Field Marketing: the Power of Branding

Field Marketing is the art of raising sales for a product or service and one of its most powerful tools is branding. Somebody who can successfully develop brand image will never be out of work in field marketing, it can be the cornerstone not only of one marketing campaign but for the whole life span of a company.

The brand is the specific name, design or logo that identifies a specific product. For example, two instantly recognisable brands are the 'golden arches' of McDonalds and the typeface and colour scheme of Coca Cola.

It can be easy to forget the power of a brand, more exciting pursuits like designing advertising campaigns and high powered executive sales are some of the swinging arms of field marketing, however all these aspects to a campaign will be worthless without the right branding.

As the brand is literally how a customer sees the product, it should dominate the product itself as well as any marketing material. This is the main way customers identify between the physical product and the marketing campaign. If a brand is weak, then no matter how powerful, or beautiful or hilarious an advertising campaign might be, no consumer will relate it to the product.

So the power of branding is subtle but essential. The elements of a brand include the name, but also typeface, colouring and any logo design. The brand can be used in many ways, for example different branches of one organisation can manipulate the brand to indicate that particular service whilst remaining associated with the main brand.

One of the most famous and possibly remarkably successful branding was the red and white colour scheme of Coca Cola. By the 1930s Coca Cola settled on a distinct red and white colour scheme for their drinks, this they then applied to their advertising campaign depicting Santa Claus dressed in their distinctive colour scheme. This was so remarkably successful in associating Santa with the red and white of Coca Cola that it is still used today. Coca Cola still run Santa Claus adverts and Santa Claus himself is now largely recognised and depicted in the colours of Coca Cola. The fiscal value of that lies in the fact that now whenever an image of Santa or Christmas comes along, a little association pops in the backs of customer's minds reminding them of Coca Cola. Equally when they see a red and white bottle of Coca Cola they are reminded of that sort of childhood happiness that stems from Santa Claus and associate the product with that feeling of happiness.

Apple have also demonstrated effective brand associations between different products within their own company. Apple sell a broad range of electronic products that they want customers to think of separately, but still associate with the overall Apple brand. To this extent they brand each new product with the prefix of a lower case "i". iPhone, iMac, iPad, they all have their own distinct name whilst still associating with the main brand.

So branding is extremely valuable; it can be the key to the success of an entire company.