YOUR BRAND COMMUNICATES A MESSAGE
If you are in need of branding, you certainly need to know whom you are targeting. Your brand communicates a message. How can you shape the message unless you know whom you are speaking to?
I do give a lot of emphasis to the founding entrepreneurs belief in what the ecommerce brand should shape up to be. At the same time, I would like that belief to be validated and tweaked based on research. After all, you do not want to waste your money, throwing it at one group, when it should be targeting another. Or worse, you do not want to throw your money out there without focusing on any target market at all.
The more focused your target market, the more return your branding dollars could generate within the concentrated group. So a target market survey comes first, then branding.
When Brand Becomes Important in the Purchase Process
In most cases, the purchase process initiates before the customer chooses a specific brand or ecommerce destination. Most customers perform at least perfunctory research into their options before concluding their purchase.
If your brand is in the initial consideration set, your chance of making a sale increases. However, even brands with minimal brand awareness have a chance owing to the sizeable traffic sent their way by search engines.
But traffic does not necessarily translate into conversion. What you must ensure is that your branding inspires trust and motivates people to buy. That once again brings us back to the topic of discussion - research based branding.
What Do We Need to Research Before Freezing Our Branding and Positioning?
Researching our target markets should involve answer the following questions:
What are the occasions that trigger the need for our products and spur purchases?
What are the traits of the specific products and product categories that you deal in?
What is the perception that the leaders and niche players in your segment have in the minds of customers? What do people like and dislike about them? Is there a gap that your brand could fill?
What would your brand have to propose to the customer to create a perception of value?
What are the various demographic groups of the customers that purchase your product-types? Which ones of those groups seem underserved at present? Do you see a gap that your brand could fill?
Do you have any information about the behavior of the customers? For instance, could you analyze clickstream data on your site to decipher some behavioral trends?
What kind of media does your target group interact with? What kind of monies do your direct competitors spend on advertising? Do you see branding opportunities that could be cost efficient?
Can You Afford Branding? Or Should You Focus on Sales?
A well-funded ecommerce business can afford to build a brand over a long period. For the small ecommerce business, branding might seem like a luxury they cannot afford. A sales orientation is the way to go for most small businesses, as they need immediate cash.
Regardless of how crucial direct sales are to the survival of your small business, you cannot completely ignore branding. Purchasing a visitor one click at a time might help you get off the ground, but you need to start inculcating brand loyalty to be able to survive in the long term.
Final Words
When I talk to ecommerce professionals, the words "brand" and "branding" come up often. Some see branding as the only lasting value that an ecommerce business can have. While I agree with that in principle, I am less than impressed by the measures that several ecommerce businesses are taking to establish a successful brand. It is time to get down to the basics of branding rather than getting bogged down with tactical decisions such as which new social destination you need to advertise on?
At one point of time in this article, I talked about freezing one's branding and positioning. But the astute ecommerce professional knows that there is no such thing as a "frozen" brand. Even if you do not like it, your brand will evolve as the competition evolves. So, it is best if you accept that reality and get into the infinite loop of research-based brand-evolution.
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