Let’s face it: in today’s world, consumers face a barrage of up to 3,000 advertising and promotional messages every day, tuning out those that don’t appeal to what they want, need or believe in… I once read in a basic branding manual that a brand is a promise, so I guess the question is: what could one possibly promise to keep consumers from tuning out? To answer this question, first we have to find out what we stand for, and why our product is different and better. And more importantly, once we’ve made this promise, we have to be able to keep it.
I’m grumbling to myself here about branding because we are about to launch a new product (a Media Center) in a new market (in this case Windows), and we all know that when you introduce a new product, you have to decide whether the product you’re introducing will enter the market under your business brand or as its own brand, with or without a visible link to your business brand. In simpler words, we have to decide our “Brand Architecture”.
In this case, we have decided to launch this new product brand under the strong business brand identity we already have. The reason for this is simple: we have a modest marketing department and budget. It is well known that if your resources are limited, you’ll be better off if you build one strong parent brand to represent your core business and then introduce each new offering under the umbrella of your business identity. By doing so, we will eliminate the need to create and manage the identity of multiple self-standing brands, which requires an intense investment of time, people, discipline, and money.
The risk of this strategy, though, is that any flaws or problems in the new product will be linked directly to the business brand itself, thus affecting the rest of the products. There’s no reason to believe this will happen to us, but it’s something to keep in mind.
The time to brand our way to the Windows market has come, and we are oh so looking forward to it!
