Marketing and management generally, regularly find themselves actively promoting their branding credentials.
Often they would appear to have no idea beyond the mouthing of clichés why they are bothering.
The costs of building, maintaining and updating a brand is often a major item on the P&L, and there is much written about the techniques and strategies that deliver a return. However, the core question of ‘Why bother” rarely gets a mention.
Until now.
A brand has two faces:
- For the brand owner, a successful brand delivers to its owner a stream of revenue and margin. There is no other reason for the investment necessary for building and maintaining a brand to be made.
- To the customer, a brand offers some level of assurance about the performance, integrity, longevity, and many other characteristics which to them are important. In other words, the value delivered by the brand, weather that be one defined by the physical performance and characteristics, or the emotional dimensions of the brand.
“Branding” seems pretty simple, and in principal it is, but the optimisation of the investments made over the long term is the tricky part. This requires expertise and experence pretty hard to find in these days of instant digital gratification.
