Do you find it asking “what is marketing” difficult? The first question isn’t really whether you know what you’re talking about or not. The answer is that you probably don’t. As I write, the marketing industry isn’t really in full bloom and many people are still totally stunned and engineers are still trying to understand what marketing is all about and the marketing industry is the complete opposite.
Even with all that being said, this is not a domain that you should be blindsided with. From a marketing perspective, it’s a silly thing to be involved in without at least knowing something. So the first question you need to answer is “Who constitute my audience?” That question is actually key in what your objective is for your branding. While certainly one of many aspects that is going to determine where you are going to get your marketing worth, I still believe that just defining who your audience is, relates directly to understanding what that is going to be. Now going back to my original question, it’s clearly more than just a question of whom I’m trying to reach.
Getting very serious about defining this more complex question, it’s important to look at the way that the audience will beself-identifying. This is important because once you know who you’re talking to, what it is that your audience wants, and how you can reach them, you can direct your marketing efforts as one. It’s an easy concept to get wrapped up in, and it can easily make for a great team concept as well.
Now let’s take it a step further and answer what we went over earlier. “What is the objective of your branding?” What is it, for your company, your products and services? “The objective of a branding exercise is to create awareness of and fascination with a company or a product, and perhaps a certain quality about it which may then be associated with the company that creates the product or has the goods, service or it.” Now I don’t mean that that’s all that there is to it.
What I mean is what is the objective of an objective? It’s an absolutely critical piece of the puzzle. This is one of the points just as important as all the others that are going to lead to a successful company, product or service, because if you can’t get an objective, you don’t have something to focus your brand and marketing on.
In other words, the fundamental premise of a branding exercise is that you need to focus on the objective of the exercise. So ask yourself: what is it that you want to accomplish with your company, product or services?
The final part of defining just about what these objectives are going to be is to look at the resources that are going to be required.
In addition to the resources that I just talked about, there are a number of other resources that are going to be required, but those are some of the typical resources that are going to be in need of your attention. If you’re confused about what the objective of the exercise is, start down the path of figuring it out.
Now, to understand the successful nature of branding, you can look at it another way. A great thing to clearly understand is that branding is not about the customer. It’s about the objective. Does the objective match up with the objective of the branding exercise?
If it does, we’ll have a successful branding exercise. If not, it’s going to turn into a bad branding exercise. If you’ve ever been a marketing department, you’ve probably heard the phrase “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” You couldn’t devise a budget if there wasn’t some way to drive it!
Whether you’re going to hire a marketing expert to help you with your branding or just yourself to define the objective, make sure you define it, make it part of your company’s branding process, and then measure it frequently.
