OF BRANDING, PEOPLE AND CULTURE
OF BRANDING, PEOPLE AND CULTURE
Thursday, 20 May 2010 12:30
The discussions were engaging and insightful and at the end of the forum, it was clear that among other aspects of significance, the impact of people and culture could not be over emphasized and the role they play in branding.
The Impact of Culture on Branding
Culture is the collective model that encompasses knowledge, principle, customs, practices and any other habits acquired by people as members of society or group. A culture operates primarily by setting loose boundaries for individual behaviour.
A major consequence of culture is its impact on consumption patterns of individuals and institutions. This is because of the fact that culture tends to create a community with distinct behaviour and way of life that is independent and different from others.
Mr. Eddie Wachira, MD ImagineIMC noted that depending on the underlying cultural values in play, consumers tend to follow certain consumption patterns. In that respect successful brands have been able to adopt their branding strategies in line with these dominant cultural beliefs and they twine their brands into the cultural fibre.
One of the basics of branding is its ability to reduce customers’ search cost and perceived risk by standardization of images, messages, communications, attributes and features across markets. This forms the fundamental building block of a brand itself and poses the first challenge in cross cultural situations.
Many a times, brands will need to adopt their offerings to different cultures and this violates the standardization principle. Thus wittily handling the standardization and adoption issue becomes extremely crucial. So the question is standardization is dead or in what situations does it get its life?
One of the biggest implications of globalization for brands seeking to expand to foreign shores is the task of balancing standardization with customization given the varied cultural frontiers. When some of the world’s biggest brands expand beyond their home markets, they are tempted to fit their tried and tested formula which works in one market with hopes that it works in the new market as well.
But this tendency is gradually changing as global companies are learning about the unique needs of the customers in different markets along with the pressures of lifestyle, economic and cultural conditions. By demystifying cultural aspects of significance, it will be easier to understand how to reflect and beam brand messages to the masses.
People and branding
Now more than ever, marketers are appreciating the necessity of listening to consumers. Brands are not being left behind on this as brands are adjusting to the socially networked and wired environment. They are opening conversations with consumers in a bid to point out specific aspects of consumers.
Traditional methods of research that focus on product attributes often catch the apparent, top-of-mind impulses. Is it valuable in branding for a brand could be top of mind but never a preference for consumers? But to succeed, brands must fit into people’s lives, rather than the other way round.
People buy into things that fit their personal brand of meaning. The core task of marketing is, therefore, to capture peoples' emotional based sense that shapes self-identity and product-identity. That force is definitely a recipe to strikes sales and boosts profits.
A critical implication for marketers is the need to understand peoples' uniqueness, not just interests. Satisfying consumer needs is but commodity, not brand. Marketers should not waste time asking what people like, need or want. They will do better to discover who these people are and what would be a representative of them in terms of brands.
Social Media and branding
The debate on social media and the impact on branding was broadly debated with a focus on the challenge of managing such communication being well discussed. In his contribution, Mr. Moses Kemibaro, MD Dotsavvy Africa, a local digital agency steered the group in discussing social media and in his remarks he talked of social media engagement being considered a marathon and not a sprint.
He gave an instance where in an effort to become fast friends with their targets, a lot of brands rushed into Facebook and Twitter locally and internationally in the last couple of months without investing sufficient time or resources in research to find out how to do it well. The results have been catastrophic with brands fading into oblivion in the cyberspace and some being reflected in the wrong light on there own fan pages.
In coming years, savvy marketers should increase their commitment to social media or digital marketing but by first listening and then offering up a steady stream of great and engaging content that their fans actually want because with digital or social media, it’s all about content. These were sentiments by Ms. Cynthia Kantai, Head of Marketing, Housing Finance. She added a strategy on how and when should guide the whole process of social media engagement for brands.
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