Importance of Brand Value

When you think of how to advance your business, most people will come up with some combination of salesmanship, marketing and product quality. There is however something that businesses tend to overlook and that is the fact that all businesses should aspire to create a ‘brand’.

Marketing as such can be thought of as an ill-reputed profession. A lot of the time, marketing involves making people unhappy about their situation. When you think of it in terms of that, the question that props up in every marketing person’s mind is that are we really such bad and manipulative a people? Obviously this view is half-empty. That is to say it is a pretty negative view of company-customer interaction in a marketing situation. There is however a lesson to be learnt.

Every person in the market wishes to form a relationship with the company even if the purchase is trivial. This relationship is formed with what is called “the brand”. Obviously different people develop different relationships with the brand. The market segment tends to subconsciously assess how valuable your brand is to them and this leads to the formation of opinions which in turn defines their experience with the related brand.

The right kind of branding creates and fosters loyalty. What rice do you buy? Which supermarket do you frequent? Which company’s electronic goods are you most likely to buy? This exercise can be taken a step further to identify the image that comes to mind when you think of Volkswagen, Wal-Mart, Pantaloons, etc. Unless you’ve had a distasteful experience at any of their stores, the chances are that the perception you have is a result of that company’s branding strategy. Some Film Production Company’s exude a sense of grandeur by just their name or logo and we all recognize them. When a motion picture or even a documentary from a production company like Warner Brothers and their all too famous logo props up, we invariably tend to sit up and take notice. That is the power of Brand value and a truly recognizable logo. At Mirror and Smoke we realize this and help in image building of your brand.

The idea of branding is to make sure that you create a positive experience and back it up with quality processes and technology. It is essential to keep a tab on the results and strive to improve on the same in the future. It is not hard to grasp why this kind of seamless experience when dealing with your brand would produce good results. The catch however is that the person who decides the quality of the experience you offer is not you but the market.

Among the most recognizable brands in the industry, you will notice a similarity in that they are almost always easy to remember. Acronyms such as BBC, CNN, IBM, CNBC, and ESPN are quite common. Other major corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Oracle use words that we already know thereby making them memorable. However there are also more obscure and made-up words to create words like eBay, Yahoo etc. What this goes to show is that in the branding game what matters is not what you have but how you use it.

The logo we use at Mirror and Smoke is a simple yet succinct one which gets the message across to our customers. Without being flashy, the logo keeps the use of colours down to basic prime colours but has been designed to remain in the memory for long after you leave the website. We recognize that as a first time visitor until there is actual contact and after, the logo is what you remember us by.

Logos like brand names are simple, effective and easy to identify. A rule of thumb that is often employed is that if your logo can’t be put down on paper within 10 seconds, it is too complex. Good examples for logos which are simple and effective are McDonalds, Mercedes and Ford. When people recognize your logo, they recognize and remember your brand. In its crudest form your logo could be the brand-name itself.

The market interprets the brand experience that you lay out for them. All you do is put your brand out there and the market affirms, “I believe what you tell me about you!”. This results in an alignment with your brand. Otherwise, it remains just a hypothesis and you stand to gain almost nothing from it. It is imperative to live up to the highest industry standards by identifying and implementing the best possible solution through mediums ranging from documentaries, industrial films, presentations, promotional films, short films, videos or any other possible means. At Mirror and Smoke we use our in house expertize to help your business reach its potential.

The relationship between the brand and person can be interpreted in the form of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which can be crudely put this way – each level of the pyramid results in greater security. Similarly here, the relationship becomes stronger as we climb up the pyramid because of a derived preference. That is, the preference for your brand is a result of the experience the person has with it.