Brand strategy – do you need to think it over? Is it possible to start selling first, and adjust the work with the brand after launch? The answer to this question can be only one – no.
In the modern tech world, mistakes when launching a new product are unforgivable – your audience simply won’t buy it. This is especially important when working with brands of large companies – in such cases, the miss in planning the brand strategy will be felt more critically.
How to determine the brand strategy? The answer is simple – plan carefully.
Brand Strategy: 3 Key Principles
Define a brand concept
Here you can highlight the following points: target audience, price, visual component and distribution. It is first necessary to decide who will buy this product? Because an expensive product may not sell well in regional markets, especially when it comes to a poor country.
This implies the fundamental principle – know your audience, your competitors and your market. To analyze the whole process, we can give a real example of a beer company that launched a new product on the Russian market. It was a beer intended for blue-collar workers, that is, the working class, strong enough and having a label design depicting national heroes, familiar to everyone from childhood.
And where did this company sell this product? The company sold it where, first of all, it could be bought by the target audience of the product – in retail outlets of the “convenience store” format.
Promotion
To work with the product portfolio, there are several high-quality analysis tools – the BCG matrix, ABC analysis and others. However, to simplify understanding in promoting a new product, you should know the main thing – it takes time and money. How to promote a new product?
Considering the most popular market – FMCG, namely food, we can give some very useful examples. First of all, you need to create the initial distribution level of the new product. If the brand manager correctly identified the target audience and created a product suitable for it, then after production starts the right step would be to motivate sales staff and sales outlets staff with bonuses.
However, simply by selling goods to a point of sale you will not get much – you need to make sure that the goods are sold from a point of sale to the final buyer. Here two basic things will help us: ATL advertising and BTL promo. Any brand strategy should be based on these concepts of promotion. By advertising in the media, including the Internet, you can create initial brand awareness and then motivate the end customer at the outlet.
How to motivate the buyer to purchase the goods? Standard promotions help well in this matter: discounts, gift for purchase, promoters and so on. Do not be afraid in some cases to give your new product for free in the form of a gift for the purchase of another better-known product. This is certainly expensive, but will help create brand loyalty and allow customers to try out a new product.
- The brand must match the times
For example, you are planning a strategy for a new regional brand that should meet the needs of a specific target audience. Suppose this will be the production of local dairy products with low cost. Will your brand correspond to the times in 5-10 years, while dealing with the constant competition of larger players? How should he change during this time? What factors can affect these changes?
A brand is constantly influenced by many factors that can sometimes even kill a prominent product. For example, if a distribution network ordered raw materials from a supplier to produce a particular product under its own brand, and then the supplier went bankrupt, then the product will most likely have to be radically revised. You should always consider factors that primarily affect the price, image, distribution and promotion of the product.
Another example: suppose you are delivering goods to a retail chain, sales are going well and the brand is developing. However, tomorrow your partner decides to replace the product with another one that is more attractive to them. If in your region this retail chain is a monopolist, then you can be sure that the strategy of this brand in your region has failed.
But how to make the brand always relevant for the end customer? The answer is simple – over time, the brand must change. The simplest thing you can do is update the label. And if we are talking about a technological product – smartphones, televisions, computers – then in this case the most important thing is the introduction of new technological functions.
Conclusion:
In today’s world, almost every brand has its own “generations of development”. As a well-known youtuber periodically changes its content, so manufacturers add new technologies to their smartphones. And this cycle can be traced in relation to any well-known brand – even beer and soda change in accordance with time.
Correctly building a brand at the start is a very difficult task. But keeping it relevant for a long time is difficult even more. And we wish you good luck on this path.
