Branding Challenges and Opportunities
All the banks may be important as ever to customers or consumers, brand management may be more difficult than ever. Although there has been growing recognition of the values of brands a number of development have occurred in the recent years that have significantly complicated marketing practices and post challenges for brand managers with the new opportunities which are as follows:
1. Shift from Advertising to Promotions
As a consequence of the increasing pressure on brand manager to achieve short term goals, there is a Temptation to cut back on advertising support, the same it is viewed as long-term brand building investment, in favour of promotions which generate much Quikr short term results.
2. Increased Costs
At the same time that competition is increasing the cost of introducing the new product or supporting an existing product has increased rapidly, Making it difficult to match the investment and level of support that brands were able to receive in previous years. A.C Nelson and NDP have been jointly and maintaining a database of trial and repeat Trends for the average consumer products. Product trial, defined as a household buying a particular consumer packaged goods product at least once during its introductory year, was around 15% of the latter half of the 1970s, but had dropped below 10% by the year 1990s.
3. Competition
Competitive pressures and Wars have led to a few difficult situations that companies have to face challenges. The following are the typical once:
- Band proliferation.
- Consumer revolt
- Retailer power
- Media host and fragmentation.
4. Online Shopping
The internet is facilitating online shopping. Online shopping is different from traditional mail order because:
- Brands are available all the time and from all over the world.
- Information and interaction are in real time.
- Consumers can choose between brands which meet their criteria, as a result of selecting information which is in a much more convenient format for them, rather than the standard catalogue format.
The poses Threads to brands, some components of added value, agent for the retail outlet which originally added value by matching consumers with suppliers, maybe eliminated.
5. Opportunities from Technology
Brand marketers are now able to take advantage of technology to gain competitive advantage through time. Technology is already reducing the Tech Lead time needed to respond rapidly to changing customers need and minimising any delay in supply chain.
6. More Sophisticated Buyers
In business to business marketing, there are already an emphasis on bringing together individuals from different departments to evaluate suppliers’ new brands. As inter-departmental barriers break down even more, sellers are going to face increasingly sophisticated buyers who are served by better information system enabling them to pay off brand suppliers against each other.
7. Growth of Corporate Branding
Throw corporate identity program functional aspects of individual brands in the firm’s portfolio can be augmented, enabling the consumer to select brands for assessment of the values of competing firms.
Firms developed powerful corporate identity programs by recognizing the need first to identify their internal corporate values, from which floor employees attitude and specific types of staff behavior secondly, to devise integrated communication programs for different external audiences