By Adeolu Isadiran
Either weak or strong, every business has a brand. Some of the global brands in the world today started weak and unrecogonised but grew overtime to become world renowned. A brand is the idea or image of a specific product or service that consumers connect with by identifying the name, logo, slogan, or design of the company who owns the said idea or image.
Branding is not solely about getting your target market to choose a product/service over the competition, but rather about getting prospects to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem. Corporate branding has the ability to make a product very successful and if the brand name has a track record of guaranteed quality, then there are huge amounts of money to be made by using the name. Therefore, there is an urgent need to always give the brand a distinctive ‘voice or face’ on various marketing platforms through media profiling.
Profiling is a type of feature story and usually focuses on an interesting personality or company; profiling a brand makes the brand real, tangible, measurable and unforgettable. This also delivers positively on the image of the organization and rubs on brand acceptability.
Brand profiling creates a clear understanding and expression of what the business offers, how the business delivers and what it means for its customers, partners & key audiences i.e. the strengths of the brand and where to position it in the industry or environment it operates within.
Having said that, the key reason for profiling a brand (a product or service) is to create memorable distinction, difference and convey value. You can also create consumer’s recognition and trust using profiling in the media which ultimately helps to build brand loyalty, increase sales and profitability.
For a product entering a fiercely competitive market, the owners can leverage on profiling to create a healthy competitive advantage and presence in the media. Through this, key features of the product, its benefits and efficacy can be displayed in the profiling.
However, it must be noted that not only products are profiled in the media. The personality or spokesperson behind the brand can also be profiled, as this will give a ‘face’ to the brand but it must be done tactically. Strategic media profiling will greatly assist in raising a brand/company profile with the media and also indirectly reach the target audience.
In conclusion, branding is when that idea or image is marketed so that it is recognizable by more and more people, and identified with a certain service or product when there are many other companies offering the same service or product. Therefore, the key to building a great brand is getting the customer to come back and one way of achieving this feat is by establishing a tie between the brand and consumer through media profiling.