’ feel of something you share with friends, family and loved ones. It was devoid of ‘corporate’ and was purely about real people. They had a commercial with a personality named ‘Wendy’, such that Wendy came on camera and read letters from customers about Snapple, what is called customer review today. So, it was like social media before social media.
Around 1988, sales skyrocketed and the brand grew exponentially when they started using their price, place, product and people formula. But they began to find it difficult to keep up with sales, demand, suffered stock out issues and, tried as they could, they couldn’t sustain the growth.

Around 1994, Quaker, which owned its own drink brand called Gatorade (a sports drink) bought Snapple, to save the day, it seemed. Quaker was a more popular brand so, according to Gatorade, they were going to leverage on the wide distribution system that Quaker already provides, in ensuring that Snapple is publicized. The plan was to merge both products to produce ‘the next big thing!’.
But it seemed that Quaker had failed to carefully consider and analyze their decision properly. Snapple had 52 or more flavours, Gatorade had only 8 flavours. Snapple is distributed door to door, Gatorade is distributed to storehouses. Snapple had dixie-peach as the endorsement, Gatorade had Michael Jordan. Hence, they were two brands with completely different personalities.
It would interest you to know that In the process of trying to merge these two brands, Quaker destroyed as much as 1.4 billion of value.
In 1996, Triac bought Snapple from Quaker, identified three wrong decisions and corrected them. They revamped the former Snapple advertising campaign by bringing back ‘Wendy’, they brought the quirky nature back, and made friends with mon-and-pop distributors again. So, in essence, they went back to the core of Snapple. According to them, Snapple is about the flavors, about real people, mom-and-pop distribution. This is what the customers think and this is what they will get.

Now, we move on to Starbucks!!.

Starbucks and the customer effect

Starbucks is an iconic brand found in 1971, in Seattle USA. Starbucks created a place for people to drink coffee outside their homes and offices, with a mission to ‘inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time’.
Expansion was global, rapid and resulted in new stores in various countries of the world. Starbucks offered their customers a relaxing and enjoyable experience in a special way by engaging them in casual and informal chats. But Starbucks would get into their customers’ bad books in a manner most unprecedented. During winter, specifically when Christmas is in the air, their mugs used to have the Santa art and color related graphic on them and their customers loved it as the cups represented the brand’s recognition of the season. Some schools of thought faulted this act and termed the Starbucks brand as being knitted in pagan festivals.

So, In 2015, the brand introduced a tone ombré cup having no seasonal symbol at all, with Starbucks saying that they decided to tell their holiday story with a purity of design.
The new design met most customers with shock and the brand faced huge criticisms, the height of it being that the company had no regard for Christmas. Although Starbucks explained that the cup was initially just about simplicity and not relating to the existence of Christmas, the following year saw the company presenting their customers with 13 red-and-white cups designed by customers – 13 women from 6 countries.
So, you want to get your analysis right before you change any identity form unique to your brand because it is what your brand means to the consumer. It is what they buy.
Treating all brands as the same and placing the opinion of the minor few ‘schools of thought’ above that of your customers, who are the major many, can be disastrous to brand personality, reduce market share, and, in the long run, brand value.