Brand Building

So, we talked enough about the funding and entrepreneurship ethics in our previous posts. I now want to drag your attention towards propagation of business once it has been established.

A very important phase indeed is BRAND BUILDING! People often tend to confuse between brand building and marketing. Marketing is all about practices which makes people aware of your brand and earns customers for your products and services, whereas brand building is focused on retaining your already fetched customers by arousing their belief in the excellence of your product. Any company which aims to expand and gain firm grounds in the market must not ignore the latter.

It has several facets to deal with:

1. Quality Check: Even in the utmost unforeseen cases, do not compromise with the product quality. The ones who purchased from you, definitely thought something before turning up to you! And your very first customers will refer your brand to their friends and peers.

1. Consumer Support: Would you like to get a surgery done where the doctor later refuses to acknowledge post-operation complaints? Ah, same theory applies to your customers. This is also a way to track the loopholes in your service and improve on them for the better.
2. Understanding Extreme Customers: Truly innovative breakthroughs can be discovered by understanding the consumers who lie at the tail ends of the bell curve. They are all “extreme consumers” — those whose tastes are so out there that mainstream market researchers tend to dismiss them as “noise” when trying to figure out how typical consumers think. Lovers and haters of a product act as an alarm to the managers to reveal the areas where their competitors could gain an edge and snatch the market.
3. Rising above Formal Surveys: Jill Avery, the former marketing manager of female shaving products at Gillette carried out a research where she saw a wide gap between the sayings and doings of people. In feedback surveys, women would say they changed their razor blades regularly. Only when researchers visited consumers in their homes, however, did reality — and a product opportunity — come to light. Women frequently forgot to keep their blade supply restocked in the shower. Avery, then prepared the launch of the Venus razor with in-shower blade dispenser, making it more convenient for consumers — and selling a lot more razor blades.
4. Incentivizing Customers- Who doesn’t like an icing on his cake? Yes, attractive discounts can be another way to attract and retain customers. Further, maximizing user convenience wrt delivery of products, customised payment modes are further lucrative ways to achieve the same.

There can be several online tools to track your brand:

• Google Alerts — Set Google will send you link to blogs, articles and webpages where your brand is being talked about.
• Yahoo Pipes — It enables people to create a news feed for them using other feeds from the web. It helps one to know whether anyone reads stuff about his business.
• Google Blog Search — Find what is being written about your brand in the blogosphere. Utilize the internet boom to maximize your reach and scale.

That’s why they say “Marketing is for your business, Brand is for your consumers.”

Written by:

Priya Kumari