Branding – a marketing imperative

If we fail to brand, the market will brand us. The way the market brands us may not be what we want. Hence, it is imperative to be proactive about branding our business. A carefully designed brand can rationalise our price, differentiates our offerings and define our target market. These are just few benefits of branding. More important, a brand is the intangible asset of a business. Therefore it is sensible to invest into ones brand and be strategic from the start.

We tend to relate branding to logos, ads, celebrities etc. While these may be essential, they are a means to an end. The end here entails to what the business stands for, similar to a candidate in an election. Therefore branding ought to commence with a clear definition of the business philosophy or world view – read an earlier posting on marketing philosophy. A brand developed in the context of the philosophy will provide identity that relates to the market place.

If we can see brand as an asset – intangible – we will be prepared to set resource aside for branding. Let me explain the idea of intangible asset this way. When you eventually decide to sell the business, you would tally up the stock in hand, liabilities, and physical assets to come up with a figure that is the worth of the business. You will then account for the goodwill (intangible asset) of the business in the market, but you need evidence to justify the amount. The cliental could be used to demonstrate goodwill and justify the amount charge. Very often this may be a limited listed because of Pareto's 20/80 rule, (80% of the business comes from 20% of the clients). If you have developed a brand, then the size of the brand in terms of brand equity could justify a larger amount. Next time, will write on a branding approach based on Collective Intelligence that all businesses, small and large, can use.


 

Auckland Super City Election: A measure of brand performance

Following from the previous posting, I have reproduced the search results of the two candidates ("John Banks" and "Len Brown") for the electioneering period ending on 9 Oct 2010.

Google search results for "John Banks" and "Len Brown"

In this period, Len Brown was searched 252 times (55%) and John Banks 210 (45%). While these estimates are not suggestive of the election outcome (Len Brown = 49%; John Banks 35.7%), they clearly revealed who was the leading candidate. Based on the search results, the leading candidate became evident somewhere in the middle of the electioneering period. Compare to Digipoll announced on Sept 16 (Len Brown = 29.8% and John Banks 27.8%) the pattern produced by Google search was much clearer. Making predictions out of search results may be a far cry, but they seem to be able to tell who performed better, at least for this election.

The other candidates were not searched sufficiently to appear on Google search results. Was that indicating how they performed in the election? When considering the election results, perhaps yes. From this small experiment, can we safely conclude that if you are not online then you are not in the competition"? What do you think? Have your say by commenting below.

Now, think of the two leading candidates as brands. Google search results provide a simple measure of which brand is performing better, provided the brand is online and Internet Marketing is the primary marketing strategy. Send me a note if you want help with Internet Marketing.