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Showing posts with label marketing strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing strategy. Show all posts

Strategic branding concerns for small businesses; the foremost path to succeed in a small business, example provided with Chinese brands

(Source: Google image)

The very basic investment for a small business should be made to target and position the offerings of this business in a most attractive and in a profitable niche. Later, the business’ success is decided by the facts such emotional relationship between the business and its customers, the acceptability, recognition, loyalty and so on. Therefore it would be more logical to say that the sustainability and profitability of any business is purely depended on how a product or a service or an offering is emotionally recognized as a brand, how it is strategically positioned as a brand, what concepts that brand represents for and how unique that brand stands smart from the competitors.

Therefore, a well-built brand should cover all above mentioned aspects and the branding strategies should be enormously brilliant to beat against the practical circumstances that arise. Chinese brands seem to benchmark in the global markets with their brilliant strategies. In a general manner, Chinese products are recognized in other countries as less in quality, low- safety, cause of physical diseases, worst user friendliness, and standing for low social responsibility. Therefore, the concept of ‘Made in China’ has actually become a desecration for Chinese brands and nowadays world leading Chinese brands have started refusing to use this conception in their branding options. Any brand that is named something like ‘Zing or sing’ would be easily recognized as a Chinese brand in global market and leading Chinese brands have started to avoid branding their products in a Chinese way and yes, they are successful. The best example would be Bird a Chinese brand for mobile phone had been world listed as one of the best mobile phone soon after Nokia. (Interbrand, 2005)       

Chinese brands can be considered as role models for any business that is about to brand its offerings on the perspective of avoiding the practical circumstances in a clever manner. Other than, a good brand should represent good ideas that would be beneficial from the customers’ viewpoint or from any other stakeholders’ involved in the business. The ideas might be emotional or rational and most importantly, in both ways, the brand should ensure the end customer is benefiting from the ideas and concepts rather than just keeping them for a business model. Example: Wal-Mart is not just a place to buy products, it is concept of low-cost high quality purchasing and most importantly, it functionally benefits the customers to save their money and emotionally making them happy.

For a small business, these concerns would be quiet enough to make their brand successful in a niche market. However, when the business grows in the forms of expansions, partnerships and alliances, the coverage of branding concerns also get expanded as well well-studied compliance to the areas of where they need to grow.  

Suggested reading

The secrets behind viral videos in YouTube; marketing secrets revealed in TechCrunch, sounds to be an ugly game


A guest article was published in TechCrunch on 22nd November 2007 by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company and the article seems remaining popular from the day it was put online. The article starts as ‘Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine’.

The whole article was spotlighted on how Dan as a viral marketing company owner strategically made some private label branded studios’ videos very popular in YouTube, how his clients were generated with millions of views un-naturally, how they got comments such ‘wow...what a great work’ for a video that had almost nothing insightful. The main reasons for why small startups go behind these viral marketing companies are that they want to gain popularity and recognition for their un-known brands. Very logically, it takes time for these companies to get recognized by their viewers and to start earning considering the massive competition in the web. Therefore, just as an off-line start-up, small online startups too need to find a company that will promote their videos and podcasts. This is the point where it urges a need of thinking on whether these un-natural loadings, comments and likes would really turn a brand into recognition unless if the content of the video is insightful and means something to the viewer.

In case, the content of the video has nothing specifically intuitive and there are millions of views and thousands of comments saying that this is the greatest video that no one revealed yet. Now think a bit, what you would feel on it. Does it sound to be a good marketing technique? Dan’s other strategy was deleting negative comments on the videos that were given by the actual viewers. However, he has forgotten that there have been enormous instances where negative comments were used as a vital marketing tool of popularizing a commercial in the ground of criticisms and one who is saying that he or she is leaving from a site or a video would actually not leave and would come again and see who else is commenting further. Further, Dan seems to be very happy to hire an attractive woman to appear in a video in such a case where there is no superior content. This sex appeal may boost the number of guys who come for that woman and not for that particular brand and most dangerously these viewers will remember the woman and will not listen to what she has to say. It seems like, what these viral marketing companies doing is too artificial and would have the least impact of helping small brands to grow further or they are spamming them. 
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