"Five Steps" To Help Smes Establish Brand Names

Some time ago, in a chat with a friend, my friend said: now that his business is growing bigger and bigger, it is necessary to standardize management and further expand business. He said he wanted to promote, want to make a brand, want to advertise in Nandu, ask me what opinion.

In conversation with friends, a friend thinks that making a brand is to advertise, so if you want to build a brand, you should put a lot of advertisements on it. This is my friend's misunderstanding of the brand, and it is also a common problem for most of the small and medium enterprises in China.

As a small and medium-sized enterprise, facing the dual pressure of survival and development, how do they occupy the heights of brand ladder, and how to build their brand quickly in the development?

Step one: reeducation of brand awareness

What is the brand? This problem is really not a problem for professionals in the industry. But for most small and medium enterprises, maybe they think they know it. What they think they know is that they only know the corner of the brand mountain.

The misunderstanding of "advertising = brand" has made many small and medium-sized enterprises fearful of brands. They think brand knowledge should be done by those big enterprises.

Therefore, I think it is necessary to carry out brand re education for SMEs and re recognize the brand.

What is a brand? Brand is the cognition of consumers and the associated associations resulting from them.

For small and medium-sized enterprises that have "just done the product well", I want to say that the era of product oriented demands has become the past. With the homogenization of products, better products will not let you stand out in the market.

The competitive battleground has turned to consumers, and only when consumers think you are good, consumers will pay for what they call "good".

The essence of good and bad is a kind of consumer psychological cognition, and this kind of cognition of enterprises and products constitutes a brand.

If an enterprise wants to expand its market share and earn more profits, it must communicate with consumers. The main body of communication should not be products, but rather brands. Consumers will pay for their favorite brands.

The brand we see in the consumer market is characterized by the visualization of the brand, namely, brand identification, brand name, advertising performance, product packaging and a series of visual performance, but consumers will never see the core of the brand. The core of the brand is consumer cognition and a series of consumer associations arising from it.

Brand visualization helps to enhance cognition.

Therefore, traditional visual standards do not constitute brands. Only when products or services and external images really enter the minds of consumers and are recognized by consumers, can they complete the brand establishment.

It's not time to let trademarks become brand names. Some companies with a history of over 100 years, as long as they do not form a stable cognition among consumers, are still trademarks registered in the trade and Industry Bureau.

Small and medium business owners should think about whether your products or services are registered in the consumer psychology. If not, how do you register?

The second step: strategic positioning, building a brand from the big pattern.

The core of strategy is competition. Competition is not from inside to outside, but it should be the market environment to react to the enterprise itself, including internal management.

The core of enterprises' concern for the market environment is consumers, who constitute the market and demand constitute the market.

To see clearly the essence of market environment is to have a thorough knowledge of consumers, only if they can build brand.

For most small and medium enterprises, it is usually through advertising, activities, promotions and other means to try to build brand, that as long as the mass communication, consumers know that you, the brand has been built up, we do not know that the establishment of the brand is not based on the pmission force, and by consumer perception, no core purpose of publicity and promotion can not build the brand, but will make the road of the future brand more difficult.

Because your disorderly publicity has led to a vague understanding of the product or service, rather than a core memory point, a unique brand proposition.

For a product or service that has not yet been recognized by consumers, inaction is the best protection for future brand building.

If we start the publicity and promotion work, the first thing to consider is what kind of appearance to enter the market, "who am I", "what characteristics", "my direction of development" and other issues, specifically covering your brand name, logo and combination, brand proposition, market positioning and so on.

Take NOKIA as an example, no matter how his TV ads and posters are creative, the core of the "technology oriented" brand proposition is always the demand point of every theme. NOKIA brings the humanized high-tech quality to consumers, and the brand concept of customers exporting is "young and fast fashion".

Small and medium enterprises, before entering the market, first consider clearly what your brand proposition is, next is the specific promotion and publicity.

The third step: "stage theory", the guiding ideology of brand building.

For business organizations, marketing is his top priority.

Therefore, we need to ask SMEs why you need to build brands. Although most business owners can't say why they need brands, successful brands in the market tell them that "brands help enterprises achieve their marketing objectives".

The brand's premium capability and brand help to build a competitive barrier and the forerunner of the brand, help enterprises expand the market share and so on, are all verifying the fact that "brand serves the marketing", and marketing is the source of brand building.

The different stages of enterprise development determine their corresponding marketing objectives and the marketing activities surrounding this purpose.

The fourth step: public relations, brand building, advertising, brand maintenance and promotion will only destroy the brand.

As mentioned above, there is no doubt that public relations is the best brand tool for an enterprise that has just entered the market and tries to build a brand.

After brand establishment, brand maintenance is more important than establishment.

Brand maintenance can not rely on public relations, because the public relations resources of enterprises are always exhausted. New product promotion meetings are not quarterly. In addition, because of the three party intervention in public relations, the controllability is weak.

So when PR successfully exported the brand proposition, PR's brand mission was basically completed, and the rest was daily advertising to enhance the brand proposition of PR output.

Enterprises have entered a period of rapid growth after the early stage of entering the market. At this time, sales need advertising support. Advertising, like forwards, helps enterprises expand their market share and help enterprises expand their market share.

At this time, advertisements can be innovating in form, but the creativity of advertisements can not be divorced from the brand's core proposition.

The uniqueness of brand proposition is the invariable principle of the whole brand from beginning to end.

The "talk value" created by advertising is undoubtedly a powerful addition to the brand, constantly accumulating brand equity and strengthening consumer brand recognition.

When it comes to brand maintenance, we have to mention the adverse effects of sales promotion on brands, especially for newly established brands.

Many enterprises like to promote sales. Sales promotion brings popularity and brings wealth. Sales promotion means a strong stimulant to the market, and directly brings "sales value". This is even more true for small and medium-sized enterprises that have just built up their brand -- directly feel the direct value brought by the brand, but if the long-term promotional activities are not conducive to the brand building of the enterprise, they will even destroy the newly established brand.

In the market, there is no "promotion brand", it is necessary to rely on sales promotion to achieve sales performance, and consumers can only buy goods or services when they see promotional information, indicating that this product or service is not a brand.

For mature brands, occasional and irregular commercial promotions are also necessary. For business promotion activities, we can understand that it is a public relations and an event marketing, in order to further enhance brand communication and brand experience with consumers.

It's hard to build a brand. Don't let the promotion destroy him.

Conclusion: there is no shortcut in brand. The only way to brand is patience and perseverance.

For how to establish a brand, how to maintain a brand, and prevent the aging of the brand, it is necessary for the enterprise to discuss it according to the enterprise's own and realistic marketing environment.

At present, Brand Life Cycle (BLC) is loved by many marketers and enterprises.

BLC is like an enterprise's brand development plan, but the market is changing rapidly. The brand planning that is 3-10 years old is not practical. Moreover, enterprises have their own development status. The unified standardized brand module does not exist.

Ge and Mercedes Benz are all enterprises born after the industrial revolution. Apart from a few IT companies, the top 500 companies in the world have basically a hundred years of growth history. Most of them are initially recognized by consumers after they have been established for decades or even 20-30 years.

The Volkswagen, which was born in 1937, grew into a big brand after 19 years, and the remaining half century is brand maintenance.

Some brands have been brilliant. Later, they tried to expand their brand attractiveness, deepen their brand, and take the brand extension to blur the core of the brand, and finally quit the stage of history.

The brand needs to aim at the focus. There is only one brand proposition. There are only two things to build a strong global brand: patience and perseverance.

The road to brand is a long way to go. For the small and medium enterprises whose brand has just started, the road ahead will be very long.