How do you achieve positive customer-based brand equity? You have to keep the brand awareness and brand image at high levels at all times. But how do you accomplish that?

First, you have to have a great understanding of what your customer needs. Find out what their preferences are, what their tastes are like, and how aware of your brand they are at the present moment.

Once you know all that, you can raise the level of brand awareness in the minds of your consumers. You can achieve that by implementing various marketing strategies and measuring their results. However, compiling an effective marketing strategy is no easy task. It involves juggling multiple factors and often working with a wide range of products and brands. What’s more, each segment of the marketing strategy has to be aligned towards the same goal. The ultimate goal is increasing positive customer-based brand equity.

 

Distinguishing Your Brand

The primary goal of marketing strategies is to distinguish the brand from other competitors. However, branding strategies also deal with deciding whether product brands and corporate brands should be separate or not. Furthermore, they design and devise names, logos, symbols, and other visual brand identifiers. The primary goal is achieved by pointing out not only differences but also similarities with other brands in the same product category and creating brand awareness.

Brand Portfolio and Brand Expansions

To explain your brand portfolio and make plans for potential brand expansions, you have to understand the dynamics between brand and product. This is called the brand-product matrix. This matrix represents all competitors from the same product category and creates an opportunity to not only understand the brand line but also expand the product line.

The brand portfolio represents all current competing brands for the same product category, and it gives an insight into developing future strategies.

 

The Product Line

How does the product line help marketers? The decision whether to extend the existing product line or to create new alternatives to the products the brand is already developing is up to the marketers.

When making this decision, marketers have to mind the SWOT. SWOT stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat, and each of these elements should be thoroughly analysed. The analysis will provide the product line which will make deciding about future branding moves much easier. What’s more, the analysis of these elements will also help the marketers understand the dynamics of category structure, market conditions, and the environment.

The best approach to dominating the product line is creating multiple brands. Take famous automotive companies as an example. General Motors dominates the product category by manufacturing different product classes under different brand names. Creating different brands for different products in the same category allows you to implement various strategies. What’s more, it enables a more narrow focus.

 

The Brand Product Matrix

With the help of the brand-product matrix, you can have an insight into the brand hierarchy of all brands and products within the same product category. This structure showcases corporate brands first, but it also gives an idea into lesser brands and different product categories. This kind of structural display allows marketers to create multi-level strategies.

Three Approaches to Designing a Marketing Strategy

While there is no single, perfect way to design an effective branding strategy. Typically, you can take one of following three approaches.

  • The first approach is to prioritise corporate over product brands.
  • The second approach is to keep the accent on one or more product brands while also highlighting the corporate brand.
  • The third approach is to completely dismiss the corporate brand in favour of the product brand.

Social Marketing

Nowadays, another approach is steadily gaining popularity. That’s social marketing, otherwise known as cause marketing. It consists of associating the brand with a social cause.

Brands give portions of their earnings to designated causes. Social marketing does wonders for brand awareness and brand image because it creates a positive impression in the consumer’s mind, not only of the brand but the consumer as well. By consuming your product, the consumer feels proud because they are contributing to an important cause.

There is no definite recipe for designing, maintaining, and improving branding strategies. However, one thing is certain — proactivity is the key. Analysing and discarding different approaches until you find the one that’s most effective is crucial. Furthermore, flexibility and adaptability to changes is also a significant factor.

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