What do Brands Do?

As a Marketing student, you might wonder if brand building means advertising or that brand building is achieved through advertisements alone. Well, at this juncture it becomes important to understand that the brands stand for a lot more than just the product and its functional value that it promises to deliver to the customers.

Celebrating a brand that has become a cult proves to be a way of life with many communities. Realizing the power of the brands over the loyal community of customers, the organizations have nurtured and carefully grown the brands in terms of its reputation as well as its influence.

Many successful brands associate themselves and support many social causes as well as promote their social responsibilities.

It has now become common for the well known brands to promote sports, cultural or music as well as charity or research related events and associate the brand with the particular field that they are associated with. Sports and Branding have a hugely successful partnership. Nike, Reebok etc have gained global visibility by supporting sports traditionally.

When you analyze the brands and their associations, you will soon realize that the brands stand for a lot many things other than just the logo and visual image. No doubt the visual image is one of the intrinsic characteristics of the brand, but the brands also convey a perception that is also associated with the image. They have a distinctive position as well as value and image besides having a personality too.

Delve a little more into the branding concept and you will find that the brands acquire certain personalities too. What we mean to say is that the brands use well known personalities as the ambassadors. The personality and the public image of the brand ambassador also contribute to the brand image and popularity.

Today every personal product, be it a perfume or a watch is associated with a well known personality who represents the brand and helps promote it. Mr. Richard Branson is perhaps one of the most well known brand ambassadors and a brand in himself. There are so many highly successful individuals, sports stars like Tiger Woods as well as actors and actresses who represent and promote brands and popularize them.

All in all, the brands communicate a lot of different things to different people. Today most successful organizations promote their corporate identity or the corporate company brand to retain, sustain and build their corporate image of the company while continuing with individual brand promotion of their products as well. In such cases we see that the Corporate branding and promotions are trying to communicate a different set of messages to the customers while the product brand promotions convey a totally different message.

The corporate branding tries to cultivate and nurture the corporate identify, values and the image while at the product level, the branding promotes the product and its value proposition to the target customers.

Understanding of the different types of branding gives us the understanding that the brands carry a certain power which can be termed as perception combined with an image. Besides, the brand also carries many more components and messages that it tries to convey.

Overall you will also note that the brands have the power to gain access to and remain in the sub conscious mind of the viewers. More importantly they use this power to help initiate and strengthen the relationship with the viewers as well as the customers.

When you start noticing all about brands around, you will realize that there is a design and strategy that goes into building and growing brands for different purposes. This marks the beginning of an interesting journey into the world of brand power for marketing management students.