Marketing Brand Policies - Essay Example

Before analyzing the different types of branding, it is important to understand the meaning and true significance of a branding policy. When a company introduces a product to the market, it must do so after shaping the product’s identity. They must treat the product as if it were being dressed for show, and then accordingly decide which attire would serve to impress the audience the most. This includes several small and large details, including several guidelines, procedures, and rules. When chosen wisely, all these factors interact to form the brand policy required to make the product a success in the market. At a superficial glance, the branding guidelines seem too related to the logo and the slogan of the advertising campaign. However, this includes several finer details, all of which form an important part of the branding guidelines. This includes the message that the brand portrays, the image that it wants to hold in the customer’s eyes, and keywords with which it might want to be associated (Lambert and Hair, 2011, pp. 200-249). For example, Johnson’s baby products are branded with specific details that help capture their essence. The packaging and advertisement colors are light, pastel colors, which resemble the colors of other baby products such as clothes, toys, and baby blankets. Furthermore, the advertisements show loving mothers with their happy children, using Johnsons and Johnson’s baby products. This is because the brand policy aims to create mental associations in their customer’s minds, which makes them link these products to their infants and their care. This is the image the company wants its products to have, and have thus tailored its brand policy accordingly (Gregory, 2004, pp. 114). Using this method, companies can design brand policies to maneuver their product’s market in the desired direction.

There are several different types of brand policies, which a marketer can adopt when introducing a new product to a market. Individual branding, corporate branding, and family branding are all distinct types of branding and tackle the issue of market positioning in their unique ways. Companies that already have well-established and highly popular brand names in the company may choose to use corporate branding when marketing a new product. This method utilizes the company’s brand equity to market its products, assuming that the product’s popularity will receive a boost if it has the company’s name attached to it. Disney’s branding is a popular instance of corporate branding. They produce a diverse range of products, ranging from entertainment media to children’s toys. Each of these products is branded with the brand name ‘Disney’, which has several advantages. One major advantage is that they can use one advertising campaign to market several different products, all of which are branded under the Disney logo. Another advantage is that loyal customers of Disney warmly receive even the new products, simply because of their association with the Disney brand (citeMAN Network, 2006). Due to all these advantages, a company might find it fruitful to use corporate branding.

While corporate branding helps sell several different and often unrelated products under a single brand name, family branding uses similar tools to market products, which are related in nature. Also known as umbrella branding, it helps a brand owner to sell different related products by linking their brand images and presenting them to the market under the same brand name. Indian brand Amul makes use of family branding, to sell its wide variety of dairy products like milk, butter, and cream (Heredia, 1999, pp. 140). It takes advantage of the fact that its customers are aware of how it masters the production of dairy products, and thus it introduces each new dairy product under that name so that the customers can be assured of the good quality even before buying it. This illustrates one of the largest advantages that family branding has, and is thus a popular branding method amongst established companies.

Despite the several advantages of corporate and family branding, some firms prefer to use individual branding to market and position their new products; this method of branding entails that each product is given its own, individual brand name, and image. Thus, they position each product differently in the market, and it is not associated with other products that the company may produce. This helps maintain a distinct and memorable identity for each product and helps position products differently when they have distinct product attributes. Proctor and Gamble is an example of such a marketer (Kotler, 2005, pp. 186). It markets a variety of products in distinct and unrelated ways, each under a different brand name.

These various methods of branding help a marketer tailor a specific and appropriate branding policy for each product at hand. They include several different factors in their evaluation, such as how popular the producer is in the market, the quality of products in a product range, and the unique selling propositions of different products produced by the same company; thus, the science of marketing moves one-step closer to depicting the needed strategies for each product at hand accurately.