Brands & Branding Mechanism

Branding is one of the most important strategies. Every business needs branding but if you look deeply into it you will realize that brands with good branding strategies are more approachable. Branding itself is an advertising tool that bring people more close to your business.

“Branding is a promotion of a particular product by means of advertising and distinctive design.”

Branding is misunderstood by many people in general, as branding is not only a brand image but it also creates customer values and helps in creating and maintaining competitive advantages. In other words, Branding explains the highlighting of what you are offering differently. It’s a perception in people’s mind and through these perceptions you can emotionally and psychologically connect to your customers. As one well-respected marketer once said, “Products are created in the factory, but brands are created in the minds.”

Branding creates difference in terms of adding values and connecting with people by all means but it also has four basic key elements;

• Design
• Message
• Use of multiple channels
• Content types

Brands use two different strategies involving 6 elements in order to build brand equity or to maintain brand equity. There are 3 major elements every brand should consider when building brand equity (offensive strategy).

1. Memorability – an element that helps in achieving high level of brand awareness.
2. Meaningfulness – brand awareness need to be meaningful in terms of product category and keeping in mind the benefits and attributes of the brand.
3. Likability – this element bring fun in the brand awareness, interesting colors and good story-line can emotionally connect people with the product.

The below 3 elements are considered when maintaining brand equity.

1. Transfer'ability – it brings brand equity to new products of the brand in the line extensions and adds brand equity across geographical boundaries and market segments.  
2. Adaptability – it’s a flexible brand element and it is easy to keep up changing according to customer liking.
3. Protect’ability – that all the content should be legally protected. Brand elements need to be chosen in a ways that is legally protected with legal bodies.

Branding needs strategies so that companies can attracts the target customers. There are 9 steps involved in brand strategy.

1. Consider business strategy – before starting any business companies make business strategies which help them to regulate on product life cycle.
2. Identify target clients – an important aspect in any business is to target your clients so that it would be easy for any company to know how to brand their products.
3. Research target clients – research is very important before doing anything in the market. Firstly target client’s needs to be researched and later to be targeted according to their likes and dislikes.
4. Develop brand positioning – companies needs to keep in mind where and how to position their products in terms of Geographic’s.
5. Develop messaging strategy – companies need to build a strong message in order to attract its customers. Message should be in a way that can be understandable to the customers. It should be descriptive.
6. Develop name, logo and tagline – these essential needs to be so catchy that will stay in customers mind for log. Names should be short enough to remember like in 3 words. Tagline should be catchy.
7. Develop content marketing strategy – the content in the message should be no so brief that make the customer boring and should not be less that the customers don’t get anything related to the product.
8. Build marketing toolkit – build marketing toolkit so that people can know what and how you are working. It would be easy for the customers to keep a close look of what exactly the company is delivering.
9. Implement, track and adjust – all the tools need to be up to date. And customer can track their products they have ordered.

Branding is very important, as without branding your products or services won’t last in the market for long run.

So now, you have the tips and tricks of how you can brand you products. Just bring your own creativity in all these point to make it unique for yourself. 

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