By Macdonald Mafandizvo
Zimbabwe. – (News Of The South) – It was only when I got a chance to discuss the topic on branding in an interview with a local branding expert Tirivashe Mundondo,when I learnt that the branding concept is but a very essential marketing tool.Tirivashe has a wealth of professional experience in the field of advertising,image marketing,and branding for medical,real estate,technology and service industries and lends his extensive expertise in the fields of imagineering,print design,corporate image ,brand building and cutting-edge web design.
In that exclusive interview,it came out that the technical definition of this concept is very far away from how we would define it in college. According to Tirivashe,branding is simply your passion that you reveal to the world.Whilst his definition makes a lot of sense,it’s sad when looking at how today’s businesses do their branding,it actually contradicts this definition and has to a greater extent led to companies coming up with brands that fail after all.
Branding is not just an issue of attaching nice names to your business or your products. Its not even about your logo or anything else.Its time you divorce this notion.Therefore a successiful brand is one that has in it a strong underlying passion attached to a business idea or a service one may be trying to establish.For example Aple designs a brand that shows a strong passion within Steve Jobs,his passion of elegance and style.Now the success of Aple depends on how they reveal and inspire the same passion of elegance to their target audience.Notably,irrespective of how expensive the Apple brand may be,consumers still don’t hesitate to have it in their possession.
Tirivashe Mundondo stressing a point during the interview.
In essence,branding begins with you the individual when you first define your passion.You can not be successiful in creating a strong brand whilst your passion is far away from that business idea.Therefore the first brand should be you and then the passion passes on to your products and services.Everyone in business should know that the brand is the whole business and your business is marketing that brand.It clearly comes back to the fact that if you are not attached to your brand emotionally you can not successifuly win markets and your business may fail.
It is a good thing though to go to a designer and get your logo done but the first brand is you the individual.Once you brand yourself everyone will follow whatever the good thing you may be doing. Brand yourself first then you go on create the neccessary attention and people will listen to you hence accept your offer.A very good example of a branded person is Carl Joshua Ncube,a prominent Zimbabwean stand up commedian. There are a lot of people in the comedy sector who could give a lot of insight or could make the comedy scene shift but they cant because they don’t have a brand.
Carl created a brand and to prove that,it is after a few months down his comedy work when he came up with the idea that Carl can cook and now people follow his cooking stuff.
Speaking of passion,Carl admits that he doesn’t even know how and why he has got so many followers even on social platforms.”I am not online trying to promote a show or promote DVD sales.I am out there talking about my life,I am like a walking book on social media and I believe people believe my honesty,input,perspective and occassionally my jokes”
Nonetheless,it is important for a brand to have 1 million likes on Facebook and relevant to those people.It makes no sense to have 1 million likes and you are not engaging with the audience.With the advent of the internet and social media platforms,a brand’s success is measured by the number of followers who are engaged.Hence creativity and your passion should be at the core of your communication to your audience thus attracting the much needed attention from the followers who would want to have that same passion in you,and by so doing it creates a two way communication system in which you gather remarks and reccommendations.
Branding is a marketing tool which is intrinsically indespensable in any business if done properly or with a great sense of deliberation. Branding is that process by which businesses differentiate themselves by identifying and effectively articulating what makes them different or unique from their competitors. Thus their Unique Selling Proposition(USP) which I think is the business leader’s underlying passion revealed in the products and services offered by the organisation. Branding therefore helps your business gain an edge on your competition.
On the other hand,personal branding is also important because if you don’t stand out of the crowd that means you are just like everyone else-a white jelly bean in a jar full of white jelly beans. And if you are just like everyone else,why should customers or clients choose you over your competitors? They shouldn’t and they probably won’t.
Branding is a universal concept that can be applicable in any organisation. It then depends on who wants to apply it and how he intends to do so.Some people might say they don’t mind how their products or services are positioned in the minds of the consumers,all they care about is selling their product or service to those who need it.It is however from a marketing point of view detrimental to any business that holds on to such a sure-fire recipe for disaster ideology.Since the market is saturated with almost homogeneous products,the only effective way of setting abase competition is through branding.
Mr Mundondo alluded to the fact that there is a cancer out there when it comes to branding.The common mistake today’s brands make is telling no stories.Story telling is a critical tool in branding,and a brand has to tell a story. It creates an impact or in other words gets your target market hooked to your brand.Rick Fulton,the Managing Director of Upton Fulton McCann Advertising also at a marketers social event hosted by Marketers Association of Zimbabwe in conjuction with Goldern Pilsner in Harare recently spoke on the same trending topic of story telling in branding.Rick iterated that a great brand tells its market how it evolved,its accomplishments,how it has impacted lives and how it remains relevant and generally its intrinsic value to its target market.
A great brand is known for something and that should be your story. When Google came on the scene,they created a blank white page with a search box and said “Search”. That is what Google is known for. They however own a lot of other things like Youtube, Android etc but they have a story to tell as a search engine.
There are a lot of branding misconceptions and literalism in the market.Just because you own a bookstore doesn’t mean you have to put a book as part of your logo.Its like naming your business after your kids.It is relevant to you but not to your market.For axample if you decide to put your face in your logo,it has to be you as the brand,and you therefore has to be the story behind.You can not have a coffee shop with your face,or if it’s Obama putting his face,it should be as merely Obama and not as the Democratic party.
It was therefore clear to me that coming up with a strong brand that can give a captivating story lies in the ability of the brand to reveal the underlying passion.You can not fail to tell a story of your life let alone a story of what you love doing which turns out to be a business idea that solves customer pains in a profitable way.
Macdonal Mafandizvo works for TV Sales And Home and is a 3rd year Marketing student at Harare Polytechnic College.He can be contacted at:
mmafandizvo@gmail.com
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