What Message Is Your Brand Sending?

A company’s brand can be described as its identity, not only the products or services that they provide, but who they are as persons and the reputation that comes along with their products and services (Harrington, 2018). Brand marketing, then, is a way of promoting a company’s products or services by emphasizing the company’s identity, its values, and personality. Brand marketing has been important since the days when companies were named after the founders such as with 20th Century Fox, JC Penny, or Chrysler. The idea was that they were putting their own personal name and reputation behind the product they were offering. Today, the companies have become sprawling, multinational bureaucracies, and putting a personal name on the product no longer provides the same reassurance.

Now it is necessary to build strong brand marketing to provide the same kind of trust that the name and logo provided a hundred years ago. Traditional ways to market a company’s brand are through logo design, packaging design, experience design, advertising, product placement, and reward programs (Stec, 2018). Contemporary methods of promoting a company brand include websites, search engine optimization, social media, live streaming, content marketing, infographics, car wraps, networking, and giveaways (Nikolic, 2018).

According to Strategy New Media (n.d.), strong brand marketing can do a number of things for a company: it can promote recognition, offer a differential from competition, tell potential customers about the company’s core beliefs, generate referrals, provide motivation and direction for employees, and ultimately it can provide value.

Perhaps the best example of brand marketing in the last twenty years is with Apple (Patel, n.d.). To Apple’s customers, the products and services are important, but the brand is much more relevant and intimate and so have become a kind of lifestyle. The company’s products have evolved to be designed as simple, sleek, and futuristic computer devices, encapsulated by the very basic Apple logo, the brand is much more. Largely driven by its founder Steve Job’s vision, the brand is about lifestyle, creativity, individuality, unconventionality, style, flair, urban, and democratization (Marketing Minds, n.d.). This expansive brand is conveyed through an assortment of stylized commercials, posters, billboards, and storefronts that dominate cityscapes. The success of Apple’s brand marketing can be seen in the loyalty that the company engenders. Customers typically stay with the company over many iterations of its products and the company boasts a 72 net promoter score, which is among the highest in the technology industry (Niziak, 2018).

References

Harrington, H. (2018). What is brand marketing? Retrieved from https://blog.rebrandly.com/what-is-brand-marketing/

Marketing Minds (n.d.). Apple’s branding strategy. Retrieved from http://www.marketingminds.com.au/apple_branding_strategy.html

Nikolic, D. (2018). 19 powerful ways to market your brand. Retrieved from https://strategynewmedia.com/why-is-branding-important/

Niziak, T. (2018). The reasons behind Apple’s customer loyalty and high NPS. Retrieved from https://www.retently.com/blog/apple-nps/

Patel, N. (n.d.). 7 key strategies you must learn from Apple’s marketing. Retrieved from https://neilpatel.com/blog/7-key-strategies-that-you-must-learn-from-apples-marketing/

Stec, C. (2018). Brand strategy 101: 7 essentials for strong company branding. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31739/7-components-that-comprise-a-comprehensive-brand-strategy.aspx

Strategy New Media (n.d.). Why is branding important? Retrieved from https://strategynewmedia.com/why-is-branding-important/