A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller’s product offering as distinct from those of other sellers.
The objective of brand marketing is to create certain attitudes towards the product or service in the minds of consumers, such as:
awareness of the existence of the brand;
recognition of the brand;
persuasion to try the brand - make a purchase;
retention or loyalty to the brand - making repeated purchases in the future.
The digital world poses many new challenges to the successful marketing of brands – especially with the advent of social media – which we now devote an entire section of the knowledge centre to.
In this section we concentrate on the marketing of brands across the board.
Branding commodities may seem to be an oxymoron, because the mere word "commodity" connotes parity, sameness and commonality. And we all know that brands have to have emotional and rational unique points of difference, a "personality" and qualities that the consumer can identify with and relate to. Read More
Nike, exclusive sponsor of sportswear and footwear for the 1997 New York City Marathon, is liquidating surplus custom marathon merchandise through a direct mail flyer targeted at the 20,000 domestic runners in last fall's race. Read More
How often are brands and their impact on a business’ financial health fully aired and understood in the boardroom? How does the Financial Director feel about the return on investment of the company’s marketing spend? How does the Managing Director see brand policy as the basis to a successful mergers and acquisition strategy? Read More
What will brands do in the future based on how they've behaved today and in the past? The founders of Idea Engineers, Mandy de Waal and Janice Spark, look at brand trends for the coming year and beyond. Read More
Sponsorship is the business link between commercial companies and events or activities, through the provision of funds and services to achieve a predetermined marketing and communication objective. Primarily this tends to be the corporate or brand exposure via the media and in addition, superb PR, promotional and business returns, which benefit the sponsor’s internal and external relationships Read More
In the mid '80s, BMW had a strong share of America's then-thriving luxury car market. Fortyish-year-old execs across the nation spent their weekends hugging the curves and waxing Germany's premier car, carefully positions as the "ultimate driving machine." Read More
There was a time when direct marketers did not believe that they concerned themselves with brands, even though they created some of the most famous brands on earth. Historically, direct marketers mainly concerned themselves with direct marketing. If you are a classic direct marketer, and you derive all of your revenues from direct-to-consumer sales, I'm going to urge you to now think of your product or service as a brand. Read More
Relationship marketing has become one of marketing's buzzwords. Even a casual reading of the direct marketing press will reveal an almost universal (at least among marketers) longing and reverence for the concept. Its goal of fostering a dialogue between companies and customers in order to build long lasting, profitable relationships are certainly a worthy one. Read More
Each time freedom has been squeezed into a box, it has triumphed.
Now it has become a business. A new generation of Internet sites has geared up for what could be the most interesting race for market share in months. Read More
Cause Related Marketing (CRM) has been practised for many years in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has established itself as an additional marketing tool in South Africa over the past decade and opened a new and valued source of funding for non-profit organisations. Read More
We know that brands today can represent just about anything. Many feel that the word brand is so overused that it has become totally confusing. Some think a brand is purely an icon or logo or word. Others prefer to talk about corporate worth or reputation. Read More
Creating global brands is an imperative for the future of South Africa. Since the ending of apartheid and the opening up of South Africa’s own market to international competition, jobs have been lost within South Africa’s own industries, unemployment now reaching levels of a third of the working age population or 15 million people. Read More
Blurring industry boundaries. Globalised competition. E-commerce. Supply chain management. Disintermediation. Molecularisation. Strategic alliance building. – You don’t need a PhD to realise there’s no place for the weak of heart in 21st century marketing.But if it’s no place for a “tender-pants”, it’s no place for Dirty Harry either. There’s a growing awareness that all firms are part of “supply chains” of companies that serve ultimate consumers. This new development places a premium on the skills of co-operation and co-ordination. Read More
The consequence of price promotions is weak brand equity, which in turn leads to too many product categories that should be brand-moderated becoming price-moderated, quasi-commodity sectors. Read More
