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What is Brand Marketing?
In today’s society brands are one of the most important things out there. They have been increasing in popularity and importance in the last several years and are now looked at as vital components of our culture and the economy. They are even thought of as personal philosophies and cultural accessories. By definition, a brand is a collection of associations, symbols and experiences connected with a service, artifact, product, person, or any other entity. The brand itself isn’t important until it becomes popular, and that creates the need for brand marketing.
A brand marketer’s main goal is to align or develop all expectations behind the brand itself, creating an impression that the products or services that are associated with a certain brand are either unique or special. Because brands are no doubt the most important factors in any ad campaign, brand marketers must constantly maintain the integrity of the brand itself. As long as brand management is done carefully and cleverly, a highly successful advertising campaign can be crafted that is able to convince the everyday consumer to pay a much higher price for products and services which are in actuality extremely inexpensive to produce. Basically, brands do not have any value until we give it to them. This is known as creating value, and basically involves a lot of manipulation on the part of the advertiser, but it is a proven method that has worked for many years. As an example, you may know someone or have a friend that only buys popular brand name or designer jeans; however, you may get yours off the rack at a local department store. Your jeans also have a brand, but your brand doesn’t have the commercial popularity that your friend’s jeans have. She may pay five times as much for her jeans than you paid for hers, yet they look and fit the same as yours. Now you can easily see that she is only paying for the name. Perhaps the most amazing thing about brand marketing is its psychological effect. Brand marketers are able to subconsciously nudge you into believing that paying more for a product or buying a popular brand name product makes the product quality better, when that is not always the case.
Companies could spend millions of dollars on shaping their brand names and creating and launching successful ad campaigns. The best brand marketers are able to build a brand up and make it a household name without anyone realizing what is happening. However, there is a fine line that brand marketers walk when shaping a brand name, and they must be extremely careful and precise. If there come on too strong with a brand or saturate the market too heavily with ads, then they could easily turn potential customers against the brand. If this happens, the odds are very low that the brand would ever be able to reach popularity. For this reason, you may see a product with a specific brand name fail miserably, only to reappear back on the market the very next year under a completely different name.