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Brand Importance: What's in a Name?
The brand is perhaps the most important facet of any business, beyond the product, distribution, price or location. The brand of a company is its definition in the world, the name that identifies it to itself and to the market. A model can be beautiful, but without a name, she is just "that girl in that picture". Where would Norma Jean be without Marilyn Monroe, or who would imagine Coca-Cola as simply a soft drink manufacturer? A brand provides a concrete description for both customers and competitors, a name for a product or service to distinguish it from anything else. Bob may own a hobby shop, but trying to advertise as "The hobby shop that a guy named Bob owns down the street" is financial suicide. Each customer will have to describe the store, who Bob is, and what the store does whenever someone asks about it. This makes the process of recommending a good hobby store too much work for the average customer and too much work for a user searching for hobby stores on the Internet. A customer looking for Bob's Hobby Shop will find it easier if he knows how to refer to it as "Bob's Hobby Shop", and the customer can refer others to Bob's Hobby Shop by name, which increases potential advertising exponentially. .
Building a brand involves more than just choosing a catchy name and placing an ad in the newspaper: a brand is more than a unique series of letters that denote a particular product; a successful brand is a mnemonic trigger that makes a consumer feel a certain way when thinking about the brand. For cola-flavored drinkers, what's more appealing on a hot day: a cold cola or an ice-cold Coke? Coca-Cola has spent 100 years developing its particular brand of cola-flavored soda as both a refreshing beverage and a core representation of a market segment. Coca-Cola has used a combination of direct marketing, giveaway techniques, and cross-branding of various products to achieve maximum brand recognition and visibility not only in its immediately competitive market, but also in markets as diverse as racing cars. the Coca-Cola brand. and household items.
Brand loyalty is an integral part of building a brand, as consumers generally have a choice of products in the same market segment, so a successful business will find a way to get consumers to buy again. your product or return to your location. instead of going to a competitor. These brand-loyalty-building efforts can come in the form of coupons, incentives such as many supermarket chains' technique of "grocery discount cards" or "loss leaders," intended to entice consumers into the store, where they will hopefully purchase products along with the discounted rate at a higher profit rate. In exchange for these discounts and grocery cards, many companies collect information on shopping habits and average spending amounts, to better tailor advertisements and better target future promotional efforts. Once a consumer is hooked, brand loyalty tends to result in higher sales volume, plus loyal customers are less sensitive to price changes for their favorite brands (within reason, of course). , as well as less sensitive to competitive incentives. Studies have shown that it takes 5 times more money to win a customer than it does to retain one. That's 5 times more money than could have been spent on other things.
A brand is who your business is and what it's selling – it's as important as naming a baby and should take the same amount of effort to develop, but if done right, it can mature into a successful and profitable adult.
