Brand duty

By Krishna Venkitachalam | 21 Jun 2002

Melbourne: Brand is a term widely used by companies and in other spheres of life. From the corporate sense, branding does the role of educating the customer about the firms products and services delivered in the market under a unique name that gets repeated in the customers mind.

Being an abstract concept, brand management is used as one of the tools to sustain a strategic and competitive advantage for organisations in the past, present and future, as well as in products diversification and industry entry.

For providing a clear picture to customers about a brands category of products and services, there are two factors inherent in a brand relevant information and right knowledge. These factors are concerned with an organisations operations, quality, pricing, features and benefits of products and services given as a whole.

Inherent is determined by individual perception. Individual perception is evolved through experiencing and learning of a particular brand. If the experience of a brand is a negative one, the learning is not interpreted in the right manner and hence, the lifespan of that brand becomes minimised. To earn a positive experience of a brand, the learning is interpreted in the right sense. This means the inherent factors relevant information and right knowledge of a brand are informed to the customers in the right meaning, manner and purpose for products and services provided in the market.

In brief, an organisations success and sustained growth in the marketplace depends on the perception of its brand, and the positivism and negativity of a brand success are measured by individual perception in terms of market value.

Branding and knowledge
Developing and maintaining a brand is difficult and demanding in todays competitive world. This is an attempt to explain how branding relates to its inherent elements. This brings a line of questions of what is meant by knowledge, information and how it relates to the branding of a company.

Knowledge is a form of useful information available in any format it could be tangible or intangible. Branding imparts both tangible and intangible elements of a corporation to the corporate world in terms of what it does in its business. The tangible element is the relevant information, which refers to product types, price and the services provided. The intangible is the right knowledge conveyed in the exact sense of a firms product quality, features and benefits.

Relevant information means providing the information about the types, prices of products or services offered by the organisation. Perhaps it does not prove the fact that the relevant information is projected in the right meaning, which basically means the right knowledge of product quality and benefits in educating the customers.

Due to globalisation and information revolution, customers are more aware of what their purchasing needs are and explore before buying any product or service. This behaviour pushes companies to focus on the importance of relevant information and right knowledge while creating and developing a brand. If this important aspect of relevant information and right knowledge is not taken into account, the results will be a brand decline for the organisation.

In conclusion, managing right knowledge and relevant information is important for organisations when defining and determining its brand. Moreover, to sustain and expand the brand of a corporation, both inherent elements should be emphasised for surviving in a highly volatile global business scenario.

The writer is a PhD student at University of Melbourne. The views expressed above are personal and do not imply any person or corporation in any sense. He can be contacted at: krish_venkit@yahoo.com