The focus of businesses and companies has been changing from products to customers. Approximately 74% of the customers expect from their brands how they treat their environment, employees, and customers. Companies should stay alert on how they’re following their marketing strategies for their brand awareness. Today, we’ll discuss what is brand equity; its importance, its elements, and how to create it with examples.
What is Brand Equity?
Brand equity is the process of bringing the brand’s name into the minds of customers, and it’s valuable to have a brand that customers could recognize. Companies can develop brand equity by offering a good and pleasant experience to the customers. It would make their purchase and choose your product over competitors that are offering the same things.
Typically, you can achieve brand equity by creating awareness through running a campaign that focuses on retention efforts, loyalty, delivering a promised and qualified product that customers want, and the values of target customers.
The customers would purchase your products over competitors if you offer them rewards and incentives to your loyal customers. Some companies provide discounts, free products, gifts, coins, and stars to their regular customers on their birthdays; and it helps them to increase brand awareness.
Importance of Brand Equity
One of the main benefits of BE is to have a higher ROI (return on investment). Companies that would use branding, their profitability is higher, and they spend less on advertising, production, and promotion. For instance, positive BE allows businesses and companies to charge premium prices to their customers.
When customers believe in the offered quality and value of the brands, they would be willing to pay higher prices for the products of their brands. After building trust with their target customers, companies can launch new products and market them by using the same brands’ names, it helps them to sell their products faster.
It is a growing trend among customers; approximately 80% of the customers don’t buy products from such brands that they don’t like or trust. Roundabout 90% of the customers don’t engage with those companies that have failed to meet their promises.
Elements of Brand Equity
The four main elements of brand equity are as follows;
Brands Awareness
You should notice whether customers could easily recognize your brand or not. The imagery and messaging relevant to your brands should be consistent and cohesive so that the customers could easily recognize them. However, you should know what types of values customers are attaching to your brands. It’s important to focus on family-friendly traits, quality, and sustainability.
Brands Attributes
The first-hand experience of your customers has gone by using your brands. It comprises of following
- Whether the product performed well the way it supposed to do
- The worthiness of loyalty and reward programs
- Helpfulness and accommodating behavior of customer representative team
Perceived Quality
When you increase the perceived value of the brand, it would amplify the customer experience and ultimately sales. The perceived quality is when customers analyze the quality of the product based on the user experience. If customers didn’t have a good experience using the products of the brands, they won’t positively react to the brand.
Brands Loyalty
Brands loyalty comprises brands attributes, brands awareness, and overall experience of using the brands. In simple words, brands loyalty means that the customers prefer your brand over competitors. When you work on the qualities of your brand, it would increase your brands influence and profitability.
How to Create Brand Equity
Some of the main steps on how to create brand equity are as follows;
Understand Why
The focus of many advertisers and marketers is on how versus why. It is like “how the brand would make the customers’ life easier” versus “why companies do things.” For instance, when you look at the Apple tech company, then the company’s “why” is easily understandable. The focus of Apple is on its brand and not the computers, and it allowed the company to expand its product portfolio into various categories.
Test Your Message
While crafting the marketing message, it’s significant to check the position of your company with customers.
- How they should react
- What you should do to get their best response
- Know whether you’re addressing their pain points or not
- Whether they would stop and check your message or not, know that while creating it
You should include creative elements while crafting the message, and add such things that would attract the attention of your customers. It has become important in today’s marketplace of specialization.
Drive Awareness
After crafting the compelling messaging, your focus should be on creating awareness of your brands and company. It requires you to put emphasis on developing emotional connection over conversion, and brands value over the attributes of the product.
However, it’s difficult to do long-term planning, when the focus of the world is on the immediate transaction. You should run the brands campaign in the long term so that the customers would remember the message and connect with it. It would benefit the company in the long term.
Consistency
You should be consistent with your brands strategy after building your brand. It comprises style guides and typefaces. For instance, if the ad’s idea is catchy and interesting; but it is outside of your company’s personality, then you should avoid implementing it.
Customer Experience
The image and personality of brands are the way customers perceive them. When you put customers at the center of your company’s strategy, it would help you to amplify your brand. For instance, you should study the review system of Amazon and other e-commerce platforms. It encourages users to review products after using them and communicate with the seller that how they could make them better. You should always choose customers over the immediate customers’ value.
Examples of Brand Equity
Porsche
Porsche is a luxury automobile brand. The company has established and maintained powerful brands equity through unique material, high quality, reliability, and image. The company offers the best user experience through its vehicles. Porsche ranks at the top leading position in the luxury vehicle category.
Coca Cola
Coca-Cola is the world’s leading soft drink manufacturing brand. The company has achieved the status of much more than a product through excellent taste and experience. Coca-Cola always runs a unique marketing and promotional campaign, and it has made a strong impact in terms of generating user engagement.
Conclusion: What is Brand Equity? Importance, Elements, Examples
After an in-depth study of what is brand equity; its importance, its elements, and how to create it along with examples; we have realized that brands equity is important for the growth of your business. If you’re working on building it, then you should work on building it.
Ahsan Ali Shaw is an accomplished Business Writer, Analyst, and Public Speaker. Other than that, he’s a fun loving person.
