Sunday, October 11, 2015

Branding and Brand Management

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What is branding? The process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumer's' mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.

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And what is brand management? It includes developing a promise, making that promise and maintaining it. It means defining the brand, positioning the brand, and delivering the brand. Brand management is nothing but an art of creating and sustaining the brand. Branding makes customers committed to your business. A strong brand differentiates your products from the competitors. It gives a quality image to your business. Brand equity also provides value to customers. It enhances the customer’s ability to interpret and process information, improves confidence in the purchase decision and affects the quality of the user experience. The fact that it provides customer value showcases brand equity as one of the major components of modern marketing alongside the marketing concept, segmentation, and several others.

Brand equity is a set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand name and symbol, which add to or subtract from the value provided by a product or service. Brand equity has four dimensions—brand loyalty, brand awareness, brand associations, and perceived quality, each providing value to a firm in numerous ways. Once a brand identifies the value of brand equity, they can follow a brand equity roadmap to manage that potential value.

Brands play an important role in generating and sustaining the financial performance of businesses. With high levels of competition and excess capacity in virtually every industry, strong brands help companies differentiate themselves in the market and communicate why their products and services are uniquely able to satisfy customer needs.The past 20 years have witnessed a dramatic shift in the sources of value creation from tangible assets (such as property, plant, equipment and inventory) to intangible assets (such as skilled employees, patents, business systems and brands).

Cadbury dairy Milk has been trying to get out of the image of ”just another chocolate” and position itself as something special in the minds of the people. The campaign has successfully created a picture in the mind of the customers that Cadbury is not just a chocolate but a means of celebrations.
There are two main sources of Brand Equity, and they are:
Brand Awareness: It is the extent to which consumers are familiar with the qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.
Brand Image: It is the consumer’s perception of a particular goods or services.

Cadbury’s not only enjoys high levels of Brand Awareness but also unaided Brand Recall. This level of recall is generated especially when Dairy Milk enjoys the top of the mind effect. The brand image of Cadbury Dairy Milk plays an important role in building the brand equity of Dairy Milk through the medium of unique brand associations. Right from the "Kuch Meetha Ho Jaye" campaign to the recent “Shubh Aarambh”, Dairy Milk has managed to create strong, unique, and favorable brand associations in the minds of the consumers which is commendable.

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Another  important sources of Brand Equity is:
Emotional Connect: Dairy Milk is considered as a replacement to traditional Indian sweets (Mithai) which people exchange with their near and dear ones on these occasions. Using Amitabh Bachchan as a brand ambassador is just a stroke of genius on Cadbury’s part.  Cadbury India's managing director Bharat Puri has been quoted in the media. "Moreover, Bachchan has a universal appeal that extends to everyone from six years to 60, just as our chocolates do." His appeal cuts across socio-economic and age strata. This is exactly what Cadbury needs. Our generation has grown up on Bachchan, while his current popularity ensures that today's generation is also growing up on him.

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When a company is sold, it seeks to obtain a value over and beyond that of its tangible assets. Historically this has been referred to as `goodwill' and was taken to mean the value of the loyalty of the firm's customers. This is an interesting concept as loyalty is an important component of branding - so already it is clear that there is a strong link between goodwill and brands. After all, a good brand is one which customers insist on by name and for which they are prepared to pay a premium.

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