Golden Rules of Brand Building 1
"Achieving additional sales in the short term by expanding the brand causes the concept of branding to work in reverse. If you want to create a strong brand in the mind of the consumer, you have to narrow down your brand, not expand it. In the long run, expanding the area where your brand spreads will reduce your power and weaken your image."
First of all, let's give some information about brand and branding. Brand in its simplest form; It is an identity created to differentiate the product from similar ones. If we start from the most basic known story, marking and stamping one of the apples in a basket distinguishes it from other apples. The fact that this stamp has a name, color, model, in short, a unique design is called a brand, and this process is called branding. When you choose an apple, you can briefly say: No, not that apple, but the one with "DMG" written on it.
Today, this process has changed its dimension through various stages and layers due to the abundance of similar products in the market, and each brand now has a living human personality. And every brand has a promise to the consumer: The fastest, the cleanest, the safest, the most beautiful, the healthiest.
Now, we will learn how to create the right brand by examining each rule of the book "22 Rules of Creating a Brand", written by industry doyens Al Ries and Laura Ries, which you will use as a bedside table.
01. Propagation Rule
The strength of a brand is inversely proportional to its distribution area.
No matter how strong and big your brand is, it cannot represent everything. When we look at the messages of a brand like Coca Cola, we see that it only embraces happiness. So what comes to mind first when you think of Chevrolet? Engine, car or computer brand? However, Chevrolet has been one of the best-selling car brands in America for a long time. There are almost countless models available. For this reason, there is no definite image that Chevrolet creates in our minds when it is first mentioned. Branding everything produced in the factory as Chevrolet in order to make your brand's name known and get quick results will increase sales in the short term, but in the long term, consumers will ask "What is Chevrolet?" The person who cannot answer the question experiences message confusion. This undermines the power of the brand in question.
The target audience is exposed to thousands of advertisements and slogans a day. If the Corvette is a fast car, the Chevrolet must have something different. Is it possible for two cars to be fast at the same time? Maybe yes, but instead of embracing this, new values should be discovered from different perspectives. Brands can only take their place in the consumer's mind when they operate in a narrow segment and can be expressed in a single short word.
What comes to your mind when you think of Volvo? Yes, our "Security" too.