Manage-Wise

Brand building—a curtain raiser

“Brand building is the establishment and improvement of a brand’s identity, including giving the brand a set of values that the consumers wants, recognizes, identifies with, and trusts.” “Values developed in the process of brand building include psychological, physical, and functional properties that consumers desire and should always identify a property that is unique to that brand.”

From the definition it can be drawn that physical, psychological and functional properties form the parts in the brand building process. Apart from the physical product, its attributes, its perceived quality and performance and its functionality, brand building embraces certain psychological and emotional aspects. These psychological and emotional aspects convey something unique to the brand and can only be built over a period of time. Many air passengers perceive that some flights are safe to travel, some shoppers perceive few stores are cheap, some drinks are refreshing, some bikes are rugged, some cars are elegant etc. Likewise, over a period of time customers build emotional relationships with the brands beyond functional relationships. Hence, they do not purchase product or service but their emotional connection with the brand.

Brand auditing

The process of brand building starts with auditing the target market needs, preferences and understanding their perception about the company. Brand auditing also embraces competitors activities and employees.

Auditing these three groups (customers, competitors and employees) should lead to the definition of vision statement. Managements, first, have to define their vision statement, how they want to build their identity and where they want to position their offerings vis-à-vis competition. Brand identity signifies the desired brand image of the company with the targeted customer groups and other stakeholders that the company wants to build its image.

This vision statement has to be translated into the brand offerings by designing tangibles and intangibles that the company wants to offer to the targeted market. This stage is followed by brand implementation phase wherein the company fine tunes its offerings and the same is communicated quite effectively to the targeted sections. However, strong brands can only be built by following an integrated approach to communicate the brand to the targeted market and other stakeholders. In order to communicate the company’s brand to them, companies use various communication tools, such as advertising, personal selling, publicity, etc.

Communication tools

Advertising is the most suitable tool for consumer goods whereas personal selling is appropriate for industrial goods and publicity is the most trusted communication channel for both the types of goods, as it does not involve any paid source and identity. When it comes to building the institutional image, advertising has a great role to play. Moreover, advent of new technologies and state-of-art technologies particularly those related to digitalization of the media, animation, Internet and web technologies have a long lasting impact on advertising.

There is an increasing trend in communicating the brand to all the stakeholders and to the consumers indirectly by using Corporate Social Responsibility and Cause-Related Marketing. Many big corporate houses are investing heavily in social good and in communicating this to the stakeholders in order to have everlasting brand image both internal and external to the organization. Following the environmental and safety standards, pollution control measures in manufacturing the products and services and showing equal enthusiasm in communicating this to stakeholders has occupied the top priority on the corporate communication agenda for many bigwigs. For example, this paper is manufactured through recycled papers and reduced usage of HCFCs and emission of pollutant gases.

At the same time, the role of charities in building brand image particularly institutional brand image cannot be undermined. Microsoft is the best example in this category. Running schools for underprivileged sections of the societies, building up hospitals, saving the people from natural hazards etc., are being highlighted by many corporate either directly or indirectly as part of this exercise. Building new houses for earthquake victims and tsunami affected people and highlighting these accomplishments through their ads and publicity campaigns is one of the trends in brand building.

Building brand image

Some companies exclusively depend on events and sponsorships to build their image. Red Bull Drink sponsor extreme sports events such as motor racing, ski jumps, skate boards etc.

Celebrity endorsement and public relations as per the many branding experts become the future for brand building through corporate communications. The trend of using experts and celebrities of other fields such as sports people and film actors/actresses is picking up particularly for brands in cosmetics, luxury items, and fashion products. Sports people are, increasingly, used to build brands among the items like the shoes, watches, clothes etc. Film actors/actresses are used to build brands of cosmetics, perfumes, clothing items. Using doctors, engineers and architects in building image for tooth pastes and construction material and Nike and Adidas using prominent sports people representing different sports. Timex and Rolex using celebrities and shaving equipment manufacturers using sports people fall into this category.

Logos and mascots also do wonders for corporate in building their image among users. Nike and Intel spending heavily on designing and building logos and mascots for immediate identification and attention among end users demonstrate the impact of effective usage of logos and mascots in building long-term value for brands.

Below the line advertising methods, such as, effect of the word of mouth and building buzz through effective utilization of opinion leadership is catching up trend for various products. Starting clubs for enthusiastic drivers of rugged bikes and automobiles, community magazines, starting business blogs and blogs for likeminded groups, using opinion of beer tasters, fall into this category. Harley-Davidson, BMW, New Belgium Brewing etc. also fall into this category.

Excerpt from ‘Brand Building: New Dimensions’ by A V Bala Krishna. Published by Icfai University Press