A brand has a vital role in a company/organization. Brand is one important element that can reflect and even determine whether the business of a company/organization can continue to grow or will be lost in time. Brand existence becomes more important when we are marketing a product with low involvement and limited decision making where consumers tend to have low knowledge about the product and just rely on the their own perception to define the quality of the product.
The following points are some simple benchmarks a brand should consider:
1. A good brand should have a focus: a strong brand has a strong focus on a product/business (or product/business categories that are still interconnected). Therefore, the positioning built becomes sharper and does not confuse the consumers (or other stakeholders).
2. A good brand should be easy to relate: If we want to develop our product/organization and want to build it as a brand, then it would be better if we choose a name or a symbol that is easy to remember and pronounce but still has a strong relevance to business philosophy and focus.
3. A good brand should be consistent: In brand management, we are familiar with brand manual. By regulating the font style, size, and color in detail, a brand manual takes its role to determine how a brand can be consistently presented. It is done in order to maintain the consistency of a brand and the meaning it conveys.
4. A good brand should be trusted: Usually what is promised by a brand will be reflected in the tagline or slogan that serves as the brand “booster”. Although it seems simple, the promise must be kept consistently to build consumers’ “trust”. Well, it is often misunderstood that a brand scope is limited only to the tangible (image) side while to build trust, the intangible (culture) side must also be built.
Now we know how we can simply see the power of a brand. The four points above are brand aspects that we can implement through a good and proper brand management. A brand management begins with a research to obtain information necessary to align brand strategy focus with the strategy of the company/organization, build the image relevant with stakeholders, maintain the consistency of brand image and ultimately bring the meaning to life so as to make it trusted and not merely a slogan.
For example, we want to have a brand bearing the attribute “easy”. As the consequence, the “easiness” should be obvious and felt in all its aspects; easy to understand, easy to reach, easy to solve and easy to do any other things. To realize the easiness, the attribute “easy” should be infused in all elements ranging from the products, personnel’s, procedures, processes, services, and any other elements so that consumers would experience “easiness” in everything.
How to make all elements in the company infuse and execute the “easy” attribute is by making “easiness” an integral part of the corporate culture. The attempt to integrate the culture into all the elements is called the cultural transformation process that is very important to be carried out as an internal branding process and becomes the solution to external branding (or external communications) that we are working on. If both are synchronized, then the brand is considered to be successful in building trust.
Pictures sources: http://valueacceleration.wordpress.com, http://sparka.com.au
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