What Does It Take to Develop a Successful Brand Positioning - Assignment Example

Brand Marketing: Building A Strong, Lasting Bond Between Brand and Buyer Introduction Branding in another context is defined as "to burn or impress a mark upon with a hot iron, to distinguish by a similar mark, or to mark permanently." Brand marketing seeks to achieve the same effect on consumers, which also has to do with a distinguishing and permanent mark. But instead of hot irons, brand marketing burns its mark upon consumers by creating impressions that make the brand stand out among so many brands in the market competing for their attention. This paper discusses what it takes to develop a successful brand positioning by describing a brand personality, the common characteristics and attributes of the more successful brands and the role and nature of brands as they relate to the need to reinforce and sustain a brand's image over time. 1. Brand Positioning Question: How does a company develop its brand positioning The primary goal of brand positioning is to build a strong and longer-lasting relationship between the brand and buyer. With so many brands out there competing for consumer's attention, this takes some doing indeed. This makes brand positioning an unenviable exercise of communicating in an "over-communicated" society, whose objective is to let your stand out in the din of marketing activities. You may have an excellent product in your hands, manufactured in the most innovative process, but this does not guarantee success in the present-day market where image and symbols are more important than process, product quality or need. The symbolic meanings of brand include prestige, status and personality. For a company to develop its brand positioning effectively, it must project an image that has these symbolic meanings of brand. A brand is made up of the name, logo and other visual elements like images, fonts, color schemes, and symbols. All these are part of brand image, a symbolic construct created within the minds of people, which consists of all the information and expectations associated with a product or service. In developing a brand positioning strategy, the logical first step is visibility. The organization needs to give its brand maximum visibility and this entails a lot of expense and effort, such that brand positioning is not for top management and CEOs who are overly concerned with costs. While making the brand visible, there are 6 suggested strategies of brand positioning that the company can take up: 1. Link the brand to a particular need. The brand should be presented as an answer to a consumer need that has not been adequately served by existing brands. 2. Associate the brand with a pleasant mood. People want escape from the stresses of modern living, so any brand that evokes ugly and unpleasant moods is likely to rate low in consumer preferences. 3. Make the brand appeal to subconscious motives. Marketing techniques that are indirect and subtle make people think, contrary to those that are too simple and direct. 4. Condition the consumers' mind to prefer the brand through a reward system. A reward system may come in the form of giveaways, taste tests and similar promotional activities. 5. Provide attractive models for consumers to emulate. The company may sign up movie stars and beauty queens as its brand icons for such brands as personal care products, who will endorse the brand in all its ads. For consumer brands targeting men, high-profile athletes are appropriate as brand icons. 6. Break through the known perceptual and cognitive barriers to consumer preference. These barriers may have something to do with culture, such that a product designed for Western consumers will have little appeal to Asians. 2. Brand Personality Question: How can a cereal manufacturer use the brand personality theories to solve a problem regarding a new brand of breakfast cereal it has developed that it wants to give a brand personality distinct from its other cereal products The best way for this cereal company to solve its problem is by giving its new cereal brand a distinctive personality, such as making it appear new and different from its existing products. Personality is one of the symbolic meanings of brand, the others being prestige and status. Brand personality is the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Brand personality can suffer if the organization gets involved in incidents that distort the image that it endeavors to projects. For example, Nike, which promotes itself as defender of the rights of lowly workers, suffered when it was accused of using sweatshop labor in its Third World plants. The same thing happened to Coke, whose homey image was shot to pieces when spoiled Coke products downed many people in Belgium in 1999. In choosing a brand personality, the company may want its cereal product to be known as a local or global brand. According to the brand personality theory, some products are suitable for globalization but need to be localized if they are rooted in local taste, culture and physiology, such as food, household cleaning and personal care products. For example, McDonald's and KFC originally built their hamburger and fried chicken products, respectively, as local brands catering to American tastes and lifestyle but eventually the products transformed into global brands. One of the options available to subject company is to employ the composite brand strategy by combining two existing brand names to come up with a new product. This way, the shortcoming of one product is supplanted by the good qualities of the other product. Composite branding worked well for Kellog and Healthy Choice Cereal, and for Eggo and Special K frozen waffles. Another possible strategy is brand extension, in which the company promotes a new product by riding on the popularity of an existing product. This means that the company with a new brand of breakfast cereal takes advantage of the brand personality already achieved for an existing cereal product. A good example is the way Adidas successfully extended its prestige brand for men's athletic shoes to T-shirts and deodorants for men. The company should remember that brand is the sum total of all that is known, thought, felt and perceived about a company, its product or service. A corporate brand is targeted at stakeholders while a product brand focuses on customers. Since the breakfast cereal is a product brand, all the brand positioning strategies of the company need to be directed at consumers. These efforts are aimed to attract the attention of consumers by giving the brand a personality of its own through originality, creativity and differentiation. 3. Characteristics of Brands and Brand Differentiation Question: What are the characteristics and attributes common to successful brands Cite some examples. Lack of brand differentiation is one of the causes of the failure of 80 percent of US companies, according to one survey. Originality and differentiation are therefore the most common characteristics of successful brands. Generalization is gone together with product-driven marketing concepts and has been replaced by the consumer-oriented strategy of branding because of increasing competition. Such a marketing focus on customers calls for a high degree of creativity and brand differentiation. Other notable characteristics of successful brands include their: 1) insistence on innovation, 2) an effort to match the medium with the message, 3) the ability to think broadly, and 4) their partiality for selling products to smaller outlets. The first characteristic confirms that new and innovative products have strong appeal to consumers, and the second characteristic tells us that the message in a brand marketing campaign should fit the audience to which it is intended. So if an organization's target is the youth market, it has to use hip language and such. As for characteristic No. 3, there is an advantage in making a brand meet as many expectations as possible. For a manufacturer of household products, for example, it will work better if its products try to solve not just one but all household problems. The fourth characteristic relates to the current consumer trend of avoiding the hassles and high prices of big supermarkets in favor of convenience stores and the neighborhood grocers. So if the company manufacturers consumer goods, it should sell less to big retailers like Walter-Mart and more to smaller stores. If the target market is characterized by the qualities of nurturance, warmth, family orientation, the company should build an image according to these qualities. Among the successful brands with such a warm, caring and considerate image are Hallmark, Coke and Ford. If the target market evokes attributes of energy and youthfulness, the brand differentiation strategies used include irreverent ads, atypical logos and hip language. This accounts for the success of Virgin, MTV and Yahoo! Youth may in fact be the characteristic of your brand, which could appeal to both the young and the young at heart. Pepsi developed its brand personality by appealing to the young and the young at heart. Some companies differentiate their brand by projecting tenderness and caring. This will be attractive to those who desire these qualities. An example of this distinctive brand personality is Lux, with its soft, smooth and caring image. It reinforces this image by projecting the brand as the beauty soap of movie stars. These endorsers become the brand icons, whose presence helps identify the brand a mile away. In 2005, the Business Week magazine picked the top 100 most valuable brands worldwide and narrowed the count to 53 American, 37 European, seven Japanese and three South Korean brands. The US brands included American Express, Apple, Disney, Coke, Citi, Ford, GE, Gillette, KFC, McDonald's, Nike, Pepsi, Starbucks and Harley Davidson. Among the European brands were Mercedes Benz, BMW, British Airlines, British Telecom, Telefonica and Nestle. Of the successful Japanese brands, the standouts were Toyota, Mitsubishi and Canon, while the Korean brands were Samsung, LG Collins and Hyundai. The common denominator in the success of these brands is they did not build their brand on generalization but sought to be specific and focused. 4. The Role and Nature of Brands Question: Discuss how an organization can ensure the consistency of Its brand. To ensure the consistency of a brand, the organization should align the functions of its entire staff, the manufacturing, production and marketing units towards the attainment of its brand positioning goals. All the activities are harmonized and orchestrated for one single objective. Even the ways in which the organization's staff handle their telephone conversations and interact with customers are aligned towards this objective. The organization needs to decide if it wants to position its brand as a market leader, a challenger or a follower to the current market leader. Whatever its decision, this brand positioning should be understood and carried out among all stakeholders in the organization. The literature on brand marketing says IT systems can help guarantee the consistency of the brand experience throughout the organization but the wholesale replacement of the staff by technology may not be advisable. Even without technology, it is believed that making brand performance higher over time is possible by letting an organization's staff understand their brand's values, acquired better appreciation of their roles, and increase their commitment to delivering the brand promise. A more humanistic approach is necessary in corporate branding, which must be coupled with efforts to place greater emphasis on internal communication so that the staff fully appreciate their brand's promise and how the brand values should guide their behavior. Successful brands are characterized by participative approaches in which senior management provides guidance about the brand's values. If the vision for the brand is integrated with the organizational culture, and it is relevant and reinforcing, consistency of the brand-supporting behavior is enhanced, trust is built all around and there are higher levels of brand performance. The organization should steer clear of such incidents as the spoiled Coke products that made people sick in Belgium or the use of sweatshop labor that exploded in the face of Nike. If any of these things happen, the consistency of the brand is compromised and the organization will have to start all over again. This was exactly what happened to Tylenol when tampered specimens of the product killed people in the US in the 1960s, and to Union Carbide when a breakdown in its plant in India killed many workers. Read More