Brand Building Process

BRAND BUILDING PROCESS

When an offering is branded, it is, in effect, standing up from the midst of commodity clutter and gets ready to be counted. What does proper branding entail? It requires the offerings to be built as strong brands over a period of time. What, then, is a strong brand? It can be defined as," A successful brand is an identifiable product, service, person or place, augmented in such a way that the buyers perceive relevant, unique, and added values which match their needs or aspirations more closely.

Furthermore, its success results from being able to sustain these added values in the face of competition. The above definition makes it clear that a brand is a distinctive identity that differentiates a relevant, enduring and credible promise of value associated with a product, service or organization and indicates the source of the promise.

Road Map to Brand Building

This implies serious investment of resources in brand building. While a significant part of this investment will be for communicating the brand values, the other part of this investment has to be put in creating customer -value oriented Strengths, which will be helping to create the meanings that the marketer wants to, associate with the brand in the customer's mind. Thus, road to customer recognition through branding puts the offering under twin pressure of responsibility.

Organizations must invest in improving the underlying elements enshrined in the brand like quality and service or cost reduction. Second, these values are going to be extensively communicated becomes the other prong of the pressure to live up to the claims made in the external communication. Fundamentally, this is how branding sets the organization on a path to achieve excellence.

In the market place, brand perception is never static but ever evolving. Competition, changing consumer context, external environmental forces all ensure that brand building is a continuous activity and there is no...