Brand marketing describes the process of an organization building a relationship between its brand and customers from the target audience. Instead of marketing the features of a particular product or service, brand marketing promotes the whole brand by mentioning how those products and services support the brand’s promise.
Aspect
Explanation
Definition
Brand Marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on promoting and building a strong and positive brand identity for a product, service, or organization. It involves creating and communicating a distinct brand image, values, and personality to attract and retain customers.
Key Concepts
– Brand Identity: The visual and verbal elements that represent the brand. – Brand Image: How the brand is perceived by customers and the public. – Brand Equity: The value and reputation associated with the brand. – Brand Loyalty: Customer devotion to the brand. – Brand Awareness: The extent to which the brand is recognized. – Brand Positioning: How the brand is positioned in the market.
Strategies
– Brand Development: Building a new brand identity or rebranding. – Content Marketing: Creating valuable content that aligns with the brand’s values. – Social Media Marketing: Leveraging social platforms to connect with audiences. – Influencer Marketing: Partnering with influencers to promote the brand. – Storytelling: Creating narratives that resonate with the brand’s identity. – Experiential Marketing: Creating memorable brand experiences for customers.
Benefits
Brand marketing offers several benefits: 1. Customer Trust: Building trust and credibility. 2. Customer Loyalty: Fostering loyalty and repeat business. 3. Competitive Advantage: Gaining an edge in the market. 4. Increased Value: Enhancing the brand’s perceived value. 5. Emotional Connection: Creating emotional bonds with customers.
Challenges
Challenges include maintaining brand consistency, adapting to changing consumer preferences, and measuring the ROI of brand marketing efforts.
Metrics
Metrics for brand marketing include brand awareness levels, customer sentiment, customer retention rates, brand recall, and market share.
Conclusion
Brand Marketing is a vital aspect of a company’s overall marketing strategy. It focuses on creating and maintaining a unique brand identity that resonates with target audiences, fosters trust and loyalty, and provides a competitive advantage in the market. Successful brand marketing requires a clear brand strategy, consistent messaging, and a deep understanding of customer perceptions and preferences.
Despite this important distinction, brand marketing works in much the same way as the marketing of a product. It takes place on various channels such as paid advertising and social media, with the most effective strategies incorporating a media mix that helps the brand reach a wider audience.
When implemented correctly, brand marketing helps the company establish and grow a loyal base of customers. This can only be achieved by the continual and consistent communication of the brand’s identity in a compelling and meaningful way.
Long term goals of brand marketing
How can brand awareness, recognition, and trust be created in such a way that the overall reputation of the brand increases?
Successful brand marketing can be broken down into a number of specific components:
Brand identity and image – this involves making the brand recognizable with symbols, colors, logos, packaging, and so forth.
Brand awareness – the extent to which a consumer is familiar with the characteristics of a brand.
Brand loyalty – there are many ways to do create loyalty, but delivering on quality and value, asking customers what they want, and focusing on consistency is a good start.
Brand engagement – a key component of brand marketing as it is a process that forms an emotional or rational attachment between the brand and consumer. If nothing else, brand engagement positively influences purchase intention.
Brand ambassadors – these are consumers that recommend a product or service to their friends and family and are an important driver of new customer acquisition.
Advantages of Brand Marketing
Recognition: Effective brand marketing enhances brand recognition, making it easier for consumers to identify and remember your brand.
Trust and Loyalty: Building a consistent and trustworthy brand image fosters customer loyalty and advocacy.
Competitive Edge: A strong brand can differentiate your business in a competitive market, giving you an edge over rivals.
Higher Perceived Value: Successful brand marketing can elevate the perceived value of your products or services, allowing you to command premium prices.
Challenges of Brand Marketing
Consistency: Maintaining a consistent brand image across diverse marketing channels and over time requires careful planning and execution.
Resource Intensive: Effective brand marketing often requires significant resources, including time, personnel, and budget.
Measuring Impact: Measuring the direct impact of brand marketing efforts on the bottom line can be challenging due to its long-term nature.
Market Changes: Adapting to changing consumer preferences and market dynamics while maintaining brand integrity can be a delicate balance.
When to Use Brand Marketing
Market Entry: Brand marketing is crucial when entering a new market to establish brand awareness and credibility.
Product Launch: For new product launches, effective brand marketing can create anticipation and drive initial sales.
Rebranding: During rebranding efforts, brand marketing helps communicate changes in brand identity or positioning.
Strategic Planning: Incorporate brand marketing into your strategic planning to align marketing efforts with your brand’s core values and objectives.
What to Expect from Using Brand Marketing
Enhanced Brand Visibility: Brand marketing increases your brand’s visibility and exposure to a broader audience.
Improved Reputation: Consistent and positive brand marketing efforts enhance your brand’s reputation and credibility.
Customer Engagement: Effective brand marketing encourages customer engagement, leading to increased interactions and conversions.
Long-Term Growth: Over time, successful brand marketing can lead to sustainable growth and market leadership.
Long-Term Impact of Brand Marketing
Market Leadership: Successful brand marketing can lead to market leadership, positioning your brand as an industry or category leader.
Customer Loyalty: Building strong customer relationships through brand marketing fosters long-term loyalty, advocacy, and repeat business.
Consistent Brand Image: Brand marketing helps maintain a consistent brand image, even as your brand evolves.
Related Business Frameworks
Customer Journey Mapping: Understanding the customer journey is crucial for effective brand marketing, as it helps tailor marketing efforts to different touchpoints and stages of the customer’s experience.
Content Marketing: Content is a key component of brand marketing, as it allows you to communicate your brand’s story, values, and benefits in a meaningful way.
Brand Equity: Brand equity, which encompasses brand awareness, associations, loyalty, and perceived quality, is closely tied to the success of brand marketing efforts.
Competitive Analysis: Regularly analyzing competitors’ branding and marketing strategies can help your brand stay competitive and innovative.
Brand marketing examples
Let’s conclude this article by taking a look at some examples of brand marketing in action:
Apple – for each new product it releases, Apple sells a lifestyle with its crisp, white packaging, well-attended product launches, and sometimes provocative marketing campaigns. Apple’s brand marketing strategy has created a dedicated and loyal user base who believe they need the company’s products to improve their lives.
McDonald’s – the fast-food restaurant chain has used consistent brand marketing to make it one of the most recognized brands in the world. McDonald’s relies heavily on brand identity and image in particular, with its golden arches logo more or less the same as it was when the company was founded. The brand’s core message of fun and happiness has also remained constant over the decades.
Nike – where Nike differentiates its brand marketing strategy from competitors is in its ability to tell stories. Whether it be a social media post, product description, or even the décor in company headquarters, Nike does not miss a chance to explain where it has come from and where it intends to go. Storytelling increases loyalty and engagement because stories include a human element that makes the brand more relatable.
Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola’s brand marketing is built around the idea of happiness and togetherness. Their iconic red cans and holiday campaigns emphasize the emotional connection associated with sharing a Coke.
Disney: Disney’s brand marketing centers on the themes of magic, family, and storytelling. Their characters, theme parks, and movies all contribute to creating a sense of wonder and nostalgia.
Nike: Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign is a prime example of brand marketing. It’s not just about selling athletic shoes; it’s about inspiring people to push their limits and achieve their goals.
Starbucks: Starbucks focuses on creating a sense of community and an upscale coffee experience. Their green logo and cozy store atmospheres contribute to their brand identity.
Google: Google’s brand marketing centers around trust and innovation. Their colorful logo and commitment to organizing the world’s information contribute to their brand perception.
Red Bull: Red Bull’s brand marketing is all about energy and adventure. Their events and extreme sports sponsorships reinforce this image.
Dove: Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign promotes self-esteem and body positivity. They focus on challenging beauty stereotypes rather than just selling soap and skincare products.
Amazon: Amazon’s brand marketing emphasizes convenience and customer-centricity. Their smile logo and fast delivery options are key elements of their brand identity.
Tesla: Tesla’s brand marketing revolves around sustainability and cutting-edge technology. They position themselves as leaders in the electric vehicle and clean energy space.
Harley-Davidson: Harley-Davidson’s brand is all about freedom and rebellion. Their motorcycles are not just products but symbols of a lifestyle.
McDonald’s: McDonald’s uses its golden arches and consistent messaging to create a sense of familiarity and comfort in their brand.
Pepsi: Pepsi often competes with Coca-Cola in the cola market. Their brand marketing focuses on youth, excitement, and pop culture.
Oreo: Oreo cookies are marketed as a timeless and fun snack. Their “Twist, Lick, Dunk” slogan encourages playful consumption.
Lego: Lego’s brand marketing revolves around creativity, imagination, and family bonding. Their products are not just building blocks but tools for storytelling.
GoPro: GoPro’s brand marketing is all about adventure and capturing moments. Their cameras are positioned as tools for adrenaline junkies and outdoor enthusiasts.
Patagonia: Patagonia’s brand marketing is deeply rooted in environmental consciousness and sustainability. They actively support environmental causes and promote responsible consumption.
Chick-fil-A: Chick-fil-A’s brand marketing focuses on quality, customer service, and their unique “Eat Mor Chikin” cow campaign.
BMW: BMW’s brand marketing emphasizes luxury, performance, and precision. They position their vehicles as the ultimate driving machines.
Lululemon: Lululemon’s brand marketing is centered on active lifestyle and mindfulness. They promote their products as part of a holistic approach to wellness.
Key takeaways:
Brand marketing is a way for an organization to promote its brand as a whole.
Successful brand marketing can be broken down into a number of specific components. These include brand identity and image, brand awareness, brand ambassadorship, brand loyalty, and brand engagement.
Examples of effective brand marketing in action include Apple, McDonald’s, and Nike. Each company markets its brand in a way that is meaningful and relevant to the company and its consumers.
Key Highlights of Brand Marketing:
Definition: Brand marketing focuses on building a relationship between an organization’s brand and its target audience. It emphasizes promoting the entire brand and how its products or services align with the brand’s promise, rather than just marketing specific features.
Channels: Brand marketing utilizes various channels, including paid advertising and social media, to reach a wide audience. Effective strategies often incorporate a mix of media to maximize brand exposure.
Loyalty Building: Successful brand marketing aims to establish and cultivate a loyal customer base. Consistent and compelling communication of the brand’s identity is essential for achieving this.
Long-Term Goals:
Brand Identity and Image: Creating recognizable brand elements such as logos, colors, and packaging.
Brand Awareness: Ensuring consumers are familiar with the brand’s characteristics.
Brand Loyalty: Building loyalty through quality, value, consistency, and customer feedback.
Brand Engagement: Forming emotional or rational attachments between the brand and consumers, influencing purchase intention.
Brand Ambassadors: Encouraging customers to recommend the brand to others, driving new customer acquisition.
Brand Marketing Examples:
Apple: Apple’s brand marketing focuses on selling a lifestyle along with its products, creating a dedicated and loyal user base.
McDonald’s: The fast-food chain relies on consistent brand identity and messaging, making it one of the world’s most recognized brands.
Nike: Nike distinguishes itself with storytelling, sharing its journey and future plans to increase loyalty and engagement.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
