Showing posts with label Branding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Branding. Show all posts

BMW positioning the brand as to create a new category "luxury performance cars".




Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) is a German luxury vehicles, motorcycle, and engine manufacturing company owning and producing Mini cars and serves as the parent company of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. BMW produces motorcycles under BMW Motor-rad, and plug-in electric cars under the BMW i sub-brand. It is one of the best-selling luxury automakers in the world. Before discussing how BMW positioned the brand in the global market, we must mention a small piece of brand information.

 Brand positioning is at the heart of marketing strategy. It is the act of designing the company’s offer and image so that it occupies a distinct and valued place in the target customer’s minds. As the name implies, positioning means finding the proper “location” in the minds of a group of consumers or market segment, so that they think about a product or service in the desired way to maximize potential benefit to the firm. 

 Deciding on a positioning requires determining the target market and the nature of competition and the optimal points-of-parity and points-of-difference brand associations. In other words, marketers need to know who the target consumer is, who the main competitors are, how the brand is similar to these competitors, and how the brand is different from them. 
In brand management, points of difference are formally defined as attributes or benefits that consumers strongly associate with a brand, positively evaluate, and believe that they could not find to the same extent with a competitive brand. On the other hand, points of parity are not necessarily unique to the brand but may in fact be shared with other brands in three types: category, competitive, and correlation.

 When BMW first made a strong competitive push into the U.S. market in the early 1980's, it positioned the brand as being the only automobile that offered both luxury and performance. At that time, U.S. luxury cars like Cadillac were seen by many as lacking performance, and U.S. performance cars like the Chevy Corvette were seen as lacking luxury. By relying on the design of its cars, its German heritage, and other aspects of a well-designed marketing program, BMW was able to simultaneously achieve a point-of-difference on performance and a point-of-parity on luxury with respect to luxury cars and a point-of-difference on luxury and a point-of-parity on performance with respect to performance cars. The clever slogan, “The Ultimate Driving Machine” effectively captured the newly created  umbrella category—luxury performance cars.

How Nike became more recognizable outside the United States more than inside?



Nike Inc. is the number one U.S athletic footwear company and one of the most recognized American brands among foreign consumers. The high degree of recognition is one of the main reasons Nike has been so successful. At the end of 2006, the company operated 23 distribution centers in Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America, Africa and Canada.

However, Nike’s success could be attributed to its concept based advertising campaigns. The company uses a strategy that is often called “image transfer”. Nike traditionally does not place a specific product or mention the brand name but it creates a mood or atmosphere and then the brand is associated with that mood. Nike says “We don’t set out to make ads, the ultimate goal is to make a connection.”

Nike uses much of the celebrity endorsement to create the desired atmospheres. Many popular athletes participated in Nike ads such as Michael Jordan and Jon McEnroe. They aim to infer that real athletes prefer Nike and that perhaps if the potential customers buys the brand, they will play better.

In 1998, Nike shifted to a new phase in its marketing strategy and emphasized more of its product, innovation skills than the jokey, edgy attitude that it displayed in previous years. They realized that their ads need to tell consumers more about Nike’s products innovation and not just athletes and exposure. They also wanted to prove to consumer that they are not just slapping the company trademark to make money. With the launch of the “I Can” campaign, Nike showed fewer of the celebrity athletes who previously adorned its marketing output and showed more product usage than in the previous “Just do it” campaign.

At the same time, competitors Reebok and Adidas recently featured more product-focused ads and were met with a great deal of success. Despite this rearranged strategy, Nike did not back away from innovative marketing. On September 2003, Nike acquired converse Inc. and as a response on August 2005, Adidas confirmed that it had agreed to acquire Reebok.

In 2005, the CEO of Nike stated that developing markets such as India, Brazil, China, Russia and the development of converse presented a big growth opportunity. Nike started to introduce women’s fitness wears and became the number one of the world’s leading on-field performance brands. They have been able to leverage that success by creating an entirely new category of soccer-inspired street footwear.

However, Nike future strategy is the international arena which represents the hardest challenge Nike could undertake. Reaching 2016, it seems Nike became more recognizable outside the United States more than inside as they established this goal in 2010.

One year ago, Nike introduced “the last game” campaign which achieved high success globally with over than 94 million views on YouTube and enhanced its innovation strategies in creating the desired atmosphere through their ads even if they are celebrity endorsing and associating the products to that atmosphere.
Nike and Adidas battle with both companies having huge resources, budgets, creative minds and great managements is one of the fiercest brand competitions globally that is worth following up with the updates.

So stay tuned, we will deliver the latest updates to you as soon as they happens. 

How does celebrity endorsement help in brand marketing?

We have seen many marketing campaigns involving celebrity endorsement, some of which succeeded in connecting us emotionally with the products being promoted and others that surely never faded from our memories.

Each celebrity has their own fame, esteem, relevance, image and definitely a huge base of fans. Having a well-known and admired character to promote your brand or product, can easily draw massive attention and shape the perception of the brand. 

A celebrity endorsement can save miles to go in establishing brand awareness, representing a brand image and creating secondary brand associations. 

However, there are some issues to consider when approaching celebrity endorsement:

  • Celebrity can endorse so many brands that they no longer create any specific product meaning.

  • There must be a reasonable match between the product and the celebrity to be endorsed.

  • Many customers may feel celebrities are doing the endorsement just for money, do not even believe in the brand and yet transfer wrong perception of the brand.

  • Celebrity can get in trouble or lose popularity, diminishing their marketing value to the brand.

If you handle these issues poorly, it would ruin the brand equity. Therefore, it is critical to choose the suitable celebrity that would be mostly familiar to the your target audience, influences them and supports the desired product image. 

Starting Your own business? Here are some brand naming tips


Brand naming is one of the most important brand elements that you should consider lots of efforts to develop. There are plosives (B, C, D, G, K, P, and T) which are easier to escape from the mouth and are more direct. Moreover, there are also the sibilants (S, Soft C) softer sound which tend to conjure up romantic or scenery images.
But yet, to build a strong brand image and ensure it has the desired character in the market, here are some crucial mistakes in brand naming that you should avoid,
1.     Taking the easy way and setting initials as a brand name.
Setting initials such as (I.A.) may be easier to trademark, but an enormous budget is typically required to give them meaning to the potential market.
2.   Insisting on using a name that can be found in the dictionary.
Potential market may translate the brand name which causes confusion in delivering the desired image.
3.   A name that customers have to work too hard to remember it out.
Brand names that are easy to remember will affect the consumer purchase decision and provides an advantage of being at the top of consumers brand mind list.
4.   Combining too many names and creating a confusing brand name.
Definitely, you don’t want to mess up by combining too many name and introducing a brand name that is way confusing that can’t either be remembered or shows any brand image meaning. A name that customers have to work too hard to figure out is a turnoff—and a wasted opportunity.
5.   Asking suggestions from friends or other uniformed sources.
The results that come from this approach seldom relate to or express a company’s business strategy.
6.   Using 'innovation' or 'solution' in a name.

In most industry situations these kinds of words are so overused, they no longer have meaning.
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Marketing Hub aims to replace the wrong marketing concepts in the Egyptian society with the right concepts and knowledge through our articles. We share experience with our audience through articles and we are wide open to communicate with everyone in any field who aims to understand more about marketing or wants to discuss and analyze any market update. We offer consultation in developing your brand, designing brand strategies, designing marketing strategies, generating advertising campaign ideas and developing business plan. Remember, marketing is an art not a job. We are wide open to communicate with creative individuals and join our business community.

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