Brand Building Process:-How to build a brand ?

What is a brand & how is it important?

A brand  is a name, term, design, symbol, or other feature that distinguishes one seller’s product from those of others. its importance lies in the fact that it provides the assurance to customer of the product quality & removes the risk associated with the purchase

Brand building-How to approach ?

There are six steps in the branding process

Familiarity:

Does customer know what category your brand is in?

Does customer know which category your brand operates?

There are 2 things here. First is clarity to customer. Customer should know what the brand stands for.Second is strength of communication of what is stands for. Basically customer will be clear about the brand only if brand identity has been properly established

Differentiation

Once familiarity has been established for the brand, next basic step should be that your offer should be different from your customers. If your offer is same as your customer why will your customer pick you?

There are basically 2 ways to achieve differentiation

First one is to perform above all on any important dimension so that your USP becomes clear to customer. But as manufacturers are becoming swifter in copying each other, this is becoming tougher.Second way is to find a unique way to express an important attribute. You express an attribute in a particular way that you own it up better than your competition

Relevance

It basically means that Your brand is meeting customer needs-rationally & emotionally & is an acceptable price.It is more about type of product or service that is offered than about how well that promise is delivered. Lack of relevance means your brand cannot get into consideration set of customer.Examples can be  Am I interested in handset which has 2 rear camera?Am I interested in having TV which has internet features?             Relevance is tougher one for brands to achieve and one of biggest levers of brand equity.it sets up a maximum potential for a brand, in terms of number of people who would consider buying it

Performance

This is mainly functional.How does the brand do the job for which it’s bought?It looks obvious that better performance is what every brand needs & that is what is expected by customer. But the expectations of performance have become flexible over last few years. Nowadays own labels of supermarkets is seen competing with big brands on the same shelf. Now any brand can be good quality. We are less seduced by status & distinguish between functional quality & style

 Empathy

This is next level of performance where emotional connection is made with a customer. Bonding is another word that can be used to describe this. In this social era brands are seen to be more accessible to customer, talking to him on a daily basis & becoming a part of his personal life. Brands are now more and more coming to equal terms with customer and communicating from that perspective

Popularity

Whereas performance & empathy is based on self assessment. This is what customer perception of other people’s opinions. This is a important brand building level since it gives customer a security of choosing a brand. “All those other people can’t be wrong”. This makes it a practical & quick decision. Examples of brands using this are British airways:-The World’s favorite airline

All these are attitudes that act as blocks in brand build ing process. Though it’s unrealistic & quite mechanical to assume that customer will be calculating all & adding up a score to determine equity of a brand, but it’s safe to assume that customer does make some conscious or unconscious evaluation of same before purchase and therein these attitude building blocks come into play.