Strategic Brand Management - The Beginner's Guide

Branding as a process is more than just designing a logo and having a catchy brand name. A branding strategy in most cases can make or break your business. Your branding strategy should involve steps to find differentiating factors between your product's promise and its advantages over that of your competitors.   It involves creating a brand message which is not only the Holy Bible for the company, but also involves communicating this message across to your consumers through advertising and promotions. Having a successful branding strategy ensures a steady growth in loyal customers and thereby translates into growth in financial returns in the long run. Below are some tips at how to formulate a good branding strategy, being a start-up. 1.      Do an exhaustive preliminary research Before you get started on creating your branding strategy, you first need to research about your target market, your competitors, their market share and the problems they’re facing

Once a marketer has defined the target market and the type of competition, it’s imperative for the marketer to define the basis of this positioning. This can be done by the defining the Points of Parity and Points of Difference. Points of Parity (POP) are usually the attributes or functionalities or benefits or any other marketing mix elements that are not unique to the brand and might be shared by some or all the competitors, as they mostly include the basic necessities for a brand to be considered in a particular category. There are two types of Points of Parity: i)             Category Points of Parity: These represent the necessary elements that a brand should possess for a consumer to consider it in a particular category. In other words, these elements ensure that a consumer considers your brand too while considering your competitors. ii)            Competitive Points of Parity: Once your brand provides the basic elements required by the category, the next step is to add ele