Introduction of Branding/Storytelling
Branding is an essential part of marketing products, which business often distinguish themselves from competitors with its name, slogan and design. A strong brand today requires a personality that resonates with its audience. Branding can also be defined as a company’s identity from who they are, what they do, and the type of quality being offered.
Leverage on Brand identity – Aaker model
The Aaker Model is a developed by a marketing expert David Aaker. The model is created to help businesses to attain brand equity. It also highlights the importance of brand identity and offers a unique solution to build a brand. The Aaker model consists of four different brand topics, Awareness, Loyalty, Perceived Quality and Brand Associations. These various topics will bring value to businesses.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the level of consumer consciousness of a brand. It is used to determine if a customer can recognise the brand image. When a consumer trusts a brand, the likelihood of them being aware of what the brand’s offer is high. Therefore, with excellent brand awareness, the customer tends to patronise that brand rather than researching for an alternative.
One example of how Coca-Cola increase their brand awareness is during the launch of the marketing campaign named after “Share a Coke“. Coca-Cola has shared that the campaign had been a global success as they have garnered almost two million visits during the campaign. They have also shared that more than 51% of the visitors came from mobile devices. During the process, Coca-Cola has partnered with mobile experts to ensure that the high-resolution advertisement will still be available even with weak broadband speed.
Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is the tendency of having the consumer to purchase one brand’s product over another continuously. Such behaviour patterns show that the brand has built trust between the company. Therefore it leads to a continuous purchase from the consumer.
Despite having many competitors in the market, consumers of Coca-Cola are still loyal to the brand. This is because Coca-Cola’s digital marketing effort has enhanced the customer’s experience by making their consumers “feel good” and happy when they are allowed to send off a personalised virtual Coke bottle to friends and loved ones which have helped them to drive brand loyalty.
Perceived Quality
Perceived Quality refers to consumers’ view of the quality of a product in terms of what they expect and also in comparison with how they perceive the quality of what the competitors are offers. It can also be defined as consumers believe.
The embedded video above is about people taking a blind test on Coca-Cola and Pepsi, many of them describe that coke tastes better, and they will not have a problem identifying it. However, during the blind test, most of them did not get it right as Pepsi tends to taste better. This shows that Coca-Cola has done a great job as they have a higher level of perceived quality in comparison with Pepsi despite Pepsi being the tastier on in the video.
Brand Associations
The brand association can be anything which is in the consumer’s mind when the brand is mentioned to the particular consumer. All brands will have a different meaning for every individual consumer. The brand should be associated with something positive so that consumer can also relate the brand with it being positive.
Another successful campaign that Coca-Cola has launched, called “Taste the Feeling”. Which is to encourage millennials to sit down with their friends and family during mealtimes, has created a strong brand association among the millennials. This has led to Coca-Cola being often consumed with family and friends during gatherings on special occasions. This then attracts the millennials to purchase glasses of coke during every gathering. This has also helped Coca-Cola to gain significant sales during holiday seasons where family and friends often gather and celebrate the festive season together.
Creating a brand storytelling
Determine Why
It has to be starting from sharing why the brand exists. The brands have to display their purpose beyond the product. By recalling the passion of how the business gets into the industry can be one way to start from. If consumer is able to see the passion, they would want to be part of it.
Understand Your Product
To know the brand story, the businesses must also understand how and where the product fits into it. This is because if a brand story that does not relate their product properly, it might drive an engaged fan base, but not high sales.
Understand the Audience
Businesses will have a strong advantage if they were to be able to identify the passions and pain points of their consumers, this will help businesses to determine how can their brand story fits into their lives.
Be Consistent
When a brand story is consistent, it will be very impactful. A brand story have to be communicated consistently, across all channels and have to relevant to the business target audience.
“Every element of your brand — from story narrative to visuals — should have a purpose. Your products should assist each other, not fight for attention or shelf space.”
Rosen
Coca-Cola Brand Story
Coca Cola doesn’t have a mission, however, they have a brand story that the business can relate with their broad target market. “Coca Cola is not selling just carbonated sugar and water,” says Conway. “They’ve always been about happiness, friendship and fun.”
Coca Cola is very consistency in sharing their brand stories.
“They push messaging consistently through all of their media, from Facebook to advertising campaigns. The timeless designs, fonts, images, and color pantones are instantly recognizable.”
Conway
Key Take Away (Reflection)
Branding today is extremely important as it will be the first impression for the consumers. Based on my learning, the whole aspect of the coming out with a good brand story started with the logo design. The design is so important as it will affect the brand identity. Therefore, it is very important to do good market research before diving into the logo design.
One key question that marketers should keep asking the target audience is “What is do you first think of when you first saw the “design”. The design will only be established when the businesses start to hear keywords that are positive and at the same time, relevant to their brand
By creating an excellent brand identity this could create a huge advantage among their competitors as it would make the brand stand out among others and at the same time making their brands a preferred choice of the customer. Hence, in the long run, these customers will become the company’s, loyal customers.
On top of creating an excellent brand identity, the company should not ignore the importance of storyboarding where it helps the businesses to not tell a confusing story but invite the customer into a story so that customer has a better connection in between the brand and themselves.