
Packaging design is the silent salesman that will grab busy consumers’ attention in-store. In our example of branding water, packaging design and advertising are perhaps the most powerful tools used by marketers: Workspace experience and management style.Advertising and communications: TV, radio, magazines, outdoor ads, website, mobile apps….Brand identity: name, tone of voice, visual identity design (which includes the logo design, color palette, typographies…).Brand definition: purpose, values, promise.For example, branding can be achieved through: However, if you feel like the brand understands you and offers products that inspire you, you would probably desire to work for it and be part of its world.Ĭompanies tend to use different tools to create and shape a brand. This asset can affect a range of people, from consumers to employees, investors, shareholders, providers, and distributors. As an example, if you don’t like or don’t feel connected to a brand, you would probably not want to work for it. Employees/shareholders/third-parties: Besides helping consumers to distinguish similar products, successful branding strategies are also adding to a company’s reputation.Consumers: As discussed above, a brand provides consumers with a decision-making-shortcut when feeling indecisive about the same product from different companies.The objective is to attract and retain loyal customers and other stakeholders by delivering a product that is always aligned with what the brand promises. It is a strategy designed by organizations to help people to quickly identify and experience their brand, and give them a reason to choose their products over the competition’s, by clarifying what this particular brand is and is not. “Branding is endowing products and services with the power of a brand” (Kotler & Keller, 2015)īranding is the process of giving a meaning to specific organization, company, products or services by creating and shaping a brand in consumers’ minds. Each person creates his or her own version of it, and some brands increase or decrease in popularity because of how consumers feel about them. In the end, a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a specific product or company. – Fiji Water is pure, healthy and natural – Perrier is refreshing, bubbling and sexy

And each one of these brands provides a different meaning to the product water: The product sold is water, but in order to convince people to purchase a particular water, companies developed different water brands, such as Evian, Perrier, Fiji or Volvic. Let’s illustrate this again with our water example. For example, Pepsi and Coca-Cola taste very similar, however for some reason, some people feel more connected to Coca-Cola, others to Pepsi. This combination of physical and emotional cues is triggered when exposed to the name, the logo, the visual identity, or even the message communicated.Ī product can be easily copied by other players in a market, but a brand will always be unique. It is therefore not just the physical features that create a brand but also the feelings that consumers develop towards the company or its product. “the shoe is light-weight”) and emotional way (e.g. You can consider a brand as the idea or image people have in mind when thinking about specific products, services, and activities of a company, both in a practical (e.g. “A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers” (American Marketing Association).

So, how can different companies sell the same product but still convince people to purchase their bottled water instead of the one from the competition? Yet it became a product the day humans and companies started to commercialize it, for example by selling mineral water in glass and plastic bottles.īut water always looks the same, isn’t it? It is liquid and transparent.
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Water is a free resource that every human being needs to live and survive.

To illustrate the definition of a product and the role it occupies in defining branding, we will use the example of water: This means that a product can be anything from a hotel stay, a flight, a language course, to clothes, food, a toothbrush etc. “Broadly, a product is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy a want or need, including physical goods, services, experiences, events, persons, places, properties, organizations, information, and ideas” (Kotler & Keller, 2015).
