Principles of Marketing describes a brand as “name, term, sign, or design—or a combination of these—that identifies the maker or seller of a product or service.” People see brands every day and are consistently bombarded by these techniques to inspire them to buy a particular product. But how do these marketers create a brand to draw people in? They utilize the branding strategy process.
Branding strategy, in order to build strong brands, includes four major steps: brand positioning, brand name selection, brand sponsorship, and brand development. Brand positioning includes attributes, benefits, and beliefs and values designed to target a customer to make the product appealing. Brand name selection is important to draw customers because if a name catches someone’s attention, they are more likely to be interested in learning about the product. The product or brand name should have desirable qualities such as suggesting benefits and qualities, being easy to pronounce, recognize, and remember, being distinctive, etc. Brand sponsorship is though what facets or to whom does the manufacturer sell, license, or distribute the product to get it to the consumer. This includes manufacturer brand, private brand, licensed brand, or co-brand. Lastly, brand development is how a company can develop their image through introducing line extensions, brand extensions, multibrands, or new brands
To get a better understanding of each of these steps, let us look at the branding strategy used in the Marketing Planning Project. My group decided to create a high tech smartphone for children. We positioned our brand to be desirable to the everyday user but safe for children with easy to program parental controls for adults. The brand name selection and brand sponsorship steps were combined. We decided that Apple would be the best and most reliable company to manufacturer and sell the product so we utilized their preexisting naming concept and called our phone the iPhone K. This name is desirable to consumers because it is already very distinctive and has high value with the iPhone moniker. Also, the “K” represents “kids” for whom the product is targeted towards. The last step of our branding strategy was the brand development. Even though the iPhone K is not a company on its own, brand development can we seen through Apple and was the main reason why we designed the iPhone K. Apple is known for consistently extending lines of products: iPhone, iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C; and extending their brand: iPhones, iPods, Macs, etc. We decided to add a phone for children by extending Apple’s iPhone product line and satisfying a need. In the future, this iPhone K may have its own product line extension though different models or built-in applications.
Learning Portfolio 