Playing with jargons

Bottom of the Funnel, Call-to-action, Inbound Marketing. Ever heard of this term? You must have, you’re a budding marketers!

Jargons are fascinatingly boring. We all at some point in time use it to show off our Marketing “knowledge”. The purpose of this series of articles is to go beyond the verbatim meaning of a marketing jargon. Yes, you may impress a bunch of students with fancy jargons in a couple of college seminars, but not your marketing head and definitely not your customers.

So where do we start? Let’s start with my favorite one – Brand Equity! It’s a case in point for most used or abused jargon of the management fraternity.

“The commercial value that derives from consumer perception of the brand name of a particular product or service, rather than from the product or service itself.”

So many jargons within the definition of a jargon, huh!

Let me just simplify this a little more – It is the equity associated with a brand.

To reduce it to bare bones - It is those extra bucks, those extra miles that you as a customer willing to put for that brand, so that you can have it, and not any other! Why? Just because you have got that name associated with your product. This is gold, right?

Now ask yourself “why do you pay Starbucks 160 for a cup of coffee, when you can still get it for 15 anywhere else” (Gujjus, please skip this one – I know you have never visited Starbucks)

The reason might be anything – you may genuinely like the coffee there, or you need to boast it to your colleagues about your visit there or any other, but Starbucks has just earned over 10 times the other product from your single visit there.

Now we all can relate, right?

One thing that strikes immediately in the definition is the consumer perception. Consumer is the most important part of the whole process of creating a brand worth equity.

Back in the 1990’s David Aaker described brand equity as “a set of assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and symbol, that adds to or subtracts from the value provided by a product or service…”

To convey the importance of the Brand and BE, I would like to quote the prestige in the context relevant to this,

“Every great brand consists of three parts. The first part is called "The Product". The marketer shows you something ordinary. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't (probably). The second part is called "The Branding". The marketer takes the ordinary something product and makes it something extraordinary (by creating customer loyalty and brand awareness). Now you're (and the competitors) looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because, of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because creating a brand isn't enough; you have to justify it, in monetary terms. That's why every marketer/company/organization are in pursuit of this third part, the hardest part, the part we call "Brand Equity".

Of course, branding and brand equity goes way beyond than this in understanding.

Often a Marketer/Company get into the mode of playing safe once they start hitting regular profits and stop marketing the product/service as rigorously as earlier, and this is probably the biggest blunder an organization can make from the marketing perspective. That is the reason most organization end up as a mediocre one, where they follow the classic product life-cycle and sooner the profits fade away and product dies. There is no reason making your brand just another commodity, rather make it a strong brand – build loyalty around your customers and then leverage that bond to earn “premium”

Building brand is a mammoth task, creating equity around it is even difficult and rarely happens overnight but, is essential for the lasting success of your business.