Learn How to Make Your Brand Shine
Is it worth it to put profits above customer satisfaction?
There is no secret that the ultimate goal of marketing is to make the most profit out of it. However, it is also the truth that marketers often see ‘sales’ as the end goal of their marketing journey. What happened afterwards, be it maintenance, after-service, or even customer’s feedback regarding the products they sell are no longer part of their concerns. Some of them tend to avoid these tricky ‘chores’ and even got annoyed and blamed the customers for being picky and difficult.
This recurring situation eventually boils down to a simple question: is it worth it to put quantity over quality of your products or services?
Quality Equals to Brand Building
Marketers should realize that keeping the quality of product or service is the same as keeping your brand’s reputation. Today’s consumers, thanks to information easily accessible from social media, are more demanding. Quality of a product is definitely one of the factors affecting their purchasing decision. That is to say, consumers sometimes put quality of products in expense of price. They would like to know that the products or services they are going to buy are worth the purchase.
Think about this, there are always another brand with bigger budgets and more resources, which could potentially become a threat to your business. How do you compete with them? Warren Buffet once said, “Price is what you paid. Value is what you got”. This statement sums up on why marketers should pay more attention on quality if they want their brands to be more valuable in consumers’ eyes. Take Apple for example. In all honesty, no one buys Apple products for their price. The purchasing decision is mostly based on intangible factors, from ‘coolness’, ‘privilege’, and ‘quality’. Apple managed to build and keep their brand reputation to the point when consumers buy their products, they know they are spending their money on something worth of the value.
Eventually it comes down to this: having good quality product is important for business to build their brands as well as fulfilling consumers’ demand. Here are some simple tips to do so.
Know Your Brand’s Target Audience
Although this sounds cliche, but the foundation for building a good brand is to determine your brand’s target audience. After all, you can’t be everything to everyone, right?
Focusing on who you’re trying to reach is imperative, so you can tailor your message exactly to meet their needs. The key is to be specific. Solidify a picture of who your customers are, then create a brand identity that they can understand and relate to. Identifying and narrowing your target audience is an exercise that will affect and benefit all areas of your brand building process, particularly marketing efforts, from picking the right tagline that can be easily associated with your products to choosing the right influencers to collaborate with. You want the right person to check out your content, clicking your ads, subscribing to your channels, and eventually purchasing your products and services.
Stay aesthetically consistent
One dimension of quality is how a product looks, feels, sounds, tastes, and smells. In other words, high-quality products care about aesthetics just like how customers do. Marketers need to pay close attention to aesthetics as the color, prints, shapes, textures, and features, all of them can make a difference. Product aesthetics are what set your brands apart from your competitions.
But it’s not enough just to display aesthetically pleasing products. In order to truly be perceived as a high-quality brand, business owners need to be consistent. Why? Being consistent is the key to customer satisfaction. You have to provide your customers with the same or even higher quality products or services every time you launched your products to the market to ensure the continuity of your business and good relationship with your customers.
Good storytelling sells
How do you strike the balance between quality and price? The answer is storytelling. Everyone loves a good story. A well-told brand story emotionally resonates with customers, far more than any facts or statistics ever can. At such, marketing a powerful narrative can articulate the highest possible value of your products or services and take your customers on a journey from a mere features to benefits and eventually better versions of themselves.
An effective storytelling also reminds brand not to try to be all things to all people. Away sells suitcases, hence they tell travel stories. Lenovo sells computers, therefore, their brand stories revolve around computer innovation. The important thing is to keep the story authentic and connected to your products or services. Indeed, a good brand story reaches the mind, but a great brand story touches the heart of the public and hence, loosens the purse strings of your customers.
Conclusion
To conclude, there is no brand capable of surviving without good quality products backing it up. Therefore, I believe determining your target audience is a crucial first step, followed by delivering consistency in experience as well as communication of your brand story, which will result in establishment of long-term relationships with your potential and existing customers.
Lastly, crafting a unique brand, be it through encouraging customers to play active role in your brand story or integrating your brand value in any aspects of your business, will ensure customers that ‘creativity’ and ‘authenticity’ are also the qualities of your brand that make it different from your competitors.
