Beware! A brand may make you, take a wrong decision

STILL YOU LOVE TO BUY A BRANDED PRODUCT! WHY?

If you want to buy a camera for yourself, I am sure the first criterion that will come to you mind will be how much are the megapixels counts of the chosen camera. Isn’t it? But, if I say the quality of pictures does not depend on the pixels counts but on the size of the light of sensor, I am sure it would be shocking information for you.

Same way, automobile buyers look for horsepower rather than torque; but it is torque that provides acceleration and associated thrill of driving what people look for. This is how brands or related features influence your decision to buy a product. Yes! Sometimes wrong decisions are made by people due to brands or features bombardment by companies in the market.

You have no choice, that’s how businesses are made successful around brands. It is therefore essential to build brands to force customers decide to buy products, may be wrong products or for wrong features but right products. End result, higher revenue or profit for companies.

Branding has become so essential ingredient of marketing that a company having products which to my understanding can never bring any differentiation to its business, has brands or try branding its products unnecessarily.  For example, I have come across a commodity product company which has a brand,having no relevance apparently or even otherwise; as I have seen no discussion around the brand happening even remotely in any of marketing meetings.  Nowhere, I saw any connect between marketing efforts based on specific features underlining the brand. Same way, companies having very distinct features in their products and can build & exploit markets are hesitant in branding as they see branding cost as an expense and not an investment. But, whatever said, branding has taken an indissoluble part in the market place, today. Each & every company try having a specific brand for itself or its products. Even at the end, they fail & fall into ‘Me-too’ brand category.

I can therefore; say having a brand is must today, as brands undoubtedly play a very crucial role in the success or failure of a company. But the million dollar question is how to create a brand and build it further. Let me share my thoughts on it.

If you look around, a brand is associated with unique features of a product or product category. For example, Intel Chip. There are so many chip manufacturing companies but over the period of time, Intel got speed associated with its chips through branding - 'Intel Inside'.  It does mean that companies have to identify a set of unique features and let its products get known for it.  It will help customers identifying products distinctively with others in the same category. Companies can get their products differentiated with their competitors in the market, as well.  Intel as you know has made its chips known for the processor speed in such a way that most of PC buyers look for Intel Chip inside their PCs, assuming it will give them better performance. But the truth is miles away from it.  The performance of a PC does depend on many factors like loaded software on the PC, the transfer speed of information to & from memory, network connectivity etc and not only on the speed of a chip.  This therefore a brand can do to your business; we all know Intel is Intel today because of its brand ‘compulsive’ behaviour buying of customers.

What comes out clearly from the Intel example is that a ‘set of specific criterion’ identifies and makes a product a brand. These specific criteria should become salient of product selection for customers. It therefore should be the effort of a company to get its brand register in the finite space of customer mind. Once it is achieved, a company has to ensure it not losing out on the customer mind by way of continuous features up-gradation or development, thus strengthening its brand regularly. This way, companies can bring sustainability to their businesses.

Sometimes a question is raised about whether it is ‘specific-salient criteria’ which helps in establishing a brand or it is a correct placement of a brand in a specific category of products. To my understanding both the answers are correct.  My suggestion to companies therefore is that they should evaluate existing specific product features, their brand positioning in the market and decide which way to go. Keep the fundamentals correct. The importance of specific criteria has to become so indelible in the minds of customers, that customers should blindly follow such criteria & brands.

In the last, I want to emphasize, you cannot make your company run successfully with better than average margins until you have at least one brand in your kitty of products. So either choose a set of criteria and build around it a new brand or identify a brand category and place your product in that and sleep. Nobody can take away from you better margin & sustainability of your business for years.