Marketing (branding) - Essay Example

Marketing (Branding) Branding is an integral aspect of marketing which is considered both as art as well as science within the discipline of marketing. Branding is art because it carries emotional, cultural and intangible values of business along with it and branding is also considered as science because branding is tough to fabricate and holds authenticated perspective of the business. Branding is essentially important for the endurance and triumph of the businesses. It is due to its relevance that comprehensive understanding and analyzing of the power of branding is required for managing the brands effectively and efficiently.

Two most important aspects of branding will depict its importance more precisely. Firstly, branding is an elementary method of strategizing a firms’ position within the market that involves the entire aspects of the firms. Although branding is a task of the marketing department, it cannot be kept restrained to that department alone. Secondly, a brand has to be the carrier of a firm’s value and at the same time the value has to be explained in such terms which can be adapted by the consumers (Randall, G.

, “Branding: A Practical Guide to Planning Your Strategy”). Branding as a Business Policy “Functions, differences, image and source” are considered as the four dimensions of brand that eventually shapes the essence of brands. The brand identification becomes strong as a result of uniformity among the above mentioned dimensions. If it happens that cohesion among the dimensions is not strong and any one dimension among those is sending ambiguous indications to the market, then the essence of the brand gets hampered as the customers perceive confusing notion about the brand (Randall, G.

, “Branding: A Practical Guide to Planning Your Strategy”). Source: (Randall, G., “Branding: A Practical Guide to Planning Your Strategy”). From the above brief discussion about brand and branding, it can be noted that if appropriately functioned, brands can accomplish five different tasks for the firms. The first task is the creation of identity that requires proper naming, compliance to legal security and devised fundamentals. Branding provides “shorthand summary” about the product that the customers preserve.

The third task to be performed by the brand and which branding must accomplish is that of the upholding of security. Security is in terms of providing assurance to the consumers that expected benefits will be received from the brand. The last but one important task to be derived from branding is that of differentiation which indicates that the brand should be able to distinguish itself from its rivals within the market, both nationally as well as internationally. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, branding should be able to provide value addition to the firms’ position which it represents along with added value to itself (Randall, G.

, “Branding: A Practical Guide to Planning Your Strategy”). Thus, by implementing the theoretical concept of branding in the practical world, branding can be considered as a concept of marketing which provides specific image of the product all over the world irrespective of the languages being used in the various regions of the world. In fact, names of the brands are itself a language for different parts of the world. For example, if a person in any region of the world talks about “Coca-Cola” or “BMW”, then he or she is well aware that the former represents a specific soft drink and the later represents a car.

The brand name should be created and evolved as such that it itself differentiates products of a particular company from that of the other company. The famous brands like that of the IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Colgate have all evolved from different parts of the world and are also spread across the globe. The similarity between these brands is that they are not used by translating into each and every local language of various regions of the world. They are such brands which enter a local market in the global scenario and become a component of the local languages.

This is the power of brand and branding strategy is the most important task for a marketing department as it creates and enhances the image of the businesses not only in the national market but also in the international periphery (Stuart, “The Branding of Business”). References Randall, Geoffrey. Branding: A Practical Guide to Planning Your Strategy Kogan Page Publishers, 2000. Stuart, Geoff. “The Branding of Business”. June 28, 2011. Pages, 2004.