How do we manage our brand to attract customers?

What is a brand?

Many people associate a brand with a logo or a name… But it’s so much more! Your brand defines everything about your company. 

Branding’ was originally the identifying marks burnt into the skin of livestock, slaves and criminals. In 2020, branding is everything that contributes to your customers’ opinions and feelings about your company. It’s your reputation and how people recognise you, influenced through all the intangibles such as individual customer experiences and word of mouth.

Businesses should be considering their brand from the start, but it often becomes an after-thought, coming after “making money” on the to-do list. However, strong branding can really help a business stand out and attract customers from day one.

This article summarises important aspects of branding and how they work together to help build a reputation for your business to stand out from the competition.

A strong brand “increases customers' trust of invisible products, while helping them to better understand and visualise what they are buying" (Berry 2000, p. 136). 

Brand Management

A clearly defined brand strategy should be an essential document for any successful company. It’s not easy to be instantly recognised and trusted by the people you want as your customers. It takes a deeper understanding of your customers and a strategy that creates value and builds a relationship.

Branding should be carefully managed, as businesses need to deliver on their brand promise. If the brand is successful in its efforts, the consumer will perceive the brand to have good intentions and capability to deliver. This increases their trust. 

A brand is built up over time. You can’t establish trust with most people right away. They need to get to know you first! ! You’re going to reach far more people if you’re consistent over a period of time, than if you try and fit into a current fad or trend. The internet is a powerful tool to reach a very large amount of people. But you want them to be listening! If you produce rubbish content, people will probably think you’re a little bit rubbish. Your marketing influences perceptions of your brand and the quality.

You need to have something interesting to say, and you need a differentiator.

Brand Image & Identity

The way people perceive your brand is called your brand image. It is everything a potential customer associates with a business and it defines their overall opinion. This is based on marketing, experiences and memories associated with that brand. You cannot control this, each individual will have their own brand image.

The way people perceive your brand is called your brand image. It is everything a potential customer associates with a business and it defines their overall opinion. Marketing, experiences and memories associated with that brand are the basis for a brand image, and it comes in the form of a gut opinion or mental flash of recognition. You cannot control this, as individuals will have their own brand image.

You cannot control your brand image – it’s a person’s gut opinion or mental flash of recognition.

However, a business can control their brand identity. It’s a marketing strategy with intent to nurture a certain image in consumers' minds. This is all the elements that make up a brand and its marketing. This includes colour, design, and logo. It’s also the personality of a brand, the tone of voice in your copy for example. 

Brands communicate in a certain way, such as a tone of voice (e.g. Funny or Serious), to establish a unique personality. Companies apply different human characteristics to their brands to influence customers’ associations – e.g. Tough (off-road vehicle) or fit (sportswear). A well-researched and distinct brand identity should be the foundation of any successful business.

Your Brand Story

All brands have a story. Yet, not many brands communicate it effectively, or at all. A brand story gives people a sense that they know you, if only just a little. 

A summary of how the business started, why you're in that industry, why your credible, what makes you different, and how you benefit customers and provide a solution to their problems. 

Your story should be written in a certain way to engage the reader, and should include a hero (you), a villain, overcoming adversary - giving the feel-good factor. Great brand stories are universal, and appeal to our emotions.

Value Proposition

What is your point of difference? What makes your brand any difference to the next one offering similar products? Why should consumers purchase your brand over your competitors? 

Your value proposition should answer these questions. This becomes the essence of your brand positioning strategy, which is where you sit in the market relative to competitors.

Your brand must communicate your unique offering, to try and entice customers to choose your brand. A promise of value you deliver.

Three principals that help guide a value proposition are: quality, innovation and reliability. 

Differentiation & Targeting

With globalisation and the rise of digital marketing, this has brought intense competition. It’s hard for your brand to be memorable when there’s so many alternatives. That’s why a point of difference with your branding is so important. It is how you are recognised and judged. 

Brands must focus their advertising and marketing to target a certain group of customers. Otherwise, your brand can become diluted, and you spend precious time and money on people who are never going to be a customer. Think of it this way, if you spend $100 directly targeting the people most likely to be your customer, that’s far more effective that spending $100 marketing to everybody, with only $5 worth reaching your target market.

Consistency

One of the foundations of a strong brand is consistency across communication. Colour schemes should be consistent across branding and marketing, and your copy should have a consistent tone, vibe and style, with consistent imaging.

Whether it’s your website, Facebook, LinkedIn or an e-newsletter. Content needs to illustrate who you are, and the unique experience or value that your brand represents. Consistent messaging throughout your marketing funnel will help convert leads into customers.

Your brand includes every interaction point with potential customers, such as your website, social media, customers support/service, your store or office. Therefore, your brand’s promise and communication must be consistent at each brand contact point. 

Brand Associations

Brand associations are an anchor for customer assessments and opinions of a brand and what it represents. New associations are continuously made with brands, with each interaction. These assessments are evaluated against a consumer’s personal values and lifestyle. 

Customers value brands and experiences that reflect an aspect of their own personalities, so they generally choose brands that they feel reinforce who they are and what they want to be. 

Customers subconsciously ask questions about brands such as: 👉 What are the perceived benefits? 👉 Do we share similar beliefs and values? and 👉 Do I trust them?

The content you create and share on your social media influences perceptions of your brand. It defines your brand. If you share boring content and talk about yourself all the time, that’s the brand people will associate with you.

Authenticity

If customers believe you’re authentic, it increases your credibility. You’re more likely to be viewed as superior to alternatives because of this. Authentic brands must be committed to their values and delivering on promises. To be perceived as authentic, brands need to come across as human, as it is easier for consumers to recognise a brand’s values. 

Customers want to relate to brands in the same way they relate to people. Two important aspects of this that brands need to express are warmth and competence. 

Attributes of warmth include “sincerity”, “integrity”, and “transparency”, whilst competence is conveyed through “credibility”, “reliability”, “continuity” or “consistency”. 

If you really know and understand your target market, you position your brand to be as attractive as possible to this group of customers (market segment). If you can create a meaningful connection, you form a relationship, and this is one of the drivers of loyalty.

Relationship Marketing

A fundamental of marketing is forming relationships with a group of customers or segment of the market that likes you and trusts you. This is called relationship marketing. It starts by forming a bond, and eventually creating an attachment to your brand with the customer. 

If you have a large organisation, all staff members must buy into the brand promise and show a commitment to delivering on it. The company should also regularly take feedback from customers, to see if the brand is delivering on their promise. This will keep the relationship strong, promote customer loyalty and purchase intent.

Forming a relationship increases customers' trust of invisible products, while helping them to better understand and visualise what they are buying. 

Trust is synonymous with brand originality, ethicality, genuineness, warmth, and competence. From the consumer perspective, these brand attributes are deeply interconnected. When one attribute is weakened, this negatively impacts on the others and vice versa when one is strengthened. 

Creating a successful relationship contributes to the “equity” residing in a brand (Blackston, 2000).

Brand Equity

One of the benefits of having a strong brand that people remember is the ability to charge more. It’s far easier to position your brand as a premium offering. This is because of the brand equity that has been created - which is the added value of a product in a customer’s mind, that attracts (or repulses) consumers to (from) a particular product, service or company. 

Brand equity can be explained as the influence brand knowledge has on consumer response to the marketing of the brand. It comes from a brand’s experience, uniqueness, and relationship with the customer. The higher the perception of value, the premium customers are willing to pay. 

Brand equity is a topic I will be covering in a lot more depth as a future topic.

Thank you for reading. 

If you’ve read this far, then you might see value in my 50 weeks of 50 marketing topics program.

This was the first topic. Each week, for 50 weeks, I will produce a document such as this article, a video, and a PowerPoint on a different marketing topic, to help you understand it and apply it to your business to attract more customers.

This week's video: 

I hope you enjoyed this week's topic,

Dan

The Marketing Mix - Is it still relevant today?

The Marketing mix for 2020

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix framework has been the preferred and dominant marketing model since it was introduced around 60 years ago. It was THE FIRST marketing model that all us marketers learnt in marketing 101 classes. It became treated as the unchallenged basic model of marketing, overshadowing other theories and approaches. The Marketing Mix has also played a key role in the evolution of marketing management.

Last week we discussed branding, and how companies create a brand identity to express its unique personality. The marketing mix used to create this brand identity. Marketing influences how a brand is perceived. Companies use the marketing mix to increase the value of their brand.

The strength of the model is its simplicity — categorising the fundamentals of marketing, as the reference point for applying marketing to a business.

What is the marketing mix?

The marketing mix is a list of the essential elements that make up the foundation of a company’s marketing strategy. The framweork helps marketers to often evaluate and re-evaluate brand activities.  As customer needs rapidly change, brands should often revisit their marketing mix, to see if they are targeting today's marketplace. 

The marketing mix was a concept popularised by Neil Borden in the 1980s. Borden remarks that “The quest for a science of marketing is hard upon us”. He wanted to create a practical toolkit to help marketers to be objective, and to bring an understanding of what marketing is.

Borden names twelve controllable marketing elements that he believed if responsibly managed, would result in a “profitable business operation”.

The 4P’s

The 4Ps has become synonymous with the marketing mix. The 4Ps are product, price, place and promotion. The strength of the 4Ps approach is that it is a memorable and practical framework for marketing decision-making. Along with the popularity of academics as a teaching tool, the 4Ps Mix became the trusted framework for marketing managers dealing with tactical/operational marketing issues.

Each of the 4 “ingredients” complement each other. For example, you cannot develop a product without considering how it will be priced. Product

The product or service that your company wants to sell to customers. This covers everything from the product design, the technology your product uses, to the convenience of the product and warranties. A business should be able to look at their products critically as though you were from the outside looking in, and ask a couple of key questions:

• Are the products/services suitable for the market and customers of today?
• How does it rate next to competitors? Do you have a point of difference?

For a product or service to be successful, it is important to first know what market exists. Research is a crucial step to get your product right.

Price

Pricing strategies that allow you to be as profitable as possible. It needs to be relative to your competitors, the needs of your customers and the marketplace. Sometimes you need to lower your prices. At other times, it may be right to raise your prices. Often, the profitability of products/services does not justify the amount of effort and resources that go into producing them. By raising prices, you may lose a small proportion of your clients or customers, but you become profitable.

Consumers use price as an indicator of product quality or benefits. High-priced brands are often perceived to be of higher quality and become less exposed to price cuts of competitors.

Promotion

Promotion is all the ways that you communicate with your target audience/customers about your products/services. It is important to use different forms of promotion and communication channels to find the best way to reach your customers and make sales.

Promotion includes advertising, content marketing, sponsorship, sales staff, product placement, direct mail, social media, and influencers. The way we promote our brands in 2020 has changed drastically in just ten to twenty years. What is working today will not necessarily work next week. Businesses need to update their marketing communication consistently and stay up to date with what is relevant and the most cost-effective way to reach and convert prospects into customers.

Businesses should often review their sales processes to try and maximise their conversion rate of leads to customers/clients.

Place

The place is where your product or service is sold, and how it is sold. It could be a brick and mortar store (physical location), or online. If you have a physical location, then it needs to be well thought out to be as convenient as possible for customers. If your business is based online, then your website and sales process should be professional, well-structured and easy. You want to make the process as pleasant as possible, to increase your chance of a sale. There are so many alternatives online, you do not want frustrated customers going elsewhere.

The sales channels your company uses is another aspect of the place. Are you using salespeople, intermediaries or selling directly to the customer? Wholesale or retail? Are you selling through Facebook ads, telemarketing or catalogues? Your business should try different methods to work out what really works best for customers.

The marketing mix: A vague set of guidelines?

Although the 4Ps is the marketing model, it is not without its criticism. The marketing mix is a list of categories of marketing variables. The 4ps is basic in this sense, with only 4 variables. It is quite vague, and the model focuses on internal variables, therefore, an incomplete basis for marketing.

Marketing has evolved, and the 4Ps model just not specific enough for many businesses. Great as a general learning tool — simple to help learn the basics of marketing, but not enough specifics for most businesses to apply and measure.

A shift from product-focused marketing to people-focused marketing

With the explosion of social media and digital marketing in the 2000s, the way brands communicate with customers has drastically changed. The number of services available to consumers have increased rapidly, and there has been a shift from mass marketing to niche marketing.

The 4Ps is a mass-marketed technique and a product-oriented approach. Businesses must nurture relationships with niche markets and supply solutions to clients. This is a market or a customer-orientated approach.

Another customer-focused marketing mix model is the 4C’s (Lauterbur, 1990), that uses the dimensions of communication, consumer needs, cost, and convenience. Marketing decisions are based on giving customers the service they need and want. The purposes to communicate with customers and identify their needs what they specifically want to buy (consumer needs), minimize the total buying cost to satisfy what a consumer wants (cost), and provide the consumers with the ease of getting the products/services (convenience).

4C’s: Marketing decisions are based on giving customers the service they need and want.

The Seven Ps of Services Marketing

The Seven P’s is an extension of the 4P’s, with the addition of packaging, positioning and people. Other variations of the Seven P’s include Processes and Physical evidence. I will discuss all five. These frameworks are designed for services, often called the 7Ps of digital marketing, services marketing, or target market.

Physical Evidence

Physical evidence is a valuable tool for a business to build credibility with potential customers. Examples of this is consistency across branding, testimonials from former clients, and recommendations. People do not like to buy the unknown. Social proof is important for them to take the next step. Ask for feedback, and develop reference materials so new customers can buy with confidence

If your facilities are not up to an acceptable standard, why would the customer think your service is?

Physical evidence also comes in the form of professionalism from staff, and cleanliness of the brick and mortar store or office, or smart online interfaces. Clean toilets. This is reassuring to the customer. They associate professionalism with your brand, and instantly builds credibility.

Process

Often systems are designed to help the company instead of customers. Here lies the issue.

The process of a business is how they supply & sell a product or service. Every link of the chain from convenience and speed at the point of sale, to response time online or on the phone from customer service. The helpfulness of staff, and how complaints are dealt with. Having processes in place and staff trained in those processes ensure consistency across the organisation. A potential customer has a frustrating customer with non-empathetic staff can have a devastating effect on mass. Many customers will give up and use another company. Then tell their friends and family, and anybody on social media who are listening, to avoid your services.

In the age of Google Reviews, it is important to have your service processes right.

Packaging

The packaging is the way your product or service appears from the outside. Packaging also refers to your staff and how they are presented and how they interact with customers. Your place of business. Your print marketing, your branding, your website. Everything the influences customer’s confidence (or lack of) of dealing with you. Like how real estate agents all dress a certain way, and often drive a similar type of car. It is all about creating a certain belief.

You want to leave people with a great first impression. Consider everything that the customer sees from the first moment of contact with your company all the way through the purchasing process. Small improvements in the packaging or external appearance of your product or service can often lead to completely different reactions from your customers.

Positioning

Positioning is where a brand sits in the market relative to the competition. Where does the brand sit in the hearts and minds of customers? What would people say if we asked them to describe a brand?

How you are seen and thought about by your customers is crucial to success. How strongly people feel about a brand, and how they perceive it compared to the alternatives, determines how likely they are to become a customer. When determining the position in the market you would like to have, think of your ideal client or customer, and what would attract them to a certain brand. How can you position yourself today to solve problems tomorrow?

People

People are the final P in the marketing mix. Not just dealing with customers, but the culture within a company. The management and staff. All the people inside and outside of your business who handle every element of your sales and marketing strategy and activities. This includes recruitment and training / professional development and staff benefits. Recruit, hire and keep people with the skills and abilities to do the job.

The reputation of your brand depends on the service customers are given, so staff must buy into the company vision, and be well-motivated with the right attitude. Many customers cannot separate the product or service from the staff member who provides it. This shows the importance of your people. Anyone who meets customers will make an impression, and that can have a profound effect on customer satisfaction. Negative or positive.

Thank you for reading.

This is week 2 of 50 weeks of marketing.

If you want to learn more about marketing, check it out here.

There is also a weekly video, this is the video for this topic:

Why is Authenticity important to brands?

What is Authenticity?

Authenticity has become somewhat of a "buzzword" over the past few years, and marketers have been scrambling to boast authenticity in marketing copy.  For good reason, as recent data shows that 85% of shoppers consider authenticity an important aspect when making a purchasing decision. 

Brand trust has declined, because of a contrast between the promises made by brands and what they deliver.  As a result, consumers are becoming more doubtful of brand claims.  Consumers do not trust brands that portray themselves as perfect, they instead want honesty and transparency.

“Consumers are faced with the challenge of finding authentic happiness in a world of mass-produced and hence inauthentic commodities.”  (Jantzen, 2012) 

There are multiple interpretations of authentic, such as: real, honest, truthful, ‘integrity, actual, genuine, essential, verified and sincere; and is the foundation for building trust.

A History of Authenticity

Music academics have explored authenticity, both with cultural performances and modern music such as folk, rock, rap and pop music.  Authentic music performance is for the sake of self-enjoyment or ability in the art, whilst commercial endeavours are inauthentic.  Being an artist for the sake of the arts rather than doing it to make commercial profit.  Doing something solely for profit considered inherently inauthentic (why consumers often perceive brands as inauthentic). 

There are two schools of thought: romanticism – where authenticity subscribes to tradition and cherishes the past, or a modernist approach to authenticity - grounded in experimentation and progress, and the belief true artists must move forward.  In the arts, modernism is ‘Avant Garde’ - the French term for 'in advance’ - describing any work or style considered in its own time to be radical, consciously breaking from earlier traditions.

The tourism literature also widely discusses authenticity, as it has become a primary concern for consumers seeking experiences.  Consumers often research their destinations, and have a set of expectations, preferences and beliefs about what shall occur.

Objective Authenticity - Virtue

Objective authenticity is an assessment placed on or judgement placed on an object that is what it claims, and it is genuine.  Such as a real Rolex watch, versus a counterfeit.   A truthful representation of what they say they are.  Consumers perceive an object as authentic based on their judgement of its sincerity.  This perspective of authenticity has the notion that products produced by craftsmen primarily motivated by professionalism, tradition and love for what they are doing and not profit.  Consumers seek uniqueness, originality, and genuineness.  Marketing academics also describe this as “virtue” – the purity of motive to be an expert and being true to a set of morals.

“Multiple forms of authenticity are concurrently constructed in a single consumption context.  This is in respect to the object or experience itself, the self, and the community.” (Leigh et al., 2006)

Multiple forms of Authenticity

Authenticity is not just a judgement of an object’s legitimacy, or a person’s intentions.  The search for the authentic self is another important goal of consumption, as well as authentic experiences within consumption communities.

The authenticity of  self - Control

Customers search for meaning through consumption – their desire for authentic brands is an identity creation activity.   People want to feel like their ‘real’ selves, so immerse themselves in what they believe are authentic experience that reinforces a desired sense of self.  The transferal of authenticity onto an object or experience is vital to an individual’s hopes of recognition as authentic, as this process validates the authenticator as well as the subject.  The marketing literature also refers to this process as control – mastering one’s self and environment.  

Consumers deliberately put themselves in situations conductive to this goal, called self-authentication.  Self-authentication revitalises self-meaning, which enhances an individual’s well-being.  It is an embodied sensation of knowing, to find one’s true self.  It is a “doing process” felt within, a gateway to existential authenticity. 

Existential authenticity exists an individual's experience, rather than something measured or judged.  Being true to oneself.  The concept originates in philosophy and is common in tourism, where activities achieve a state of being.   It can be based on an individual level or achieved in the presence of others through feeling like “real” community member, through collective sense of selves.  Existential authenticity helps people feel more authentic and more freely self-expressed than in everyday life.

This collective sense of self strengthens social bonds between community members, an atmosphere where individuals may experience true self in presence of relevant others.  Individuals obtain authenticity through sharing and communicating enjoyment with others.

Authenticity as Community – Connection

Customers seek authenticity in communities of consumption, often those that are based around a central brand.  Collective gatherings supply a context for legitimisation, self-validation, and authenticity.  A consumer's collective identity significantly contributes to their individual quest for authenticity. 

Authenticity dictates who is and is not part of the community.  Authentic subculture members must have legitimate intentions and should embrace subcultural values as a lifestyle.  An individual’s role performance in their subculture helps them self-authenticate through proving commitment to the community and genuine membership. 

Actions perceived as breaking community norms result in a loss of authenticity. 

“Authentic consumers embrace the subculture’s own hierarchies and definitions of what is authentic and legitimate.” (Leigh et al., 2006)

Can you fake Authenticity? Its subjective nature

Individuals seek authenticity in a range of products, brands or experiences.  Debates about authenticity within subcultures are common, usually concerned with and the nature of authentic membership and authentic behaviours.  Being versus Doing.

Community members judge each other based on their intentions and acts.  Members who adopt the accessories of a subculture without embracing its lifestyle and values considered as “doing” it — putting on a front to look the part.  “Authentic” subculture members consider this as inauthentic, as their identity is not a reflection of true self.   In contrast, authentic members are those that are engaged in “being.”   By paying their dues over the years, subculture members earn authentic status. 

But authenticity is subjective to each individual, dependent on their own interpretation.  Intentions can seem authentic to some, an authentic to others.   An individual’s opinion based their own associations based on their unique experience and knowledge.  People match an object with the idea created by their beliefs and stereotypes.   The subjectivity of an individual's goals allows them to find authenticity and objects which others consider fake.

Consumers co-create the authenticity of a brand or experience and the meaning is dependent on their personal and unique understanding of what it means to be authentic.

“Authenticity’s association with reality, truth, and believability is subjective and allows the term to be used in different ways.”  (Kolar & Zabkar, 2010)

Authenticity for Marketers

Authenticity is an important concept for marketers to understand, as consumers are more likely to trust authentic brands.   First, how do brands communicate their own authenticity?  To enhance feelings of authenticity, marketers of brands relating to products or services should aim to come across as more “human” in advertising and promotion.  Thus, enabling customers to recognise the characteristic values of the brand.  Customers associate warmth, competence and trust with authenticity.

Second, consumers want to feel authentic.  A goal of the consumption of products, brands and experiences is self-authentication, to enhances peoples’ well-being. 

“Brand authenticity is a subjective evaluation of genuineness ascribed to a brand by a consumer.” (Napoli et al., 2014)

Marketers must adapt their approach for their specific brand in specific contexts and be aware of their customers unique interpretation of authenticity.  It is important to understand the intricacies of the consumption communities related to their product, service or industry before an attempt to enhance perceptions of authenticity.  Brand community is everywhere, some examples are Facebook groups, YouTube channels, blogs, and forums.  Marketers should engross themselves in these communities to gain an understanding of what is authentic.

“Trust (like authenticity) is associated with consistency, competence, honesty, fairness, responsibility, helpfulness and benevolence.”  (Morgan & Hunt, 1994)

Despite consumers having different goals, experiences, and expectations of what is authentic, one thing stays consistent - the desire for something real, true, and genuine.   If customers perceive a brand as authentic, then they find them more trustworthy.  People who trust you are far more likely to do business with you.

Thank you for reading.

If you got this far, then you might see value in my 50 weeks of 50 marketing topics program.

This was the first topic.  Each week, for 50 weeks, I will produce a document such as this article, a video, and a PowerPoint on a different marketing topic, to help you understand it and apply it to your business to attract more customers. 

This week's video: 

I hope you enjoyed this week's topic!

Dan