Can small businesses sustain a branding campaign and succeed?

The birth of factories paved the way for what is known as branding now:

When goods began to be produced in factories, not only were entirely new-product is being introduced, but all products-even basic staples-were appearing in strikingly new forms. What made early branding efforts and different from more straightforward salesmanship was that the market was now being flooded with uniform mass-produced products that were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Competitive branding became a necessasity of the machine age-they didn’t a context of manufacturer and sameness image-based difference had to be manufactured along with the product.

What has a Nobel Prize winning scientist and his dog got to do with branding?

Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for his research into branding in 1904. Every day, Pavlov would ring a bell as he rubbed meat paste onto the tongue of a dog. The dog soon began to associate the taste of the meat with the sound of the bell until salivation became the dog’s conditioned response.

Branding is treated like football. Everyone has got an opinion and their own take on it.

When your peel off all these layers and layers of opinions and get to the crux of the matter-branding is-nothing more than implanting an associative memory. (Associative memory: a memory that has become connected to an other memory.

Ultimate Goal of branding:

To establish category dominance. i,e to become the company that customers think of immediately and the one they feel best about when ever your product or service category is named.

In the age of continual sensory bombardment how can a ‘brand’ achieve category dominance?

1.Regularity

Your target audience must be ‘exposed’ to your message on a regular basis.

2.Repetitiveness

Your ‘message’ must be ‘repeated’ again and again (remember Pavlov’s dogs?)

3.Relative association

Relative association is the process of establishing an emotional anchor. Branding works well when Regularity and Repetitiveness is tied to Relative Association, i,e an emotional anchor. (If Pavlov’s dogs were not hungry (higher emotional state) when the paste was rubbed on to the tongue, Pavlov would have had little success on associating the taste of the meat with the sound of the bell.

Many Branding exercises fail, simply because all these 3 elements are not in place.

Big businesses with big budgets can afford to carry out expensive Branding Exercise – Regularly, Repeatedly and with a Relative Association.