Posts tagged with

brand awareness

So what is brand awareness and how does strong brand awareness drive the success of your business?

If your business thrives on developing and selling a product, then ultimately your main focus and goal has to be increasing sales and income, attracting new customers and in most cases, encouraging repeat purchases.

Sounds simple on paper but to achieve this you need to use a clever combination of business and marketing skills, which all assist in strengthening your brand awareness. Brand awareness refers to just how ‘aware’ your customers and potential customers are of your business and product offer.

As an example, within two weeks after the official launch of the Apple iphone, surveys proved that 90% of US consumers were aware about the iphone as a result of advertising and news reports. This is exceptionally strong brand awareness, driven of course by an exceptional organisation and no doubt an exceptionally high marketing budget.

Ultimately, achieving strong brand awareness means that your brand is well known and easily recognisable; another great example is the Crocs phenomenon. Brand awareness is essential to differentiating your product from other similar products or competitors.

Targeting the right audience is crucial to your success. Of similar importance is understanding that you need a plan with speci?c actions in place that will increase awareness of your brand amongst your consumers.

The components of a plan to strengthen brand awareness are:

• identify and understand your target customers, build personas to understand their mindset and get inside their heads
• ensure you have a solid brand identity (company name, logo and strap-lines, etc.)
• add value through service (events, promotions, competitions, etc.)
• advertising, simply don’t stop! Where budget permits, get the brand out there as much as possible but ensure you advertise in the right places
• after sales follow up and good customer relation management (made simple these days through effective ecommerce and email marketing).

Rarely has an item of apparel so divided the public into lovers and haters, but this seemingly innocuous and childish footwear does exactly that. It is a bit like Marmite in that respect – you either love it or hate it, but there is no middle ground.

Crocs started life at sea as a deck shoe – hence the holes and the non-slip soles. Their genesis is a business fairytale: in July, 2002 three men on a Caribbean sailing trip fantasised about a pair of shoes that were slip-proof, waterproof, comfortable, fun, smell-free and didn’t leave marks. So they decided to make them.

Following their initial success with boat users, hospital workers adopted Crocs because they could be easily sterilised, and by those in the catering industry and other professions who were on their feet all day because of their comfort. Crocs’ rise to fame was somewhat meteoric, relying as it did on word of mouth alone in the early days. By 2007, Crocs reached their ‘tipping point’ and were a fashion craze and their presence on the high street became ubiquitous.

Sadly, Crocs became the victim of their own success and brand awareness. With the world market swamped by replica copies the durability of the popular multi-coloured Crocs clog shoes has come back to bite them with losses reaching $30.3 million (£18.1 million) compared with a net profit of $2.1 million a year ago.

Analysts claim the long-lasting quality of the foam footwear, combined with the economic downturn, has hit sales. A failure to diversify beyond the original shoe design has also been blamed.

The results are better than the huge downturn in sales many had expected, but revenue at Crocs, a US company, still fell by 11 per cent to $197.7 million (£118.2 million) in the second quarter of 2009.