Integrated Brand Promotion: Much More Than Advertising
Brands refer to associations created between customers and the goods and services, whereas advertising refers to a specific message conveyed by a marketer to the consumer through different channels like print, TV, radio, etc. This article attempts to evaluate the influence of advertising in brand building and the need for integrated brand promotion to drive incremental volume and profits.
Advertising serves as a mass communication tool to marketers where a single message is sent to many in an audience. It, however, has different connotations for different people. It is a business, an art form, an institution and a cultural phenomenon. For a product like Pepsi, advertising plays an important role in creating brand awareness and brand loyalty. For a retailer, it is a means to attract customers into their stores. For an art director, it is a creative expression of the concept. To a website manager, it is a way to increase the number of people visiting the site. Advertising, basically, generates awareness about the product or the service in the minds of potential customers, builds knowledge about it and helps to increase the recall value. Different ad strategies are used for reinforcing and modifying the existing attitudes of consumers to transform them from first-time buyers to repeat buyers and finally to make them brand loyal.
Today's companies are innovating the best possible ways to understand how and where consumers want to receive information about the brands. Traditionally, advertising has been considered as a means to inform consumers about the functional capabilities of the brand. It primarily focuses on the symbolic values of the brands and meanings relevant to the consumer. In a way, it outlines the path for consumer persuasion. But, the changing consumer preferences and new technological developments are reshaping the environment in which the brand image is developed at various levels, like the corporate, retail or product levels. Under such conditions, the lines between information, entertainment and commercial message are getting blurred. Firms of all sizes need and use advertising and companies, today, are using concepts like branded entertainment, Internet, influence marketing and other modes of communication to reach the target customers and pass their brand message. The conventional media are being supported by new channels to reach the customers. Many leading organizations have been spending huge amounts of money in the brand building exercise. For example, in the year 2006, Microsoft spent around $11.5 bn, Coca-Cola, more than $2.5 bn, Yahoo, $1.3 bn, eBay, around $871 mn, Google, $188 mn, Starbucks, $95 mn and confectionery firm, Perfetti, around Rs. 6 bn on various brand building exercises.
Role of Advertising in Brand Management
Our daily life revolves around many brands. It is difficult to identify when brands exactly originated. However, simple acts such as a potter putting an imprint of his thumb in the wet clay or a toolmaker leaving a mark on the handle of a blade on which he is working also could be considered as creation of brands. These marks served as a means to distinguish the goods of one craftsman from those of another. These marks added value to his wares and provided him legal protection. They also served to represent the homogeneity, quality and consistency of a particular craftsman's products. Thus, a brand primarily served to differentiate one seller or one vendor from another. Even today, a brand ultimately aims to establish a powerful and significant identity for itself in the minds of the customers. It facilitates their initial purchases and nurtures a long-term relationship between the marketer and the end-user. Hence, we can infer that a brand is one that offers something in addition to the functional purpose of the product. Here something relates to the added value in a product, which the consumer recognizes and for which the consumer is ready to pay a premium.
Strong brands generally have motivating benefits and discriminating benefits. Motivating benefits encourage the consumer to use any brand in the product field whereas discriminating benefits make the customer choosy about buying a particular brand. While all brands are already different from one another in terms of names and packaging, consumers seek some distinctiveness beyond these. This distinctiveness is the added value, which goes beyond the functional benefits of the brand or the product. These added values come from the consumers' experiences with the brand, opinions from others who use the brand, from a belief that the brand is effective and from the appearance or packaging of the brand. From a consumer's point of view, added values justify the premium paid for the branded goods over the unbranded goods. At the same time, these added values are not a substitute for the functional performance of the product.
Advertising converts products into brands and accomplishes a brand's objectives by building memory structures, which ensures that the brand is recalled and/or noticed when the customer is making a purchase decision. This eventually results in rising sales of the product. Memory structures relate to what the brand does, its elements, where it is available, when it is consumed, where it is consumed, by whom, with whom, its target customers and so on. It largely depends on the associations that the brand builds in the minds of the consumers. Successful brands have done a remarkable job in building relevant memory structures. Coke is one such example. It is the topmost global brand, which is associated with a host of memories like Red Coke, Coke Swirl, Coke and Beach, Coke and Pizza, Coke at Parties and so on. When one visualizes these memory structures like a party or a beach, one immediately thinks of the brand Coke.
Despite the advent of new technologies and various means of delivering messages, the hub of all marketing activities still remains branding. Advertising, regardless of the method, offers a broad exposure to the brand in order to meet the needs and desires of the customers. Advertising has both a short and long-term impact on sales and brand management. Its impact on sales can be instantaneous which can be experienced within seven days of an advertising exposure. If this exposure is continued for a year, it augments the brand's value. These added values have favorable effect on the brand's durability and profitability in the marketplace. They strengthen and enrich the brand by reinforcing the bond between the brand and its users. A brand cannot be successful if it fails to cater to the needs of its target customers.
Holistic Approach of Integrated Brand Promotion (IBP)
Advertising can be powerful, creative and entertaining or hard-hitting, boring and annoying. Yet, it continues to play an important role in the world of commerce and our lives. It reflects our culture and the way we see ourselves. It is a complex dynamic process, which is undergoing revolutionary changes and is being substituted by new methods of communications through the process of Integrated Brand Promotion (IBP). This process of integrated brand promotion utilizes various promotional tools, including advertising, in a coordinated manner to build and maintain brand awareness, identity and preferences.
Integrated Brand Promotion involves the use of a broader mix of communication tools. These tools may include the following: Advertising, point of purchase (in-store) materials, direct marketing (catalogs, infomercials, e-mail), personal selling, Internet advertising, blogs, podcasting, event sponsorship, brand entertainment (product placement on TV shows, in movies), outdoor signage/billboards, public relations, influencer (peer-to-peer) communications, etc.
These tools facilitate the brand manager to reach the target customers in different ways and with different kinds of messages and thus give a wide exposure to a brand. Due to the intense competition, consumers are, sometimes, overloaded with the information given by these blitz campaigns. Then, brand and brand identity elements help the customers in identifying and evaluating the most appropriate brand according to their needs and preferences. Most of the customers tend to exhibit herd behavior and form an opinion based on others' opinions.
Advertising, along with IBP, aims at building meaningful relationships between the brand and the consumer. It affects brand management and development in the following approaches:
Creating an Image and Meaning of a Brand
A brand serves to create a positive image for a product in a consumer's mind by extending a consistent recognition to the product. It also brings admiration, not only to the product but also to the company that offers the product. It serves as a reminder to the consumer when the latter is making a purchase decision and helps in associating a specific product with a particular need of the consumer. A brand is more than a recognizable name, a memorable mark or logo, or a catchy tag line. It is the values that brands possess and can be used for differentiating them from the competitive offerings. A positive image can strengthen an organization' s credibility, increase its sales, and help the organization to increase its market share. This is an important aspect of advertising, which cannot be delivered by any other tool of IBP. Advertising helps in creatively highlighting the potential meaning of a brand and conveying the same to the consumer.
Information and Persuasion
Advertising informs consumers about the product benefits, features and can influence consumer brand relationships, its evaluations and the subsequent choice made by the consumer. Brands are built by positively consolidating people's attitudes, beliefs, and feelings towards the products or services. Marketers are realizing the importance of creating compelling brand experiences and building meaningful and long-lasting relationships between the consumer and brand by persuasion. There are various principles like Reward, Threat, Expertise, Liking, Scarcity and Social Proof which further fortify the process of persuasion. In branding parlance, a reward connotes the benefits offered by a product, which can be physical, functional, emotional, psychological, experiential or social. Threat relates to increasing awareness about a problem like global warming, AIDS, etc. Expertise relates to special knowledge of a subject like Italians are considered to be experts in making pasta and pizza, Germans are experts in car engineering, etc. We tend to modify our beliefs, attitudes, and actions more easily if we like the person or brand trying to influence us. This liking may be based on familiarity, similarities, positive associations and aesthetic appeal. Sometimes, we believe that if something is scarce, it is valuable. While entering a new market, Red Bull intentionally limits its distribution and availability to make it more desirable. Some firms launch their brands with special limited editions, or tie their offering to a time limit in order to attract attention.
Introduction of New Brands or Extensions
Launching new products or brand extensions can be an attractive growth strategy, but it is not free from limitations. Advertising plays an important role in such situations. Consumers tend to carry over the positive beliefs/feelings from the parent brand to the new products or brand extensions or vice-versa. When these new brands or extensions are introduced in the markets, advertisements play a major role in educating the customers about the benefits and characteristics of the new brands/brand extensions and thereby help to create a positive brand image. If the customers find that there is perfect fit between the firm's communication and endeavor, the new product/product extension would be successful. But with changing times, advertising has to be done in conjunction with other promotional activities such as sales promotion, point-of-purchase displays and online advertising. We can take the example of Dove for this. The product changed its image from being a beauty bar to a beauty brand and has been extending its product line to include body wash, deodorant, hair care and body lotion. Its brand image flourished as people began associating concepts of true beauty with Dove and its products. The success of the Dove campaign can be attributed to the consistent use of traditional mainstream media and also other tools of brand building like use of free media. Free media places the brand image in the hands of consumers, who might voice divergent or even negative views. The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty has facilitated the company to expand its market share in all of its five major beauty categories, from bar soap, body wash, hair care to deodorants.
Building Brand Loyalty Among Consumers
Brand loyalty occurs when a customer goes for a repeat purchase of a company's product or service, irrespective of the competitive offerings and leads to new references for increasing the customer base of the company. This brand loyalty may be the result of the perception that the brand offers the best product features, quality, values and benefits at the right price. Brand loyalty aims at building long-term customer relationships, enabling the marketers to earn long-term customer patronage. While brand memory structures plays an important role in reinforcing brand loyalty, advertising also plays its role in this. Advertising reminds consumers of the values of the brand and provides extra incentives to the consumers to remain loyal.
Building and Maintaining Brand Loyalty within the Trade
Trade partners and distribution channels play a crucial role in making the brand available to the target customers. If it is a strong brand and well supported by the manufacturer, the wholesalers, retailers, distributors and brokers would be brand loyal and favor that particular brand over the others. In that case, the manufacturer should support the brand with aggressive advertising and other dimensions of IBP like PoP displays, contests, personal selling, sales training program, collateral advertising material, premiums, etc. Thus, IBP becomes more prominent and rewarding in comparison to advertising alone.
Conclusion
Advertising is always seen as a powerful tool for building the brands. It largely drives sales by refreshing memory structures and creates a purchase intention or preference towards a particular brand. On the one hand, reaching, engaging, and bonding with consumers is becoming challenging for marketers. At the same time, the evolution and increasing complexity of media environment is forcing brand builders to venture outside their creative zones and look out for other possibilities of meeting their bottom line goal. As advertising is the most visible part of brand business, it does not imply that it is always the most effective means of communication. It can achieve brand awareness, modify attitudes, build brand preferences or loyalty, build added values, but cannot make brands succeed with functional deficiency, lack of resources, devoid of logical planning and creativity.
Organizations often produce advertising that fails to refresh or build appropriate mental structures in the minds of consumers. They communicate distinctive aspects of the brand and produce campaign after campaign where each looks and feels different—as if each were for a different brand. Thus, advertising should be used in coordination with the other promotional activities for the brand building strategies. In the current scenario, there is a need to gradually transform from Integrated Marketing Communication to Integrated Brand Promotion. Marketers need to step beyond traditional mass-media advertising and focus on integrated brand promotion so as to have a consistent, compelling impression and widespread exposure for the brand. This would help in maintaining a consistent brand experience through customer experience and help the customer to connect with the brand, instead of with the product.
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with warm regards
Harish Sati
Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU)
Maidan Garhi, New Delhi-110068
(M) + 91 - 9990646343 | (E-mail) Harish.sati@gmail.com
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