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GENERATION 21X SPEAK : BRANDS Got to get you into my life By Riaz Naikwadi
Quality is absolutely essential to a strong brand. Consumer research tells us that quality, in the abstract, is not sufficient to build a strong brand; it should also be experienced by the consumer. Positive attitudes about the product are the second essential element of a strong brand. Attitude is, like quality, somewhat more complex than it appears. The most useful attitudes are those formed through personal behaviour. The final element of a strong brand is consistency of image. Brands must not ignore the reality of their established image in the eyes of their patrons. To understand how brands will need to be created and managed in this millennium, we need to understand the business environment. Five variables will affect the way companies conduct business in this century: technology; human aspirations; the global economic, political, and physical environment; complexity; and demographics. Based on the interplay of these variables, 2 very different ways of doing business will emerge: in terms of organisational size and complexity. Thus, work will either be organised in an ever-shifting network of small firms and individual contractors (called the small companies, large networks paradigm); or it will be organised in huge, all-encompassing global conglomerates (the virtual countries paradigm). In the first case, brand-management could involve dealing with one of 3 different scenarios. One, brands remain important, but the companies that own the brands outsource manufacturing and distribution and are content to use the brand as a seal of quality; two, brokers replace brands as the primary means of providing an assurance of quality to customers; or three, information is so abundant that self-regulated swarming activity by customers obviates the need for brands and brokers. In the second case, things will not be very different from what they were in the previous century: large conglomerates will continually launch brands under a global brand-name, and have sizeable manufacturing, product-development, marketing, and legal troops whose one objective is to zealously protect these brands. Today, consumers face a bewildering array of product choices, and seek effective mechanisms for determining the quality of these products and services. In the virtual countries paradigm, this mechanism is one of the most critical functions of large companies. Thus, customers will rely even more on brandnames; these will be the mechanism that assures customers about the quality and reliability of the products and services they buy. Brands will also play a role in the small companies, large networks paradigm. Providing a seal of quality will be the only critical function retained by some companies. It will be their only contribution to the value chain: they will license their brands and outsource design, production, and distribution. The logical denouement of these developments is a world where perfect information is both available and accessible. There will be no need for intermediaries. Filters and recommendations from affinity groups to which they belong will help consumers receive information on the products in which they are interested, making brands inconsequential. However, in cases where brands do matter, the focus of brand-management efforts has to be on generating brand advocacy. Creating brand advocacy is a function of turning the customer from a satisfied buyer to a confident endorser, willing to participate in a referral process wherein she recommends the products or services to others. Once brand advocacy has been generated, marketers should then adopt an iterative brand-leadership strategy. The process begins with the selection of the customer. An effective selection of the customer will also pin-point the various ways in which the vendor can innovatively fulfill her adoption needs, not just from the perspective of product-delivery, but also from that of choosing the right channel partners who will reinforce the brand's value. The second aspect of iterative brand leadership involves the identification of the relationship architecture surrounding the customer. This will help marketers create a relationship even before the customer buys the product. This relationship architecture will serve to accelerate the purchase process, as it will ensure that the right information is delivered at the right time to the right customer t. A brand is something which makes it easier for consumers to identify and remember a particular product with, and something that strengthens the product's association with one or more, tangible or intangible, attributes of quality. In the beginning, we had great functional brands which helped buyers achieve simple things like cleaning ones teeth. The first brands were built by emphasising these simple functional benefits. With competition came the second stage, where more contemporary brands attempted to fulfill a number of higher-order needs. Volvo is an interesting example. People think of Volvo as being boring and dull, but extremely safe. Now, Volvo is re-marketing its cars to represent, simultaneously, safety, speed, and style. How do you manage to balance safety and speed and style, which are, in fact, conflicting goals? This will be the one issue that will daunt many marketers this New Millennium. Riaz Naikwadi is a second-year MBA
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Simply put, a brand is a contract of trust. Strong brands have
resilience. They can take a hit from a new entrant in the market, or a wrong turn under
their own volition, and still bounce back. Strong brands impart competitive advantage to
the organisations that own them. They lower consumer effort, reduce the risk of costly
mistakes, and confer psychological rewards on customers.