By Robert W. Bradford, President & CEO
Strategic Planning Expert
Robert W. Bradford
This post is part of a series taken from Understanding the Competitive Value of your Brand. In Part One, we introduced the series and discussed What makes a brand valuable? In Part Two, we will discuss Why branding is important in the global marketplace.
Why branding is important in the global marketplace
In an increasingly global market, branding can serve two distinct functions that may be useful to you. First, a “local” brand gives you an entrenched customer base that is more difficult (and expensive) to displace. Second, a “global” brand can give you a foot in the door when seeking to enter new geographic areas. Be forewarned: this is expensive. But the “global” brand can be a useful offensive tool and defensive tool when competing with foreign companies.
Branding success is built upon three critical factors.
- Understanding the key values in the mind of your customer
- Knowing how to put the customer’s values into your product or service
- Effectively associating your brand with those values
Two of these factors, understanding your customer and associating your brand with values, are very much defined by culture. Thus, a foreign competitor will find it much more difficult to see what your customer’s key values are. It will be difficult for him to convince customers that his product or service embodies those values. This is not saying that a foreign competitor cannot do this – just that it’s a lot more expensive and difficult.
In the next post of this series, we will discuss How to evaluate your brand.
To learn ways to take your strategic planning to the next level please listen to our webinar: Why my strategic planning isn’t working.
Robert Bradford is President/CEO of the Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. He can be reached at rbradford@cssp.com.
© Copyright 2017 by Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — Reprint permission granted with full attribution