Many companies, large and small, do not understand the important differences between the brand and the usual marketing. The difference between brand and marketing is misunderstood not only by company managers but even by many brand marketers. Marketing should be understood as a management process responsible for identifying, forecasting and satisfying consumer needs with benefits. This, therefore, is an integral part of your brand. This helps you convey a promise addressed to existing and potential customers. Your marketing should be based on positioning your brand, its personality, values, and tone of voice that have been identified and conveyed by your employees.
Brand Definition Marketing
This is a complex of actions to promote a certain brand in the minds of consumers using special strategies.
Brand Marketing Strategy
Brand marketing strategy is a holistic vision for further development of the brand, starting from the idea, concept, target segment definition, unique trade offers differentiating your brand, positioning, and communication strategy, which will correctly convey the positioning to the target consumer. In other words, the strategy of brand formation explains what your brand will be for, for whom, and most importantly, exactly how it will grow and develop in the long term.
The development of the brand strategy includes absolutely all aspects of the future brand development from the value and ideological basis of the brand to well-defined market-based data, digitized indicators: market capacity, potential target audience, tactics of brand promotion strategy, and clear, measurable performance indicators. A critical and most complex component of the brand strategy is its practical implementation by a brand marketing manager. The development of a positioning and branding strategy must be based on a system of performance indicators specially designed for your brand and evaluation of their achievement. Otherwise, your branding strategy will always remain on paper.
Brand Extension as a Strategy
Extension of the brand is the process by which the brand is distributed to a new consumer segment or an identical category of goods. In this case, the brand does not change. It is possible to give an example of the released perfume for women "Hugo Boss" - this brand always offered goods for men.
Why Do We Need Extensions?
Manufacturers of goods regularly think about how to further develop their company. This is their key question. If the company needs success and expansion of its own presence in the market, it must engage in regular updating of its range, the presentation of all new and new products. Taking into account the current level of product development, colossal development costs, the time period from the idea of new products to its implementation on the conveyor regularly decreases. Brand extension is a popular marketing strategy because today it is much easier to create a new product than to continue to promote it on the market. For this reason, the most important thing is to choose the right strategy for the delivery of goods to the market. Now companies use two strategies - either they launch a new brand, or they expand the existing one.
The main types of brand extension are:
- The release of products complementary to the base brand.
- Creation of a new target consumer audience.
- New commodity destination.
- An extension is also a situation where a new brand replaces an existing product.
- Assigning the brand image to an adjacent product category.
As a result of the expansion, the brand is able to distribute its products with various benefits to customers. Such goods, promoted under one brand, are called "brand family". The main nuance of such a family is the common identity of the brand. If the brand and its identity change significantly, the brand is transformed. In other words, it is already a different brand, but still under the old name and in the old packaging.
Advantages of Brand Extension
- If the position of the brand is strong enough, it has a trusting and loyal relationships, and then these qualities are transferred by the user and to new products under the same brand.
- If a number of products are promoted under one brand, there is a cost saving. For this, the use of common channels of commodity promotion is carried out.
- If the new product comes out under the old brand, you can seriously save time and save money on its promotion.
- Another advantage of expanding the brand can be considered the protection of the manufacturer from competitors. Expansion does not take very long time and can close the way for competitors to the market segment where it appeared.
- This is the type of legal brand marketing.
How Marketing Automation Helps Brand Marketers
Over the past ten years, online marketing has dragged a significant share of the traditional marketing market. Despite this radical shift, several centuries-old marketing tactics have not lost their relevance. And branding is one of them. Even in this hyper-digital era, branding is able to support online marketing efforts when business owners and marketers know how to use it properly. Brand references in the network help improve search engine optimization via:
- Increase in direct traffic;
- Google indirectly includes Brand queries in its search algorithms;
- Branded content attracts links far better than non-brand ads.
Google's search algorithms work to accurately understand what your brand is offering. First, the search engine monitors all requests and can analyze which sites respond better to specific user requests. From this, it follows that users who visit your site from search engines for certain queries, attract the attention of these search engines. Through the analysis of visits to your site using Google Analytics and Google Chrome, the search engine will know exactly which category of queries you can give a qualitative answer to.
A reliable, memorable brand also helps to attract links from other sites. Links are a strong ranking factor for search engines. Promoting your brand on the Internet ultimately leads to mentions and the emergence of new links to your site. The more different quality backlinks from authoritative sites you can attract, the higher your rating will be.
Proper brand marketing will help in offline mode to increase your traffic. Users are accustomed to discussing interesting commercials, exhibitions, thereby creating new mentions about the company (on various sites and social networks) that will attract new people to become interested in you.