Creating Brand value

During my childhood i used to wonder why people spend lots of money for buying a branded one while they can get the same at cheaper rate. I was asked umpteen number of times what’s the brand? by my colleagues and friends and sometimes people rate you on the brands you use. I understood that people are brand conscious, some of them are brand raving. This is the reason why companies are spending millions of dollars to strengthen their brands.

It’s not just a matter of price; it’s got more than that! I strongly believe that strong brands will never compete on price, its will be their last option. Let me illustrate through an example, there's a luxurious hotel in my city which offers a room at 500 bucks. Recently a new hotel came up offering at 450 bucks. One obvious choice for the first hotel is to cut down their price by 50 bucks so that it can compete with the new one. Amazingly they renovated the existing hotel and increased their price to 700 bucks (off course they provided extra facilities). If you sense it correctly, first thing the old hotel is able to do is avoid competing on price since it will impact their profit margins for sure. The next thing is they attached luxurious to their hotel successfully.
You need to sort out options to compete, never have your brand at stake. If an arrow shirt is priced at 500 bucks, that’s the end of their road. Instead you can choose to use promotional offers to sell your stock. I remember during my sixth standard, big babool was priced at 1 rupee while other babool gums are offered at 50 paisa. we thought we can buy 2 babool gums instead of getting one big babool, The sales of big babool are not so good. Big babool came up with a terrific idea, collect 10 stories ( these are enclosed inside the pack) and exchange them for three new big babool’s. The result is extraordinary sales, they are able to chuck out others successfully and at the same stage they are able to protect their brand

Creating Brand value is about how big you are able to think.

satya
A paranoid