What is Marketing: Part 4 - Advertising and Branding

Advertising and Branding

Part 4 in the “What is Marketing” series

Inform the consumer that the product is available

As long as your business was limited to a stall at a street fair, the only advertising you needed was maybe a sign, and a tall hanger to show off your wares to the passing foot traffic.  Now you’re selling it in shops that may not give you window space.  At this point you become concerned, first with notifying people that your products are available through these channels, and secondly with trying to increase the odds that consumers who visit these channels will ask for your product by name.  Suddenly you are concerned with branding.

Brand development

If you’re investing in marketing activities (and in this context, I do mean “advertising” primarily) then you want to maximize the return you get on that investment.  If you advertise and convince prospects to visit your channel partners, then you want them to be able to ask for your products by name when they walk in the door; and for that, you need a brand name.  A brand also helps you to improve repeat customer retention – the tendency of previous customers to come back and buy from you again in the future.  The more familiar they are with your product, the more likely they are to associate it with a friendly sense of recognition.  If you have a name and mark that you implement consistently across your customer touchpoints, then your customers will be more likely to remember you from one contact to another.

Choosing a brand name and logo

Ideally, when selecting a brand name, you want something memorable, short, and descriptive; a name that will represent your company’s quirky personality and tie that in to the quirky self-image of your best customers.  In this case, your product line already has a brand name: if you hope to retain your existing name recognition and customer base, then you will probably continue to use the name from your old street fair stall sign.  You can probably safely have your logo professionally redesigned, though, unless you are happy with the one you have.  Try to be sure you work with a professional who is comfortable producing a logo that will work in a variety of media: not just something that would look flashy on a web page; but something you could have embroidered onto your clothing items, when you get bigger and start producing your products in large quantities.

Brand awareness

Now you are ready to introduce your brand to the world.  This is the expensive undertaking we all know and love from the continuous advertisements we are subjected to everywhere we go and doing everything we do.  But you don’t want to blanket every available media channel with your marketing message: you want to target your customers specifically.  Not only that, but you want to target consumers by the channel they are likely to utilize: trendy downtown pedestrians through the trendy local weeklies; internet shoppers through Google ads.  I talked about advertising a bit in a previous post, and I’ll probably come back to it again in a future post, if I manage to stay motivated.  I guess for now suffice to say that advertising is a crucial component of any marketing strategy.

This is an ongoing process.  You’ll notice that many large, successful brands never stop advertising, especially consumer brands in competitive markets with minimal differentiation.  There’s a reason for this.  Pursue your chosen strategy for a time, and then it will be time to evaluate your progress.

Next time: evaluate the results of marketing activities.