Marketing and branding experts reveal the secrets that businesses can use to build that build brands that stand the test of time and stay relevant
New Delhi: While strategies and tools of brand building change over time, fundamentals are timeless. Sticking to them and getting them right is the real secret to building brands that last, according to brand and marketing experts speaking at Shiprocket SHIVIR.
“The channels can be different, the way you service the customer can change, but the fundamentals of building a brand are not,” said Vandana Chamaria, Board Member, Sahyadri Farms. According to her, tenets one can keep in mind irrespective of which brand one is building are clarity, customer centricity and consistency.
- Clarity & Customer centricity
Being crystal clear about what one’s trying to build is important. This involves knowing one’s unique value proposition and what the brand stands for, having a distinctive product and position and having clarity around that.“One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is that they go business out instead of customer in,” Chamaria said.
- Consistency
Brands have to be consistent in their communication consistent. Adding to that Somil Agrawal, senior vice president and Head of Marketing, Shiprocket said, “We are in a digital world, plagued by attention deficit. Revenues are higher and so are distractions. That is why building a brand that people notice is difficult and then for people to remember you is even more difficult. However, brands that have been able successful in doing it have been consistent in their messaging and consistent in the delivery of the promise they are making as a brand.”
- Staying true to one’s core
According to Vani Gupta, ex-marketing director PepsiCo, the brands that stay in the long term, the ones we tend to trust over the long term are those that have stood their ground. “They have not gotten insecure about who they are and have stayed relevant for the set of consumers who values them exactly as they are,” she said.She quoted the example of a Norwegian ice cream brand that is unapologetic about its USP of its products being its taste with no pretenses about its lack of health benefits. “Brands that are very, very sure and that own a particular attribute or a proposition very firmly with no insecurity with absolute ownership are the brands that stand the test of time,” Gupta said. Her advice to new brands was to get the consumer right.
- Context
Brands today have been widely using experiential marketing to build brand salience. However, according to Swapnil Kumar, general manager of trade marketing, Pernod Ricard India, as long as we have the context understood for why a consumer might want to use one’s product, experiential marketing will work.“Experiential marketing is not product specific I would say it’s context and as long as it fits in the context, it’s all good,” Kumar said.
- Familiarity
The biggest challenge new-age brands face is stiff competition. They struggle to grab the customer’s attention in the sea of brands. This is especially true in D2C space. According to Siddharth Batra, senior director of commercial and marketing – South Asia, of nutrition company Glanbia, brands are built in the minds of consumers, they’re not built online or offline. Therefore, D2C brands need to start building familiarity. “Build familiarity and you’ll see the conversion rate jump,” he said.
