Branding

Imagine yourself a world where you walk into the corner café and buy a cold drink. It simply says cold drink and nothing more. Or maybe you walk in and ask the café owner, “Hi there I am looking for that great tasting black cold drink!” He replies, “Oh Cold drink?” and you say “Yes”! He presents you with a polystyrene cup with some black colored liquid and you taste it and say “yep this is it!” or worse “What on earth is this?”

Branding is a part of our lives, you either want “Coke Cola” or “Pepsi” not just “That black cold drink!” It is the identity of something you trust, like, prefer or hate. According to Greg Fisher, senior lecturer at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), Branding can be attributed to Procter and Gamble who decided that they wanted their products to have a name that can be distinguished from other products. This was nearly 170 years ago. According to Unilever records, the world's first registered brand was Pears Soap, first produced commercially in 1789 by Andrew Pears.

A brand reflects something

When deciding on a brand it is important to realize that a brand reflects who and what the company or the products are. A brand becomes an identity of your business where an association is being made with an expectation. That expectation can be a positive one or it can be completely negative.

This reflection of your brand will influence your marketing strategy in most possible ways and therefore branding must be integrated into your marketing strategy to a very large extend. Should a brand reflect style and luxury a funny or naughty advertising campaign can damage the brand. A brand reflecting fun and playfulness might be damaged by a stylish and luxurious advertising campaign.

Branding and online marketing

Branding plays a very important role in online marketing. Research should be done to ensure that your brand is promoted to your target market. Understanding your brand is therefore extremely important in order to make your branding campaigns as effective as possible.

Many companies make the mistake of allowing an individual to be associated with a specific brand. This can result in serious problems when that individual leaves the company. Social interaction forms an integral part of the Internet. So when a brand is being used for Social Media Marketing, community marketing and editorial marketing, this should be a serious consideration for the management of the company. However the association with an individual should not be underestimated.

Email marketing is a very useful way of building a brand. A few points are worth mentioning though.

Ensure that the company you do an email marketing campaign with is reputable and the association is not damaging towards your brand.

Only deal with companies that make use of a double opt-in list.

Ensure that you distance your brand from spam email as far as possible.

Confirming that the company has a P3P policy or something similar in place.

The company has a proper opt-out procedure in place.



Using affiliate marketing can be one of the fastest and easiest ways of obtaining customers. But ensuring that your brand stays reputable is an important responsibility you should be aware of. Many affiliates wants to make money and do not really care if they damage your brand or not, therefore they will make use of any method possible to make money. This can include spamming people and having pornography on their sites. Monitor your traffic and be on a look out for affiliate tagged links coming from bad neighborhoods. Cancel such an affiliates account if they refuse to comply to your requests that they make use of clean marketing strategies.