Customer loyalty figures high on the marketing wish list of product managers. However, at a time when the customer is so well-informed and tuned into all the latest happenings around, a product has more barriers to pass before it becomes part of peoples’ lives and comes to signify trust and confidence. Marketing has thus moved from ensuring products sell successfully to creating brands.

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	Creating brand awareness tops the wish list of modern marketers.

Product or Brand Name?
Names such as "Vaseline" and "Keds" still bring to mind petroleum jelly and running shoes. However, the customer today is not only well-informed, he also has immense variety to choose from. Beside which, marketing concepts have changed widely too. P&G never uses its corporate name to market any of its products. Ditto for Kellogg's, even though Kellogg's may be widely used to denote breakfast cereal. But, this is more true of consumer markets where a brand does not need to be backed by the corporate name to succeed.

Cutting through the Clutter
Long before the markets became as flooded with choice as we know them today, marketing gurus were stressing on the importance of tying in customer inputs and expectations to successfully market products. While a great product does not need too much marketing, the sheer variety in the markets today could lead to confusion among customers. But it seems marketers are coming up with some winning ideas to cut the clutter in this area also. Perhaps a good example of this is the marketing campaign being planned by Procter & Gamble Co. for Olay, its face-care products line. The new campaign is slated to expand Olay to more than 60 facial items and also introduce a method to explain how best to use the products.

A business house may sometimes ignore the difference. There is also a chance a particular product is the mainstay of a company and hence retains the same identity. But there are no fixed rules for this, and company size is often not a marker. Thus you have Microsoft Windows - a name that denotes both company and product.

External Attributes
The external aspect of a product plays a very significant role in influencing the eventual sales of a product or service. As with all visuals, packaging appeals to the emotional side of the customer and there is every chance it will result in a sale. Acting on the emotional appeal of a person, a visual can either be conducive or non-conducive to marketing. Often we, as customers, have bought something only because it appeared attractive only to regret the decision later. However, as the Olay campaign seems to appear, this is one place where a great brand will truly live up to its great products - information is power and the new campaign promises to inform!

On the net:

Building Brands: The Mind or the Heart?

Marketing research

Keeping the Company and Product Names Separate

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