Branding, Communication

Brand Communication & Brand Marketing – What’s the Difference?

Branding is one of the most important aspects of running a successful business, and this applies to businesses of all sizes whether you are targeting general consumers or B2B customers. In almost all cases, having an effective brand will give you an edge in an increasingly competitive marketplace, as it will make your business stand out to your customers, making them far more likely to think of you first, consider you first or buy from you first. 

Brand communication refers to the interactions between your brand and its customers, including activities such as advertising, social media posts and content such as website articles and newsletters. Brand communication occurs every time a potential customer sees or interacts with your brand, from seeing your logo in any form of media to reading your newsletters or advertising.

Brand marketing on the other hand is the process of growing and promoting your entire brand, establishing a relationship with your customers and informing them of what your brand offers, including all of your products, services and selling points that support your brand’s promise.

Brand equity represents the value of a brand. Your brand.

Brand equity is the level of sway a brand name has in the minds of consumers. You could also think of it as a measure of your brand’s value compared to other brands in the market. As such, having a brand that is identifiable and well thought of will help to constantly attract customers to your business.

An example of Brand Equity: Apple

Apple has a tremendous amount of brand equity. When people think of smartphones, Apple is one of, if not the very first brand name that comes to mind. Apple’s brand also has a distinct look which customers worldwide are able to recognize, thanks to the strength of Apple’s brand equity that has been built up over the years through the effective use of marketing and product design, to the point that even the word “Apple” immediately evokes the brand in the minds of customers rather than the fruit.

Brands and Emotions

Understanding brand discernment from a customer’s point of view has always been at the heart of advertising and marketing. Marketers want to know how consumers perceive a brand, and how to control that perception in order to raise brand equity. In the past, marketing and advertising often used the strategy of getting customers to associate a brand with an idea. This is also known as trying to obtain ‘share of mind’ or ‘power in the mind’ of the customers, but this is a somewhat dated approach. In today’s market of worldwide brands and digital media, brands no longer just focus on share of mind, but have expanded their approach to obtaining share of emotion.

Through years of research, experimentation and marketing, popular brands have created multifaceted personas. The most well-known brands are able to elicit different feelings and emotions as they see fit. Brands can make you laugh, cheer, feel touched and intrigued, all depending on how they want you to feel in response to a particular product.

Oppotus is able to help you by identifying the elements that impact customers perceptions and market performance, to shape a strategy that delivers brand equity growth for you.

Ultimate reason: more sales!

To put it simply, brand equity is necessary for the reason that it will net you more sales for your business.

Imagine this scenario, a person walks into a store with the intention of purchasing a soft drink to quench their thirst. They come to a fridge in the store containing two different drinks. One of them is Coca-Cola, in it’s unmistakable red can, featuring it’s iconic design and logo. The other is a generic brand of cola that they have not seen or tried before. Presented with these two choices, which product is the person most likely to purchase?

In the vast majority of cases, this customer would be far more likely to purchase a can of Coca-Cola because of its familiarity. The customer knows the taste and quality that they can expect from a can of Coca-Cola, and in most cases they can be completely confident that this can of Coca-Cola will have the same taste and quality as all the cans of Coca-Cola that they have purchased before. This familiarity and knowledge makes the can of Coca-Cola much more appealing compared to the generic brand of cola, as the customer cannot be confident that its taste and quality will be satisfactory.

This all comes down to brand equity. Coca-Cola possesses more brand equity than the generic brand of cola, which puts it in a vastly more advantageous position to get more sales.

Increased Awareness = Higher Profits

The higher your brand equity, the more quickly awareness of your brand will increase, as it will become more prominent in the minds of your customers. Knowledge of your brand can then spread to other potential customers through word of mouth, or through the promotional methods and marketing materials you utilize that feature your brand.

This increased awareness will then lead to far more sales compared to if your company possessed little to no brand equity. This of course, brings us back to the incentive of higher profit.

Create Brand Associations, Grow Your Brand’s Perceived Value

By associating your brand with emotions and feelings that synergize with the product that you provide, your customers will be much more likely to recall your brand first, over your competitors. Simply by having your brand at the top of their mind , this immediately gives your brand a higher perceived value than that of your competitors.

Now imagine the earlier scenario once again, but the fridge now contains Pepsi in place of the generic brand of cola.

In this scenario, Coca-Cola might arguably still possess the most brand equity of the two products, but Pepsi also possesses a significant amount of brand equity on its own, which gives it a fighting chance to be chosen by a customer. In a situation where two competing products both possess brand equity, the difference in the brand associations of the two products can end up being the deciding factor. If Coca-Cola is the most commonly purchased brand on the market, Pepsi’s brand association of being an “alternative” drink rather than the “mainstream” one might actually give it the edge over Coca-Cola in the preferences of a significant population of customers, who would opt to purchase Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola. This becomes possible thanks to Pepsi’s existing brand equity and brand associations which distinguish it from Coca-Cola as well as other competitors in the market.  

Keep track of your competitors

Knowledge of brand equity will also be able to keep track of the competitors in your sphere. By talking to potential customers and asking them what they think of your competitors’ brands in comparison to yours, you will know exactly where you stand in the industry, and more importantly where your brand stands in the minds of your customers. If potential customers have a competitor’s brand at the top of their mind when it comes to your industry, then that doesn’t necessarily mean you are at a disadvantage. By being able to understand brand equity, you will understand what emotions and values are associated with your competitor’s brand, and use that as leverage to build your own brand equity, crafting your brand’s identity to offer a more attractive alternative, or even surpass your competitors when it comes to the values which they market themselves on. 

Build relationships with customers by promoting your brand

Brand equity represents the characteristics of your brand – it is the identity of your business, carrying with it the values and promises that your business offers to your customers. By building your brand equity, you are able to better convey the value of your business to your customers, who will then become more trusting of your brand the more familiar with it they become. The stronger your brand equity, the more easily customers will trust your business, which will make it much easier to both build new relationships with customers and strengthen existing ones. 

Identify opportunities to build strategies around 

Ultimately, building your brand equity will lead to new opportunities as your brand becomes more prominent and widely recognized by customers. As these opportunities arise, you will be able to build strategies around these very opportunities, which will not only provide avenues for new business, but also open up room for your brand equity to grow even further. What will your strategy be?

First step would be to find out or measure where your brand currently stands in the eyes of your target audience, and not just amongst your customers. Contact us at theteam@oppotus.com to begin exploring the full potential for your business to build its brand equity, propelling yourself towards higher levels of success with each subsequent opportunity and strategy.

Now that you know the importance of brand equity and how vital it is for generating sales for your business, you might be keen to rush straight into building the brand equity of your business. However, building brand equity is a process that usually requires careful planning, where you will need to keep in mind the following key considerations.

Audience

The first thing to consider is your target audience. What kinds of people are the ones that will be most likely to use your business and be attracted to your brand? Will you be marketing directly to those people, or are you trying to build your brand equity in a way that makes your business more appealing to a wider audience? The answers to these questions will depend specifically on the nature of your business and your goals for growth.

Some businesses benefit from marketing specifically to their niche, while others would benefit from a more general approach. What will your demographic be? One thing that would help while planning your brand equity is to have a customer profile – a profile that contains key information about your ideal/most likely customers and how they interact with your business.

By putting together this customer profile based on the past operations of your business, you’ll have a better understanding of what your customers are looking for and what attracts them to your business, which can use to build your brand equity in a way that will be most effective for attracting more of these customers.

Furthermore, understanding your audience will also help you discover ways to reach non-users; groups of people that currently do not come to your business as customers, but could potentially be converted to customers if your brand equity was built in a way that was able to attract them.

Competitive landscape

The next thing to consider is the competitive landscape of your industry. No matter what industry your business is in, competitors that possess their own brands and unique selling points will exist.

In order to build your brand equity effectively, you’ll need to find out who your competitors are, and study their brands carefully to find out what makes them successful, as well as the areas where they are lacking. Depending on the competitive landscape and the unique features of your own business, the key to success for your business might either be positioning your brand in a way that makes it seem like it has the same selling points as your competitor while doing everything better, or by highlighting your own unique selling points which your competitor is unable to offer. As the saying goes: know yourself, and know your ‘enemy’.

Costs / budget

How much is it going to cost to put together your plans? And moreover, what resources are available to you? There are many methods and mediums through which brand equity can be built, but some of them will be alot more costly than others.

Certain avenues such as social media are available for almost everyone to utilize, but even marketing on something as accessible as social media platforms will require time and resources in order to be done effectively, with many costs to consider. Will you set aside the budget to hire a social media manager and content creators to run your social media for you? Or will you take things into your own hands? Creating your own content and running your own social media platforms is an option, but this will be at the expense of your own time, leaving you with less time to spend on other areas of your business.

Rather than jumping straight into one method of building brand equity or another, it’s essential to carefully consider the cost of each method, and whether or not your available budget will allow you to utilize that method to build your brand effectively without any wasted resources.

Put Together the Plan to Develop your Brand Equity

All of the factors we have mentioned above are key considerations when it comes to planning to build and grow your brand equity. There is a great deal of research that must be done before a detailed plan to construct your brand equity can even be formulated, but the most successful brands have always found a way to do so, even managing to re-invent and re-imagine their brands in order to remain relevant and find success as times and trends change.

Our team at Oppotus is perfectly suited to help you with all areas of business and market research, helping you to understand your own business as well as the competitive landscape so that we can work together to plan out the growth of your brand equity.

With a confident understanding of what brand equity is and the key considerations to be taken into account, the time has come to learn how to apply your brand equity strategically to maximize the number of customers you can attract to your business.

In order to apply brand equity strategically, you must first be aware of the process known as “the customer’s journey”

Considering the Customer’s Journey in 3 Steps

1. The customer encounters your product. This can be through a variety of ways such as online ads, reviews, and recommendations from their friends and family – all of which they could come across as part of their own research process.
2. The customer is now aware of your product and decides to look into it further.
3. The customer makes their decision to either buy or not buy your product.

If the customer encountered your product but did not decide to buy it in the end, then why was that the case? Did anything change their decision? What happened between the moment the customer first encountered your product and the moment your customer made the ultimate decision to buy/not buy your product?

In order to ensure that the customer’s journey is one that results in the customer buying your product, you must ensure that your brand has an effective marketing funnel set up.

What is a Marketing Funnel?

Layer 1: Awareness – The uppermost layer of the marketing funnel, otherwise known as “top of funnel”,where customers first discover your brand or product. Customers enter the marketing funnel by coming across marketing and information related to your brand. The stronger and more well planned out your brand equity, the more likely it is that potential customers will come across your brand when they are in the market for your product. By leveraging your brand equity, your brand will steadily progress from being merely part of the customer’s total awareness of all the products in the market, to becoming the brand that’s on the top of the customers mind – the first thing that they recall and mention when thinking about that type of product. Let’s be honest, if customers are not aware of you, you basically do not exist.

Layer 2: Consideration – Your product is on the list of possibilities that the customer is considering for their purchase. After some discovery or research, this is where your brand or product is being “shortlisted” in the mind of your potential customer.

Layer 3: Trial – The customer is willing to buy or use your brand or product and try it out. They may have already purchased your product in the past 3 months or so, but are yet to make repeat purchases. Customer experience at this stage is crucial, as it either solidifies the prospect of the customer coming back again in the future, or the relationship ends here.

Layer 4: Purchased regularly and currently – The consumer is dedicated to your brand and purchases your product loyally above others. In some cases, the customer enjoys the brand or product experience so much they become your brand “Advocate” so to speak.

Applying brand equity strategically means ensuring that your brand and its marketing activations are designed to maximize the conversion rate between layers, having a high success rate of turning potential customers into dedicated customers – in other words, how to convert from “top of funnel” to “bottom of funnel”.

Oppotus: Specialised to Help Companies Apply Brand Equity Strategically

• Collaborative Partnership: Our culture ensures we work as a team with our clients on a mutually beneficial collaborative journey. Our partnerships will help you grow your business and achieve your long term goals far into the future, not just provide you with short term solutions.
• Senior Involvement: Our senior experts are heavily involved with strategic planning, providing their insight throughout the study, not just at the beginning and the end.
• We’ve Done This Before: Whether online, face-to-face or over the telephone, we have experience executing brand equity strategies across urban & rural locales, as well as in the markets across the APAC region.
• Our team consists of experienced individuals who have lived and worked in different cultures and disciplines, we appreciate and understand the local nuances needed to discern valuable insights.
• Leveraging Tech: We are always on the forefront of utilizing the latest in methods and technology to empower the way we work, analyze and storytell – enjoying the efficiencies and advantages that we then pass on to our clients.
• Untraditional Insights: Utilizing the best aspects of start-up style business operations, the way we work allows us to be non-traditional, not bound by the constraints of legacy processes. We are always open to experimenting and challenging the status quo, giving you the best unfiltered insights that will keep you one step ahead of the competition.

Learning about brand equity and the importance of applying it strategically will allow you to attract many customers and generate more sales for your business. While this is a great prospect, it’s also vital to make sure that your efforts in building your brand equity are actually paying off, and that your brand continues to grow over time.

Therefore, it is highly recommended for business owners to conduct a brand equity study. This will provide you with detailed information of how customers actually perceive your brand, from the public’s awareness of your brand, to it’s identity and the perceptions and sentiments surrounding it. Thus, you will have accurate insights into whether customers know your brand exists, what your business represents to them, and why they have decided to choose you and not your competitors.

You will then also be aware of what did and didn’t work when building your brand equity, and what can be fixed/improved in order to achieve the desired result while increasing your brand equity at the same time.

Types of Brand Equity Study

Ad Hoc

Ad hoc – a term derived from latin which means “for this purpose”. An ad hoc study is used in a “one off” occasion, when researching a particular situation, or an issue that arises in the industry, the country, or in the circumstances surrounding your brand. For example, the government might introduce a new initiative to provide citizens with free credit for their e-wallets – in this scenario, an e-wallet company might want to conduct an ad-hoc study in order to find out what effect, if any, the government’s initiative has on their own brand equity as more new users decide to start using e-wallets.

Tracking

Tracking in brand equity studies refers to the intentional long term process of monitoring and measuring your brand’s value as time passes. Almost like going for a regular health check-up at a clinic, but the ‘patient’ is your brand equity instead. Tracking comes in handy if you wish to know how your brand equity has grown over time and whether your marketing and advertising efforts, for example, are gaining any positive results. Moreover, tracking allows you to have a direct insight into how many people were reached and the amount of impact and influence your brand has on your customer’s perception. This is then important when it comes to winning over more potential customers and gradually building up your brand’s value in the future.

As your brand continues to grow, so will other brands out there. Thus, tracking also gives an idea of where you are currently standing among your competitors and what you can/should do to always secure your place at the top. After all, allowing the brand you worked so hard for to be overshadowed is the last thing you want to happen.

Dipstick

A dipstick study is conducted to examine a particular time period, such as when your company is having a marketing activity / campaign. After investing resources, time and effort into a particular campaign to build your brand equity, it would be an inefficient use of those resources to not properly measure the performance & impact of that activity on your brand equity.

Say for example your company creates and introduces a new mascot for your brand in the hopes of establishing your brand image and attracting new customers. A dipstick study would help to find out how many people found out about your brand through the exposure of the mascot, and their perceptions of your brand upon finding out about it in the weeks immediately following it’s introduction, when you would expect it to have it’s greatest effect. You would also be able to find out whether the introduction of the mascot had any effect on the perceptions of your existing customers and whether it was effective in getting them to associate your brand with a particular emotion that you may have been going for.

Ultimately, the type of brand equity study that your company should conduct comes down to these factors:

• The outcome your company wants 
• The time your company wishes to carry out the research

Here at Oppotus, we have the means to provide you with the exact information that you need in order to decide what kind of brand equity study you should conduct, and provide your business with a Brand Equity Index:

A detailed measure of all the things related to your brand equity. This is done using our own proprietary tool

• Perceptor: a tool developed and honed by leading market research experts incorporating many years of experience, real life case studies and data. As a measurement model built to mimic real-life market forces, it will serve as your ace-in-the-hole for getting a huge head start on building your brand equity and putting yourself squarely ahead of the competition!

Whether your company has been running for over a decade or is just starting out, conducting a brand equity study is crucial as it greatly contributes to your brand’s growth and long-term success. As explained above, gaining as much information about your brand equity as possible will not only put you ahead of your competitors but even help kick start new businesses by providing a massive boost.

Additionally, measuring and tracking your brand equity and performance via different types of studies (e.g. Ad Hoc, Tracking, Dipstick) allows you to be prepared to come up with the best solutions when faced with sudden or emerging obstacles too. In other words, when conducting a brand equity study, you can not only be aware of how your customers and the rest of the market perceive your product, but also an extent of the unwanted issues coming your way. Thus, making it easier to decide what action or approach to carry out next. 

Is It Working?

Let’s say you have opened a dessert cafe and the main selling is your coffee and handmade cookies. At first people may feel curious enough to try out your new dessert cafe and ultimately like what your brand is about, what you are offering, or just the overall ambience  of your place. However, you start to notice a decline in customers in six months, especially during what used to be your peak hour. If this is the case, it would seem that even promoting your main selling points of coffee and cookies is not enough to bring in customers, meaning that are other factors at play which are hindering your growth. It might be that your current brand and promotion campaigns are inadequate, or possibly the location of your cafe which is surrounded by numerous competitors. Now the next step would be coming up with a plan B and executing it.

Better Than Before

At this point, you probably already have at least a vague idea of what has been hindering your brand equity. Going back to our previous example, it might be because the location of your cafe is right at the center of a big and busy mall where you are surrounded by other popular cafes with similar concepts, naturally bringing an endless stream of competition. Nevertheless, to fully understand how your brand is actually performing and why it is performing at that level, conducting a brand equity study is vital. After monitoring and measuring your brand equity for some time, you can figure out ways to improve your brand’s advertising and marketing efforts, which will allow you to reach out and win over much more potential customers, or even do things differently from your competitors to bounce back up. Suppose you can conduct a brand equity study and find that customers in your area favor cafes that are known to specialize in cake and coffee sets. In that case, a possible strategy would be for your cafe to come up with a campaign by promoting your own unique cake and coffee sets with the aim of catering to your customers’ preferences.

What Do They Think About Your Brand?

The other benefit of tracking and measuring your brand equity is knowing your customers’ perception of your product’s quality and their loyalty towards your brand – the two principal components of brand equity.

When it comes to customers judging your product quality, their past experience with your brand is what truly matters. With a brand equity study, companies will be able to recognize whether their brands manage to give their customers a good experience altogether and the level of positive reactions received that would then contribute to their total number of profits. If your products are of a high quality but failed to “wow” or leave a “warm feeling” in your customers, elevating your brand’s perceived value by associating it with a set of emotions such as laughter, joy and excitement should do the trick.

Additionally, brand loyalty – defined as the act or behavior of repeatedly buying from the same brand as well as highlighting an underlying positive attitude, conscious decision making, and a high degree of commitment in a customer – holds a positive effect on your brand equity too. This is because brand loyalty itself is an essential component that will help raise the company and its bussiness’s net worth for the long-run. Therefore, identifying ‘potential’ customers who are ready to buy your products over and over again is the key when it comes to successfully building your brand equity. Afterall, we cannot deny that it is our customers’ actions that determine a positive or negative outcome of our business.

In summary, these are a few great points brand owners should consider when it comes to conducting a brand equity study. The main idea behind keeping an eye out and maintaining your brand’s value and image effectively is to positively influence your customers and generate more sales for your business at the end of the day. Consistent tracking and analysis is then key here – and Oppotus is perfectly equipped to handle the research for you.

Ushering its way in towards a new industry that has been propped up in many business lingoes and buzzwords – the term IR 4.0, also known as the fourth industrial revolution – is no stranger within the current digital age that everyone now resides in. Consumers are now more in tune with their digital presence than ever, with their own constant browsing and digital footprints resulting in a huge data trove for many businesses in almost every industry. The demand for digital solutions is bound to increase with each passing year, and will inevitably play an integral part in studying and building brand equity at all levels of business, from start-ups to multinational corporations. 

Digital Vs Traditional Advertising

In the current era of business, the use of automated digital marketing processes is steadily being introduced into the marketing strategies of more and more companies. It creates a more dynamic approach to know how brand equity is being enforced. The process from product procurement to cash transaction and finally even to drawing spending insights – bolstered by efficient, ever-evolving digital marketing algorithms – are all essential towards laying down and further reinforcing Brand Association with consumers and potential clients.  In the era of digital media, almost all aspects of brand equity are glued together by the operations of seamless automated solutions that are only possible within the digital space, capable of reaching consumers around the world 24/7. Therefore, devoting resources towards  establishing your brand in the digital space will give you an advantage in adding value to your brand and increasing its share of brand equity. 

Speaking of the digital space, digital advertising options bring about more variety and customization that most companies are already leveraging on while smaller-scale individual entrepreneurs benefit from it as well. Far-reaching, easily accessible to almost all businesses and having the potential to penetrate the market with just one click, it is no wonder that Facebook, Instagram, Google, and even Youtube pose a better option for consumer outreach compared to traditional advertising methods such as tv, radio, and billboards. Companies are already taking their Brand to the next level when it comes to creating new and engaging content; not to mention bringing more association towards their brand via amplification of Brand Awareness. For example, associating their brand with a popular lifestyle trend that is currently popular on the social media landscape, connecting and communicating more with today’s tech-savvy generation.

The advantages of digital advertising include faster message deliverance with near pinpoint accuracy of being able to deliver that message to your preferred audience, which is only available in the digital space. This enables companies to push their brands and increase their Brand Equity. In comparison, the traditional way of advertising such as disseminating product information is much slower and less precise. News and promotions might not be complete, and the time taken to transfer information to the consumer takes longer compared to digital methods. On digital platforms, information can flow in real time with updates from a brand’s service and products accessible to any internet user. Traditional ways of advertising are no longer the only way to build brand equity.

When it comes to market penetration in the Digital Era and solidifying your position with existing customers, it is important to note that the grounds for identifying new solutions are constantly changing.

For example, Apple’s brand equity is notoriously well-defined to the point where consumers and stakeholders alike anticipate and even speculate about the yearly release of its newest gadgetry, all of which creates anticipation, excitement and curiosity which brings about bonus added value toward its Brand Equity. Since everything from discussion about the newest upcoming products, to gauging their business performance, and tech reviews is all happening online, interaction between consumers and stakeholders happens rather organically whereas before it was only limited to board meetings and outdoor discussion. In this comparison, leveraging on the connectivity of the digital landscape is one of the main factors which separates advertising and building brand equity in the previous era compared to now, as demonstrated by Apple.

Unlike traditional media of information dissemination which are concentrated locally, the digital space has a wider outreach. Digitization of most of the business operations of a brand is now more of a need than a want. Quick and clear delivery of a brand message is the key to gain consumer confidence and a larger share of their attention. 

With the advent of smarter innovative tools being readily available, all business strives only as well as the data they are provided with. Key master data is crucial in giving business insights that can have a large and impactful result in pushing their brand equity forward. When it comes to brand association and awareness, data acquisition transformed into reliable information. It will be the core of marketing. Positioning your brand in the digital space is vital for success in the 21st Century, and Oppotus with our “mobile-first” approach is able to offer the tools, information and know-how to help you traverse it.

Building your brand equity doesn’t necessarily have to be a struggle. However, in order to build a successful brand, one must understand that there will always be challenges and obstacles along the way. Not everything that you do or implement will lead to positive results, and any steps you take to build your brand equity might not necessarily have an immediate visible impact. 

Having said that, as long as you are willing to try new things in order to build your brand equity and have the measures in place to gather data, any step you take or move that your brand makes can turn out to be beneficial, even if the action in question was received negatively by your customers.

Blindspots – Obstacles or Opportunities?

Whenever you organise some kind of advertising campaign such as producing a video ad to be played on YouTube or a giveaway on social media, the activity of that campaign will result in a data spike which can be leveraged to help your brand growth. By tracking your company’s brand equity, you will now have access to an influx of extremely useful information which will prove invaluable to building your brand equity further.

Let’s say that your campaign ran fully but you did not get the expected results due to some unforeseen circumstances – this does not necessarily mean that the resources that you devoted to that campaign have gone to waste.

1. You Can Dig Further to Find Out What Happened

Even if the campaign was not successful, there will still have been some form of interaction with your consumers during its duration which you can dig deeper into to find out how you can improve for future campaigns. Let’s say for example you run a campaign in the form of a new 30 seconds long Youtube advertisement which includes a link that customers can click on which directs to a new product that you are offering. The campaign might not receive as many clicks or generate as many sales as you expected, but there will be underlying data which might explain why that was the case. In this scenario, Youtube’s advertising platform would contain data which you could use to build a profile of what type of audience the advertisement was most effective with, and you could then check this against your target audience to see whether or not the advertisement was actually able to resonate with the audience that you had in mind while developing the campaign.

Likewise, in a brand equity study, you will be able to drill into the relevant data for insights and consumer stories to find out what actually happened, along with the motivations for the actions that were taken. Very often, this makes for interesting and unexpected discoveries that will help to guide business decisions.

2. Understand Why Competitors Are Doing Well

Knowing the competition is a surefire advantage. Keeping a close eye on brand equity and market data will allow you to find out how competitors move, what they are doing, what they have already done, and what makes them attractive to consumers. Sometimes you can even learn what not to do from your competitors or how to improve on a strategy that others have failed to implement. The knowledge from your competitors can be used to create marketing strategies that take advantage of their weaknesses while also highlighting your own unique value proposition. The information gathered can further help you to discover opportunities to innovate, improve your products or services, where you need to polish up, and what trends you need to follow. 

3. Take Immediate Actions to Improve

In business, successful results are achieved through taking actions. Brand equity strategy isn’t just planning, but finding ways to improve and executing it. Consumer trends are constantly changing and businesses need to work fast to catch the ball before it slips past them. What you plan now may not be relevant tomorrow, but studying and using the data related to your brand equity will allow you to jump one step ahead of the markets and competition even if you fell behind in the past. This means taking a proactive approach to know how you handle your brand and business – thriving brands don’t stay in their comfort zones and need to be willing to take risks to be able to grow and win in the competitive landscape. 

Finally, when investigating the causes and effects of any happenings during a particular campaign, always be aware that there is margin of error for any quantifiable data, and that there will be fluctuations of data over time which must be scrutinised before taking actions. It’s always better to be constantly tracking your brand equity, analyzing the growth and results after each successive campaign to get trending data and see how your brand has grown rather than only having information for certain individual points.

As mentioned before, brand equity is the value a company achieves based on how consumers perceive and value the brand. The stronger the brand, the more consumers will flock to you, willing to go the extra mile to support your brand by making pre-orders or joining waiting lists for your products/services, or standing in long queues to get the latest releases. Consumers will gravitate towards you with little consideration for the price or the efforts they have to go through to get your products so long as they believe in the value of your brand. 

How do we translate collected data into actions? 

Identify Areas of Opportunities

An opportunity is a potential action or timeframe which allows a company to create and implement ideas or innovations to improve and grow the business. Strong brand equity can promote a company’s growth, enabling it to expand into new markets or geographies. This can be achieved through leveraging the value of your brand. By doing so, your company will be able to introduce new and innovative products to your line and consumers will be more than willing to give them a try.

Canon, for example, expanded their product line to reach different consumer segments by launching a wide range of cameras to cater for various consumer needs with their product lineups designed for professionals, advanced photographers, casual photographers, amateurs, etc. Additionally, they had also utilised the Canon brand to sell printers, successfully entering the market for a different product category. 

Brands That Can Always Improve

Continuous improvement is the best way to ensure things are done in the most effective, efficient, and productive way. A brand is more than its name or logo, it’s about the values and messages it represents. The goal is to build a brand equity that sticks in the consumer’s mind. As such it’s necessary to make adjustments and improvements along the way to ensure your brand is deeply rooted in the minds of consumers.   

Over the years, Nike has been able to maintain its market dominance through appropriate branding, especially since their switch from a rational to emotional approach. Nike understands that people now buy lifestyles more than materials. Nike’s iconic slogan “Just Do It” sums up the brand: competitive, direct, and powerful. Consumers who wear Nike aren’t just wearing sportswear, they are wearing the lifestyle that Nike represents. This emotional angle has given them a significant competitive edge. 

Capture a Share of Emotions

There’s more than one way of branding, marketing, advertising, and selling your product or services. Explore different methods and think out of the box. According to marketing researchers, consumers see an average of 4,000 to 10,000 ads in a single day. Coming up with fresh marketing campaigns has been more crucial in this age where consumers are bombarded by marketing messages to the point they are immune to them. 

However, complicated strategies aren’t always necessary. Take Coca-Cola for example, the brand sells happiness. It’s a simple concept that is universally understood across all cultures and languages. Their product is presented as something that brings family and friends together, a simple but strong message that has led the brand to long-term success. 

One of the unique ways in which Oppotus recognises and measures this facet, is that we take into account how many emotions your brand can evoke. This must be done on top of understanding how much “mindspace” (like awareness) a brand occupies in the minds of the consumers. Depending on the context, a brand can delight, make you cry, make you feel remorse and guilt, appreciate joy, even spark anger, and more. The more emotions a brand can elicit from consumers, the more emotional connections and associations it is making, thus giving it “more” share of emotions, and thus more equity.

Recognise and Move With the Trends

Trends represent what is popular at the moment of a given time. It can also be anything that changes the market your company operates in. Your brand needs to stay up to date and remain relevant to consumers to stay ahead of the competition. Change in trends is inevitable and it’s important to take steps to grow in tandem with those changes. Strong brands such as Apple and Nike remain relevant not because they always do the same thing, but because they are willing to do things differently. These brands continue to evolve by observing the market and anticipating what their customers want tomorrow. 

Understand Competitors, and Surpass Them

Always consider the competitive landscape; know yourself and your enemy. Understanding the competition may not be directly related to the bottom line of a company’s balance sheet, but it is beneficial in helping to develop a brand that stands out from the crowd. 

Every brand has their own strategies, unique selling points, and imageries. When placed on the same shelf as your competitors, the differences in the brand associations can be a deciding factor. As such it is important to distinguish your brand from the others. Brand differentiation is vital as it sets you apart from the competition by associating a distinct performing aspect of your brand that offers greater benefits to consumers. Keep in mind the differentiation should consider relevancy, authenticity, and serve a clear purpose to be effective.  

Ultimate Goal: More Sales!

Brand equity sells. A company with positive and strong brand equity is able to attract consumers who are willing to pay more for its products compared to their competitors even if they can get the same thing for less. Going back to the scenario of a consumer walking into a store with the intention of purchasing a soft drink to quench their thirst, consumers will ultimately choose to purchase a Coca-Cola over the generic brand of cola because it is a brand they know of and are confident in. 

Overall, to facilitate customer loyalty and generate more sales, a company needs to build brand equity and strengthen brand perception. A positive brand equity is a promise to consumers of what to anticipate, something they can trust. Companies with a recognizable brand will receive more demand for their products and services, leading to higher sales. 

To stand out in today’s competitive environment, brand equity plays a vital role in the survival of a business. Feel free to contact us at theteam@oppotus.com on how to build and shape a positive brand equity, and to monitor your brand perception to create marketing messages that are able to capture the consumer attention and loyalty that you want.