Products are never just products, right?
Starbucks is more than a cup of coffee. Heineken is more than a beer. Mcdonald’s is more than a fast-food restaurant.
Interacting with these products or services provides us with experiences, and we purchase them for that reason. Even better, the corporations who design and advertise them exactly understand what kind of experience they want you to have when you buy (or contemplate buying). It is for this reason that they build a brand.
It is no secret that these brands are also very successful. In this blog, we will strip down this tactic called a brand marketing strategy.
Let’s start!
What is brand marketing?
Brand marketing is a way of marketing that focuses on communicating brand values to create a bridge between the consumer and the product or service.
You are probably thinking, “Is this the only goal of brand marketing?”. No, brand marketing has many more goals, but we will discuss these in more detail in a later paragraph.
Brand marketing sounds easier than it is since the importance is mainly overlooked. Most businesses still focus on the short term instead of nurturing your brand to create a more significant impact in the long term.
Why is brand marketing so effective?
People will naturally notice your business if it has strong branding, much more so than if it does not. Furthermore, branding allows you to demonstrate to potential customers that you are a well-established, credible organisation.
It also helps you develop relationships (brand-consumer relationship) with your target audience since they will relate to the brand emotionally, eventually becoming lifelong customers. This is called brand loyalty.
Not only will you attract more (loyal) customers and build relationships with them, but you will also create some sort of guidance for your brand. You will make decisions based on the values the brand stands for. A clear brand strategy helps you keep your mission and vision in sight.
The objectives of brand marketing
As we said in the previous section of this blog, brand marketing has many more objectives. We have put all of these other objectives in a list below.
- Brand awareness
- Brand Loyalty
- Brand advocacy
- Brand equity
- Brand engagement
- Brand identity and image
Most of these terms describe themselves pretty clearly. So let’s go over the terms that could be a little confusing.
Firstly, brand advocacy means that people talk about your brand and gets promoted through word of mouth. This is a powerful result of brand marketing since your marketing efforts will have a certain carry-over effect.
Secondly, brand equity is the value your brand has. This is determined by how consumers perceive the brand and how high they value it. Look at brands like Louis Vuitton; since their brand equity is high, they can make their products more expensive than other clothing brands.
Lastly, brand engagement means they like to interact with the brand. For example, your target audience follows your brand on Instagram and likes to interact with your posts.
Choosing long term growth over the short term results
We believe that long-term growth should be every company’s goal. What is essential is personalising your brand. Creating a brand identity, so to say. A brand’s identity is everything from its logo design to its core beliefs.
What we mean by ‘choosing over the short term results’ is making choices that will slightly impact current results but improve your brand in the long term.
To use brand marketing to its full potential, you need to have a clear mission & vision statement since this will flow into clear objectives and strategies.
Defining your brand’s norms and values is difficult without a clear mission and vision statement.
Branding and marketing are still two separate entities
Like we said in the previous paragraph, branding is the brand’s personality. Brand marketing shares that personality with consumers to eventually create a brand-consumer relationship.
But to think that you will create a well-branded brand by communicating its values would be a lie. Since a brand needs to be worked on throughout all touchpoints. This means from service to employees to the packaging of the product.
To summarise, everything the target audience perceives should align with the brand’s values. But just communicating its values won’t make it a well-branded brand.
The growth engine
We like to talk about the growth engine a lot at CroudX because it is one of our core beliefs. This approach focuses on business growth rather than revenue because revenue is simply the product of growth, and the more you grow, the more money you will earn in a shorter period.
It’s not just about getting customers when it comes to the growth engine. If it were your only goal, you’d have to keep starting over. Because you must constantly attract new clients, your growth will be hindered.
Instead, what you can do with a growth engine is use these customers to attract more customers and grow. Due to your branding activities, people will start to refer it to others. Therefore attracting growth.
You should convert your current customers to brand promoters because when people are met with great experiences, they will refer it to friends, which fuels word of mouth. And brand marketing will help massively with this.
We teased this engine in a previous blog, and it may seem abstract at first, or you may not know how to approach the growth engine, but don’t worry! This model will be the subject of a separate blog post. If we try to explain this model in one paragraph, we will only be able to do it briefly, which would be a shame.
Our vision
We believe that branding should align with your marketing strategy. Especially when your business is a start-up or a scale-up since that is the moment many businesses will try to get some business going.
Instead of choosing short-term growth, you should try to look for creative ways to create a balance between brand marketing and just marketing. We also try to do this with our clients.
We utilise AI to identify the optimal balance between branding and performance by analysing various marketing statistics and making accurate predictions about the most likely outcome, allowing businesses to establish the ideal branding-performance balance.
Without the trade-off on the short-term results! And therefore create the best brand marketing campaign targeted specifically for their target market.
We write these blogs weekly to broaden everyone’s knowledge! Subscribe to our newsletter if you’d like to receive these blogs weekly and stay informed! or if you have any questions about CroudX, you can always contact us.
Till next time!
