Promoting excellence in branding

Mr Kenneth Ashigbey, Managing Director of Graphic Communications Group Ltd,  recently presented a paper at the  maiden Ghana’s super brands 2012 awards ceremony in Accra. In view of the importance of the event and the paper we publish the full text of  his  presentation.

THE organisers of this event have restricted me to the topic: Promoting Excellence in Branding” and indeed insist on a short presentation, and I intend to do just that as we are all busy people.  I am also informed that the rationale behind today’s event is to reward and pay tribute to the country’s strongest, exceptional and the most valuable brands for their excellence in branding, which I consider to be highly innovative and rewarding.  This also fits into my passion of building Ghanaian brands to become top class multinational brands.

I consider the theme adopted by Superbrands Ghana at its maiden awards not only appropriate, but also thoughtfully and absolutely relevant.
It might sound rather ridiculous to hear that you are what you eat and wear. I do not presume to romanticise things that have no human qualities, but as we try to make, create and innovate our products, we certainly bring into being a personality.

What this means is that the product or service (I use product in this speech to represent either product or service) you offer to the public, its name or logo has the potential to sustain or change behavioural loyalty. Consumers’ attitudes may likely shift away or towards the brand.

To brand a product, it is necessary to educate the public on what the product is, “who” the product is – by giving it a name and using other brand elements to help identify it – as well as what the product does and why consumers should care about it. In other words, marketers must give consumers a label for the product, (which is how you can identify the product) and provide meaning for the brand (that is, what this particular product can do for you, and why it is special and different from other products).

Branding creates mental structures and helps consumers organise their knowledge about products and services in a way that clarifies their decision- making and, in the process, provides value to the firm. The key to branding is that consumers perceive differences among brands in a product category. These differences can be related to attributes or benefits of the product itself, or they may be related to more intangible image considerations.
Marketing managers should weigh carefully the advantages of branding or not branding the firm’s products, keeping in view the company’s overall strategy, thus its goals and resources, before deciding which course to follow.

The advantages of effective branding are many. A major one is that it helps to create confidence in the firm’s products. Since the producer or middleman who elects to brand his products puts his reputation on the line, he tends to build consistent quality into them. The fact that the consumer can rely on the product encourages repeat purchases, or customer loyalty. A brand name or trademark also enables a consumer to identify the product easily and quickly.
Many consumers are quite willing to pay a slightly higher price (since most nationally branded products cost a little more) for consistency and dependability.
Control is another important advantage of branding. A producer who markets his own branded products has more control over pricing, advertising, and other promotional activities, as does a middleman who contracts with producers to manufacture goods to appear under his brand. Branding is frequently of great promotional value.

Although brands may be as important as ever to consumers, in reality brand management may be more difficult than expected. For example, increasingly, consumers and businesses have become more experienced with marketing, more knowledgeable about how it works, and more demanding. A well-developed media market pays increased attention to companies’ marketing actions and motivations.

Another important change in the branding environment is the proliferation of new brands, and products, in part spurred by the rise in line and brand extension. As a result, a brand name may now be identified with a number of different products with varying degrees of similarity.

One reason marketers have been forced to use so many financial incentives or discount is that the marketplace has become more competitive. Both demand-side and supply-side factors have contributed to the increase in competitive intensity. On the demand side, consumption of many products and services has flattened and hit the maturity stage, or even the decline stage, of the product life cycle. As a result, marketers can achieve sales growth for brands only by taking away competitor’s market share. On the supply side, globalisation is with us and intensifying, new competitors have emerged due to a number of factors.

As a result, achieving the best or excellence in branding would require doing what is most likely to increase your market share in the following ways:

1. •    Building effective relationships or partnerships: This could be intra – or inter-institutional partnerships, alliances that strengthen taste for your product. Such partnerships or alliances should be fit for genuine purposes. This means you are putting the brand out there to accomplish the key object of the company – expanding market share that would lead to growth in revenue and help to maintain the workforce through improvement on the morale of the workforce, which impacts positively on their output.
2. •    Increasing social responsibilities: Your brand in the communities enables the brand to continuously assume certain characteristics. Once a product catches on with people or they have taste for it, there is a snowball effect that increases its marketability.
3. •    Another important change in the marketing environment is the erosion or fragmentation of traditional advertising media and the emergence of interactive and non-traditional media, promotion, and other communication alternatives. You need to determine the unique characteristics of the advert in terms of which media to be adopted – rural or urban-based.
4. •    Consumers are key in all the things we do. Therefore, there is also the need to conduct periodic market surveys to ascertain the level or kind of consumer preference or taste.  Having done that it would help to determine the product to put on the market. The name, the logo and identity allude to something – taste.
5. More often than not, in our desire to beat competition through branding/repositioning of our products, serious mistakes are made. A classic marketing mistake was recorded in 1985 when Coca Cola replaced its flagship cola brand with a new formula.

Even though this was driven by the threat posed by another competitor, Pepsi, the lessons learnt were more formidable than anticipated.
Today, even though it is obvious that one of them has the edge, it is doubtful that either of the companies will take the other for granted.
The story of two giant brands in the sportswear industry is replete with deep-seated rivalry, animosity and unhealthy competition, which happily is not the case in the worldwide corporate competition today.

Adidas and Puma emerged out of what has been described as the world’s worst family feud.

Here were two brothers: Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, who were working with their father in Herzogenaurach, a remote village in the Bavarian Region in Germany. On the demise of their father, the management of the shoe-making enterprise rested on the two brothers. Unfortunately, there ensued a bitter feud between them that led to a separation, with Rudolf establishing Puma and Adolf founding Adidas, which was phonetically derived from his name.

Today, through intense competition in excellence in branding, Puma and Adidas, which emerged out of a deep-seated animosity or hatred, are not only regarded as two giant world-class companies producing quality sportswear, but also credited with the noble achievement of having changed the way the world dresses.

Achieving branding excellence, therefore, requires that the performance of the product must, at least, be acceptable, preferably with a reputation of having good quality.