Right ways to maintain your brand strong
Brands become stronger if they are focused. As narrower the focus is as better for the brand.
What do you think about Chevrolet? Probably not many things, except probably the fact that they make cars and may be that they are part of GM brand.
Chevrolet produces large rage of very different products from small cars to a luxury and sport cars like Chevrolet Camaro. The brand becomes weaker as it expands and looses focus.
How did it happen with Chevrolet? They put short-term interests ahead of their long term strategy and weakened their brand. In the first place it allowed them to sell more cars, but in just 10 years their sales declined almost twice.
A company brand grows much stronger, when it is focused on something specific or pretty narrow. When it comes to building brand strength is to focus on maintaining absolute consistency over time. Narrow your focus and stick to it. A good example here is Volvo, for decades they were saying solid and reliable mid-class sedans and became a synonym of safety. When they tried to expand to sport and convertible cars, they loosed focus, weakened their brand and finally got bankruped. Their customers missed what they get when they buy a Volvo. The expansion must be only taken when it doesn’t damage a core identity.
Strong brand makes product names synonymous with a common thing or idea. As Tesla became a synonym of electric cars. Or let’s take Walmart as an example. They sell thousand of different things united by a common idea of low prices.
Lots of marketers make a mistake thinking about brand growth using advertising. Those two things are quite separate, because advertising is aiming to maintain brand’s visibility, but it is not effective when you’re building a brand -for this purpose we use publicity. Brands need to attract press coverage and omnipresent in our every day life.
However, we must remember that nothing lasts forever. Once hype is finished, we need to switch gears and that’swhere advertising helps. The purpose of advertising is maintain all or most of the gains brand achieved on the marketplace. Many firms publicly compare their products with others showing that they are better in some aspects than their competitor’s, but in reality it doesn’t motivate customers as they are seeking for the best in class, something superior, not just something which is better.
Remember, a strong brand represents quality. What you can do to grow up your brand is to narrow the focus to a special niche, where customer will get a feeling that you’re the best of the best. Some of the examples might be Rolex or Ferrari.
Many brands associate themselves with a single concept or detail. For instance, Mercedes-Benz is prestigious, even itis not build to last forever (Take your time to read my thought on Planned Obsolescence), but some others concentrate ontheir brand’s best attributes, but what is really matters is making your brand a synonym of something which distinguish you from others.
Another good example from automotive world is Toyota which is a synonym of reliability and Honda sticks to their "well engineered". There is only better option when your brand is a word which stands in for a type of product. Like Google it or Kleenex. In most of the cases customers don’t care about who delivering their product, they care about values and benefits they obtain in exchange to their money.
What do you think about Chevrolet? Probably not many things, except probably the fact that they make cars and may be that they are part of GM brand.
Chevrolet produces large rage of very different products from small cars to a luxury and sport cars like Chevrolet Camaro. The brand becomes weaker as it expands and looses focus.
How did it happen with Chevrolet? They put short-term interests ahead of their long term strategy and weakened their brand. In the first place it allowed them to sell more cars, but in just 10 years their sales declined almost twice.
A company brand grows much stronger, when it is focused on something specific or pretty narrow. When it comes to building brand strength is to focus on maintaining absolute consistency over time. Narrow your focus and stick to it. A good example here is Volvo, for decades they were saying solid and reliable mid-class sedans and became a synonym of safety. When they tried to expand to sport and convertible cars, they loosed focus, weakened their brand and finally got bankruped. Their customers missed what they get when they buy a Volvo. The expansion must be only taken when it doesn’t damage a core identity.
Strong brand makes product names synonymous with a common thing or idea. As Tesla became a synonym of electric cars. Or let’s take Walmart as an example. They sell thousand of different things united by a common idea of low prices.
Lots of marketers make a mistake thinking about brand growth using advertising. Those two things are quite separate, because advertising is aiming to maintain brand’s visibility, but it is not effective when you’re building a brand -for this purpose we use publicity. Brands need to attract press coverage and omnipresent in our every day life.
However, we must remember that nothing lasts forever. Once hype is finished, we need to switch gears and that’swhere advertising helps. The purpose of advertising is maintain all or most of the gains brand achieved on the marketplace. Many firms publicly compare their products with others showing that they are better in some aspects than their competitor’s, but in reality it doesn’t motivate customers as they are seeking for the best in class, something superior, not just something which is better.
Remember, a strong brand represents quality. What you can do to grow up your brand is to narrow the focus to a special niche, where customer will get a feeling that you’re the best of the best. Some of the examples might be Rolex or Ferrari.
Many brands associate themselves with a single concept or detail. For instance, Mercedes-Benz is prestigious, even itis not build to last forever (Take your time to read my thought on Planned Obsolescence), but some others concentrate ontheir brand’s best attributes, but what is really matters is making your brand a synonym of something which distinguish you from others.
Another good example from automotive world is Toyota which is a synonym of reliability and Honda sticks to their "well engineered". There is only better option when your brand is a word which stands in for a type of product. Like Google it or Kleenex. In most of the cases customers don’t care about who delivering their product, they care about values and benefits they obtain in exchange to their money.