Executives every where are charged with the responsibility to generate profitable growth for organization. Meanwhile, building brand remain the channel through which company growth and profit can be achieved. But alas, success in building brand is very rare.
According to Harvard Business Review that there is a record of 90 percent product failure in the market, out of 30,000 new consumer products launched by companies each year. What a monumental loss ! After marketing professionals have spent massive amount of money to carry out research, designed product, make a creative advertisement etc.
Perhaps, we should assume that consumer behaviour is getting more complicated or we agree that the theories in practice for market segmentation and brand building are riddle with flawed assumption. However, Harvard Business Review stressed further that even P & G former CEO, A.G Lafley said that some of the fundamental paradigm of marketing are broken.
We need to re-invent the way we market to customer in order to create product that customer will consistently value. More often than not, many rising brands abruptly get threatened, slow and drop in demand due to lack of inventiveness and skills in the part of management.
Significantly, many executives do not realise that there is more to developing a functional brand than premising it on a product category defined market. For instance, Swiffer ( a cleaning product of Procter & Gamble ) was a star brand in the industry, which its research work was mainly based on the job of cleaning floor and not on demographic or psychographic study of people who mop.
Most of today great brands met the customer need satisfactorily and people also expressed their desire for it, which later emanated to brand equity.
Hypothetically, the stunning success of Sony Walkman was as a result of understanding and targeting people’s need by Sony founder, Akio Morita. He never did conventional market research according to HBR report, instead Morita and his associates spent much of their time watching what people were trying to get done in their lives, then asking themselves whether Sony electronic miniaturization technology could help them do these things better, easier and cheaper. Morita would have badly mis-judged the size of his market, had he simply analysed trends in the number of tape players being sold before he launched his Walkman.
Executive should also realize that a clear purpose brand is like two-sided compass. One side guides customer to the right product, while the other side guides company’s executives imagination and skills. Just as Peter Drucker rightly said that the ‘ marketability of a product does not depend on the excellence of that product alone but also the function of essential management skills’.
Arm & Hammer’s executives attribute their key to the extra-ordinary growth of his company to a set of functional product and communication strategy that company engaged to appeal and motivate people in building trust towards its products.
A star brand is not built easily but an executive who can bridge the gap of the broken models analysed above will be rewarded not only with successful brand but with profitably growing business as well

Azeez Abiona Writes From Lagos And Can Be Reached On: salesharvestfmcg@gmail.com,  234-7067595550