How To Manage Your Brand

1. How To Manage Your Brand Brand managementis imperative to the company’s long term strategy and thus and effective brand management goes a long way in the growth of the company. A good brand attracts loyal customers who are always coming back for more. Brand awareness is required to make the customers aware and engage, retain and keep them loyal to the brand/product. Strategies need to be evolving constantly and the means of distribution is changing fast. The opportunity for a brand to evolve is to harness the rise of social media. Today, internet is a powerful tool that gives the opportunity to make content and a product viral through YouTube marketing or even videos which can be uploaded for free on YouTube. Brands need to create an impression with the people that is long term because that is how they will achieve customer loyalty. The cost of maintaining customers who are loyal to the brand is way less than procure new ones. The strategies are varied for different set of company models. Word of mouth is one of the most effective strategies which ensure the product is heard about amongst people in large vicinity. Strategy is the key to success and both traditional and modern approaches can be applied to making the brand grow.

2. Individual branding is a highly beneficial proven strategy in which a large variety of products are branded separately under a parent brand. The greatest example of such a strategy execution is probably P&G which has many subsidiary brands like Gillette, Head & Shoulders, Olay etc., under it which in itself are brands. The risk is minimized as the parent company does not get hurt by the decisions of the separate brands. The sense of competition among brands is also heightened and the data collection and demographics is varied and helps across various sectors of the company. The positioning in the consumers mind is also varied. Multi product Branding is on the other spectrum of individual branding where a single brand name is used across various products. Companies like Samsung and Apple attract customer loyalty by leveraging the parent brand name across their various products. The investment in the brand management boosts the awareness of all the products of the brand. Thus, productivity is attained by promoting the brand name although it is risky because a single mishap can have an overall effect on the image of the entire brand. Sub-branding is an amalgamation of individual branding and multi product branding where the larger brands create large sub brands for product groups. An iconic example could be Honda and Acura being to separate brand names under Honda Company even though one is priced higher than the other. Co-branding is a suitable strategy where one brand harnesses the values and customer loyalty of another and vice versa. On various occasions Google has partnered with Samsung on various projects together. This allows each brand to benefit from the customer loyalty. Iconic brand is not a categorized strategy but it is used to build a persona of the brand. It allows the brand to create a long term perception of how the customer views the products of the brand. A large community can be built on just creating a strong brand persona. For example, Nike’s ‘Just do it’ tagline is one iconic tagline that every customer associates with who is into fitness or is working towards it. Social media is an upcoming tactic which is constantly changing. It is necessary to use core values to put the brands’ message across to the customer. One click of a button can change the perception of the entire brand in the customer’s eyes. For example, Amazon uses rating system to let the customers rate the products so it’s easier to make recommendations and purchase the products. Today so many brand management agencies are available in market, so you should choose better agency very carefully.