Branding
Brand positioning offline and online must be a core activity in all companies with marketing strategy
Only 3 Italian companies appear in the first 100 world famous brands.(Gucci, Ferrari and Prada source: Interbrand 2019 research)
The Market leader of the top word wide brands is Apple followed by Google and Amazon. In fourth place we can find Microsoft that undergoes a slight decrease compared to 2017. Coca-Cola that has been the top brand for 13 long years and now it slips to fifth place. Finally, at the sixth place we find Samsung.
Also among the new entries to dominate are the companies of the digital revolution, with Uber and LinkedIn as debutants: the former ranks in 87th position with a value of 5.714 billion dollars and LinkedIn at number 98, with 4.836 billion. The performance of Facebook is not as positive: the brand comes out of the top 10, slipping by five positions: guilt, probably of repeated scandals related to privacy and control of social media content.
It’s a critical business factor for a company's success: more the brand is identified with assigned value by the business community more it will grow, widening the opportunities to invade contiguous markets and consolidates the identification between brand and value.
The brand, it is a name, a symbol, an elements combination through which products and services are identified. It is these value combinations, whose totality determines the marks personality.
It is a promise, an idea, a guarantee; it represents the consumers expectations of a product, a service, a company.
However, in spite of the importance given to company branding politics, the activity of branding, considered extremely important for corporate growth strategy, it is not particularly developed by all the enterprises, it is incoherently redistributed among various media, monitored cost-per-contact and for null investment.
Historically all the organizations that were able to achieve the best result, leaving without exception within the sectors, in terms of brand positioning and consequently in corporate image, were those which better obtained the sharing of: promises, values, credibility and business community consistency.
To become ambassadors and defenders of some values share with the customers community and credible holders of closely coherent promises with the shared community values.
From the business point of view the most correct company strategy, in order to define a brand or a company position, should start from the answers to the following questions from the reference business community:
- Who are we?
- What do we produce?
- To what do we serves?
- What do need our business community?
- How long will we need to continue doing what we are doing?
A coherent and winning approach to brand positioning strategy does not have to be seen like an episodic fact, but a continuous strategy to brand community interest and the sensibility, translated in concrete facts through “identity” management, in all the external or market manifestation.
