Branding your business
Have you been able to connect emotionally to your customers? Is your company irreplaceable? Do you think you can build a lifelong relationship with your customers? Maximizing your business' earning potential by creating a brand that people just can't live without is pretty tricky. So how do you do this?
In order to succeed in branding you must first identify the needs and wants of your
customers. You do this by integrating your brand
strategies through your company at every point of public contact. Be innovative and evolve as customers needs change. It's important to spend time investing in researching,
defining, and building your brand. Your brand then becomes a promise to your customers that the product will always be reliable and trustworthy. It's a foundational piece in your marketing
communication and one you do not want to be without
Brands that have been around for a long time can be excellent examples of how to target your customers. Take for example Nestles which is the leading brand of instant coffee. It was also the first. After intensive research in the 1930s researchers developed a way to reduce their coffee surpluses by producing a cheaper coffee which could be made by adding water. Over the years it continued to be innovative by introducing various types of coffee. As a result Nescafe has remained the world's leading coffee brand and the second most valuable brand in the beverage sector with around 3,000 cups of Nescafe drunk every second! Then there is Wrigley whose main product was Wrigley's Scouring Soap and not gum. William Wrigley believed in customer incentives and offered a free packet of baking powder with every purchase of his soap. The baking powder soon became more popular than the soap so Wrigley started selling the baking powder and offered two packs of gum as an incentive. Again, when Wrigley realized that the gum was more popular than the baking powder he allowed his customers to dictate his business direction and made gum the sole focus of his company. After that, he continued to introduce different varieties of gum and worked hard to market his best product–Wrigley's Spearmint– by advertising in ways no one had before.
There are many more brands like Nestles and Wrigleys and they all have many things in common when it comes to branding. Will your company be the next Nike, Campbell's or Coca-Cola? Here are some books to get you started:
2 thoughts on “Branding your business”
Most enjoyable info on branding with your impressive, excellent, example of the Wrigley’s story on marketing this brand and how he let the customer dictate his business direction to success, from soap to gum, the power of an incentive. thanks!
Thank you so much for this positive feedback!