What is the best branding technique for your organization?
The reply is, this will depend.
The most recent thinking in the area of branding (which first started to emerge like a true field of study during the early ’50s) identifies five branding strategies that reign supreme in the current corporate world. Although each strategy could be effectively utilized by companies offering completely different services and products, all of them appear to operate best within fairly narrow parameters that have to do with the, service or product and market being offered.
Selecting the very best technique for your organization, then, depends upon matching the parameters of the product/service and sell to the right model.
Bearing in mind that entire books happen to be written around the individual branding strategies, here is a quick snapshot of every one:
1. Mind-Share Branding. Success within this category requires owning and consistently expressing some abstract associations that buyers connect with the service or product. However, the perceived advantages of buying and taking advantage of these products (i.e., consistently low cost, great selection) are extremely real towards the customers. As the organization consistently expresses the “brand DNA” through every single transaction, it might be firmly entrenched within the customer’s mind because the only choice within this product category.
Interestingly, mind-share branding works as well at opposite ends from the product spectrum. Functional and occasional-participation product groups (for example Tide, Southwest Airlines and Wal*Mart) and complex, high-participation product groups (for example Dell computers) can both prosper within mind-share brand strategy. Each and every finish, however, the aim — and first benefit — would be to simplify the decision for that customer.
Good reads: Positioning: The Fight for the Mind, Differentiate or Die and also the Disciple of Management
2. Cultural Branding. Cultural branding is most likely probably the most American of branding strategies for the reason that it uses cultural icons and “brand religion” to determine and sustain a brandname myth that individual consumers can amorously identify. The main focus is less around the service or product because it is around the relationship between your cultural icon and also the product and also the brand myth the consumer buys into. Probably the most effective brand myths address acute contradictions in society that touch people in a very deep level.