Branding

There is now widespread acceptance that brands play an important role in generating and sustaining the financial performance of businesses. With high levels of competition and excess capacity in virtually every industry, strong brands help companies differentiate themselves in the market and communicate why their products and services are uniquely able to satisfy customer needs.

In an environment in which the functional differences between products and services have been narrowed to the point of near invisibility by the adoption of Total Quality Management, brands provide the basis for establishing meaningful differences between apparently similar offers. Competitive advantage now depends on being able to satisfy not just the functional requirements of your customers, but also their more intangible needs. It means understanding not just what your products can do for them, but also what they can mean to them.

Brands are ideally suited to this task because they communicate on a number of different levels. Brands have three primary functions – navigation, reassurance and engagement. Navigation – brands help customers to select from a bewildering array of alternatives. Reassurance – they communicate the intrinsic quality of the product or service and so reassure customers at the point of purchase. Engagement – they communicate distinctive imagery and associations that encourage customers to identify with the brand.

Branding is the process of transforming essentially functional assets into relationship assets by providing the basis for a psychological connection between the brand and the customer. This ability to endow aproduct, service or company with an emotional significance over and above its functional value is a substantial source of value creation.

Taking an idea, abstraction, concept to market, tangible deliverable, commodity to buy and sell is everyone’s dream. TO MAKE IT BIG! HAVE THAT ONE GREAT IDEA THAT WILL SET YOU UP FOR LIFE, the ever-elusive pursuit! Well, now it can be possible and all yours, with the right kind of steps, strategies and action plan to make your idea a moneymaker, earning you millions.

 But, I am sure you still have lots of questions lingering. Here are some examples from entrepreneurs, inventors and innovators just like YOU:

-       Can you commercialize your idea?

-       What about expertise and resources to deliver this product effectively to market?

-       How do you make sense of intellectual property?

-       Where do you start if you have a great idea and you are not sure what to do with it?

All of these questions and MORE, will be addressed as the text continues to unfold and we explore the practical side of what to do and when, a little closer and in specific detail.