The Power of Branding
Dan Trapp
Branding.
The "holy grail" of marketing, the one word that conjurs
up images of mass audiences of customers driving unconciously to your product or service,
and a true gold mine if you can achieve it.
Is branding more than just good advertising? Does it control our thought process when making a decision?
I believe so.
Branding, from the point of view of the traditional meaning, would mean to make your mark
on something, much like ranchers would do with their cows. Back then branding was a forced procedure, an
unnatural but much needed by-product of protecting property. What ranchers may have realized early on is, no amount
of great advertising is going to get a cow to brand itself, and the same goes for a company's product.
For a company, the whole point of branding is to keep their product or service in the mind
of the consumer, unlike a rancher they do not do it to protect a product (that's what copyrights are for), they do it
to leave a mark in the consumers concience and if at all possible generate the notion of "there is no alternative".
It takes more than a great product and much more than a great advertising campaign to effectively brand a product.
Examples of products that differentiate "Branding" from "Good advertising"
If you get a cut do you ask for a "Band Aid" or a bandage?
If you wanted to clean your ears would you do it with a "Q-tip" or a cotton swab?
If you wanted to eat some bouncy color filled dessert would you ask for "Jello" or gelatin?
These are a few company products that have grown to define a whole category and this is more
powerful than the thought of eating "Mcdonalds" or buying basketball shoes from "Nike". Words
like the ones above have a lot of power, so much so that unless you conciously thought about it
you would buy "Jello" if you were looking for gelatin, go for the "Xerox" machine if you had a
choice, buy "Band-aids", and search every aisle for "Q-tips".
Dan Trapp internet marketing consultant
|
|
|
Smallbiz Articles » Advertising and Media » Advertising » 