Last Updated on March 3, 2022 by Rovamedia
When you watch any given television long enough, you’ll be greeted by advertisements. And in today’s ever-competitive market, the real story is behind the scenes, where companies face a constant battle to stay ahead of the competition. With brand names offering hugely lucrative contracts for the right image, the art of advertising today is massively important.
The actual art of advertising and branding is a lot more sophisticated and in-depth than the consumers they target may realize. Long before an advert even reaches the screen or print, it has been subject to painstaking research, focus groups, marketing surveys, and many other methods of determining the current state of the target market. Without this information, releasing a product runs the risk of commercial suicide if the consumer isn’t ready. There’s no such thing as luck when advertising a brand, either established or new is involved. It takes a lot of hard work, grueling hours in meetings, and highly skilled teams of creative minds to finalize a concept as Olowu opines.
Part of this process, and a way of determining whether a new brand and accompanying advertisement have succeeded or not is actually one of the simplest. By providing a group of consumers with either an image, a tagline, or even just a combination of colors and sounds, and they recognize the brand behind the advertising, then the hard work has paid off.
Branding as a concept
When describing the effect of branding, Marion says ” a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a specific product or company. Each person creates his or her own version of it, and some brands increase or decrease in popularity because of how consumers feel about them”, and you just can’t dispute that.
Branding is the process of giving meaning to a specific organization, company, product, or service by creating and shaping a brand in consumers’ minds. It is a strategy designed by organizations to help people quickly identify and experience their brand, and give them a reason to choose their products over the competition’s, by clarifying what this particular brand is and is not.
The objective is to attract and retain loyal customers and other stakeholders by delivering a product that is always aligned with what the brand promises.
You can consider a brand as the idea or image people have in mind when thinking about specific products, services, and activities of a company, both in a practical (e.g. “the shoe is light-weight”) and emotional way (e.g. “the shoe makes me feel powerful”). It is therefore not just the physical features that create a brand but also the feelings that consumers develop towards the company or its product. This combination of physical and emotional cues is triggered when exposed to the name, the logo, the visual identity, or even the message communicated.
How can it be done?
Companies tend to use different tools to create and shape a brand. For example, branding can be achieved through:
- Brand definition: purpose, values, promise
- Brand positioning statement
- Brand identity: name, tone of voice, visual identity design (which includes the logo design, color palette, typographies…)
- Advertising and communications: TV, radio, magazines, outdoor ads, website, mobile apps, etc.
- Sponsoring and partnerships
- Product and packaging design
- In-store experience
- Workspace experience and management style
- Customer service
- Pricing strategy
Branding is absolutely critical to a business because of the overall impact it makes on your company. Branding can change how people perceive your brand, it can drive new business and increase brand awareness.
The most important reason branding is important to a business is that it is how a company gets recognition and becomes known to the consumers. The logo is the most important element of branding, especially where this factor is concerned, as it is essentially the face of the company.
The correlation in advertising for brands
This is where the advertising and branding of a product are so important, by firstly ensuring that consumers will recognize a given product or brand. The next important factor is actually persuading consumers to associate certain attributes with your product. These can range from reliability, pricing, value for money, etc. This is one of the most difficult, yet most intrinsically important sources of advertising and branding success.
An instance of this is if you mentioned mouthwash – is there a brand that springs to mind immediately? How about favorite destinations to go on vacation – does one resort receive more recommendations than others? Even if that particular resort hasn’t been visited by everyone who mentioned it, just the fact the advertising of that resort makes it sound so enticing that they perceive it’s the destination they should go to is a sure sign of successful brand advertising.
Yet if successfully advertising a brand is difficult enough, to begin with, it can be even more so trying to reach out to new markets with the same product. The stronger the brand and the more successful the initial advertising campaign, the more difficult it becomes to find new avenues. Despite possibly having the number one product on the market, any new advertising still needs to go through the whole process again from scratch. After all, what worked for one product is not guaranteed to work for another.
Every business and marker wants to really make their product and service gain financial traction. Honestly, there are no two ways, business is meant to solve a problem people really need to be solved, in turn, the people using the service or product return the favor by paying for the service. It’s not actually rocket science when you think about it.
In the grand scheme of things, paid advertising is crucial to the success of most businesses. And to be frank, no business doesn’t spend money on customer acquisitions. The fact is, numerous businesses are offering the same service your business also offers, but it’s a big world and not every one of their customers will vibe with your product/service and vice versa.
And this is where the true power of advertising and branding becomes apparent, and is the strongest proof yet that it’s one of the most important in determining whether a company succeeds or fails.
Conclusion: Don’t Underestimate
Every business and marker wants to really make their product and service gain financial traction. Honestly, there are no two ways, business is meant to solve a problem people really need to be solved, in turn, the people using the service or product return the favor by paying for the service. It’s not actually rocket science when you think about it.
As opined, there’s no need to shy away from paid advertising. What you do want to avoid, however, is throwing money blindly into an ad network because somebody somewhere said it was good.
Finally, branding is not underrated as many think. Remember, A product can be easily copied by other players in a market, but a brand will always be unique. For example, Pepsi and Coca-Cola taste very similar, however, for some reason, some people feel more connected to Coca-Cola; than others to Pepsi.
Make that what you’ll make of it, and start being intentional about branding your business and boosting reactions using advertisements.