This week we learnt how, as a company we build a successful brand and communicate this with our customers. Organisations can sell their products or services, but it all comes down to the fact that customers buy because they believe in your brand and not just your products and services.
Successful brand building is at the root of a profitable business and one of the biggest hurdles that a marketing team will face. Marketing’s role serves to generate brand awareness and to strengthen brand image as a strong brand will generate profits.
What is product management?
Product management involves being responsible for understanding customer requirements and implementing changes to product ranges. Funnily enough, products are managed by product managers, and this means that they are responsible for adding particular products to ranges or discontinuing old products when they reach the decline phase of their product lifecycle.
I have touched on the product lifecycle, also called the Diffusion of innovation model before in CIM, it’s the breakdown of the phases that a product will go through, starting with its introduction, through to decline phase and is demonstrated in the diagram below.
Benefits of branding
Organisations have assets in which they can add brand value. These assets include:
- Brand name awareness
- Brand loyalty
- Perceived quality
- Brand associates
Companies need to build on their brand in order to improve their assets, here are some of the benefits that brand building can bring:
- Improved perceptions of value – customers will see a greater added value when they buy your products
- Trust – customers trust brands that have a clear messaging and structure
- Less vulnerability to competition – a clearly defined brand will differentiate you from other businesses as customers can easily identify you from the rest
- Less vulnerability to crisis – strong brands can leverage the brand name to survive a public crisis
- Larger margins – customers buy for the added value that your brand brings when they make a purchase, meaning that there will be more sales to well established brands
- Platform for brand extensions – using an existing well-established brand on new products to increase profits