Since the 2000s, the concept of branding has changed dramatically. Branding isn’t just outdoor billboards. It’s also dealing with customers in tough situations or keeping a positive impression associated with your company.
The famous brand designer Walter Landor once said:
“Products are made in a factory, but brands are created in the mind.”
This is true, especially for startups. You can create a coherent strategy for your brand in part based on product quality and positive experiences. From a management perspective, branding is the backbone of a business’s performance because it demonstrates its value in a market.
There are three main views about branding from a management perspective. Most successful companies have applied them to the branding cultures that their team members used to deal with customers.
Let’s break down rational and emotional components:
If you are a car showroom owner, the rational component is the car quality or related services that your customers are looking for.
The emotional part is the impression you make on customers in the store. In general, rational components are what you have for customers, including products, service, maintenance, or promotion. The emotional aspect is how they feel after using your products or seeing your company brand.
Because we view branding from a management perspective, owners or managers must find the balance between the two. The balance is different at times because of many factors (including budget and customer behavior).
Back to the showroom example, you have to decide what aspect you spend improving with a limited budget. If you choose the rational element, you hire designers to improve the showroom appearance or choose better cars to sell. With the emotional option, you spend more on advertisements to get your customers back and attract new ones.
The ultimate goal of branding is that people look at your company name and associate it with trust. They’ll keep that association in their mind long after purchase or interaction, which is, in a way, a signal of successful branding. Therefore, you find the balance between rational and emotional components by understanding what your customers need the most at different times.
There is an easy tip for you to do that. Combine these two elements. When you choose better cars to sell, tell customers that they will have a better experience after using the products. If you invest in colorful advertising, prove that your cars are as great as the commercial when customers come to your showroom.
Brand managers called these two components a perceived quality which is “the impression of excellence that customer experiences about a product, brand or business, derived through sight, sound, touch, and scent.”
There are two ways to understand this concept.
The first one is by its definition. Brand equity is “a value premium that a company generates from a product with a recognizable name when compared to a generic equivalent.” In other words, you make your products or service memorable, quality, and reliable.
The other way to acquire the brand equity is finishing a process:
brand description => brand strength => brand value
A brand description is what the market needs from your company, including the 4 Ps (product, price, place, and promotion). After the first step, your brand could become more popular and impress customers, which builds up brand strength or brand loyalty. When your company has enough brand strength, it creates brand value which helps you gain profit in the long run.
From a management perspective, this second approach to branding is popular among big companies with enough budget to implement the 4 Ps or become popular in the market and reinstate their mission through branding.
Take Walmart, for example. Its brand description is low prices for customers. Walmart goes further by installing the brand description into the company’s culture, and even executives use economy tickets on business trips and share hotel rooms. Its general strategy is constantly negotiating with suppliers to have a super-low buying price and pass the bargain to customers. Even big companies have to rely on Walmart to stay on the shopping aisles because they cannot ignore the enormous number of Walmart shoppers.
By following the brand description for a long time, Walmart’s name is outstanding among rivals like Sears and Kmart, demonstrating the arrival of brand strength. These days, the brand value of Walmart is tremendous, with 10,500 stores in 24 countries.
A mission is what core value your company provides in the market, and vision is the tool or long-term plan to put your mission into reality.
Before coming up with any branding idea, you must ask yourself, “Will it fit the mission?” or “Does it make the vision more feasible?”
This perspective about branding is simple to understand but might be tough to implement. For example, you own a bookstore and have a low-budget plan to attract more customers post-pandemic.
Your mission is to create a brick-and-mortar environment for readers to enjoy and buy books. However, to bring customers in, you decided to make branding videos posted on social media, which boosts interaction effectively but may go against the brand’s commitment to brick and mortar.
Sometimes you should be flexible in approaching your customers but never forget your mission. In the bookstore example, you cannot be on social media forever because it goes against your mission. Those colorful videos on Tiktok or Facebook are just instruments to help you survive the pandemic and not represent your company value which must serve printed book lovers.
Branding is all about putting your name on a superior level that your customer will remember forever.
Although these two branding views are different in their name and elements, they are supposed to help the owners or managers formulate a successful branding strategy. Once again, you must remember the ultimate goal of branding is that people look at your company name and think trust.
When the economy returns to normal, many companies will need brand management to help carve out space in the market. The Aspire360 team is always ready to help CEOs with 1:1 coaching, bi-weekly mastermind, diverse expert network, and annual pitch competition.
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This article was written by Cao Huu Tin
Written by DesignCrowd on Friday, July 2, 2021
DesignCrowd is an online marketplace providing logo, website, print and graphic design services by providing access to freelance graphic designers and design studios around the world.