Brands: The intangible way

One of the most over used term in todays world is BRAND. We have all kind of stakeholders involved in the business of branding, right from agencies which specialize in creating a brand to the companies which believe that everything that they create is a brand.

So how you define brands?  What are they? 

Brand as a term is an intangible property which is being created in the minds of your stakeholders. Brands are not products. They are not services either. They are not something your customers can touch. Brands evoke sensory experiencing, feelings that are conjured in the minds of your client when they see or use your product/service.  For example, when you take the name of Rahul Dravid, as a product he is the batsman in Indian team. But as a brand the kind of emotions/adjectives that his name will spark in your minds are rock solid, trustworthy, his defense can’t be breached, etc. So when I as a viewer can think of adjectives for a product, the product/ service has scaled up to the next level. It has become THE BRAND.

How to create Brands?

Consistency is the name of the game. Day in day out, product churns out messaging which is able to evoke an intended feeling in the minds of your customers. Your marketing team does events, releases advertisements communicating a single message, hoping to evoke a particular adjective in your brain. For example, Coca Cola tries to evoke a sense of happiness. How it does? Coca Cola recently put two vending machines of Coke one in Delhi and another in Karachi. The machine allows you to see across it such that Indians can see Pakistanis standing on the other side and vice versa. People across the borders can dance, make faces, smile, tease with their counterparts from across the border. This simple act of Coke not just brought smiles to many people who were at the shopping mall but also to the million sof viewers who saw this on Facebook. Thus, Coke aroused the feeling of happiness through these marketing gems. Thus, Coke is synonymous with happiness and smile and laughter. Hence, by being consistent in their messaging, they have created an intangible property in the minds of their consumers which is BRAND COKE.

Have a look at the ad here:

 Another branding brilliance came from technology giant IBM. In its effort to create "smarter planet", look what they did.