Brand is a very powerful in business. There are three basic branding strategies:

1. Unique brand
2. Corporate brand
3. Range brand

Unique branding is used by a company like Proctor & Gamble. All its many different household products use have a unique identity. P&G owns popular brands such as: Ariel, Braun, Crest, Duracell, Fairy, Gillette, Lenor, Oral-B, Pampers, Pringles, Head & Shoulders, Olay and Wella.

A unique branding strategy allows a company to dominate a product area by building a successful brand that stands for just one thing. Such a brand can often become synonymous with the product: Kleenex, for example. Also, if a brand is unsuccessful, its failure does not affect the other brands the company owns. Moreover, the company can even compete against itself by launching different brands in the same product category. No matter which product the consumer buys, the parent company is successful. The disadvantage is that each brand must be marketed separately. It takes a significant investment in time, money and effort to establish a new brand.

Corporate brand strategy means using a single brand for all products. Apple uses this strategy. New products share the awareness of the established brand identity. Time to launch a new product is greatly reduced. Customers already know and trust the existing brand. However, as a corporation extends its product lines into many different markets, it can become difficult to maintain consistent quality for all products and the whole brand suffers as a result. One failed product can bring the entire company’s image down. Also, when the company is not perceived as a dedicated provider of a single category of product, people may begin to doubt the corporation’s devotion to each of its product lines. The result: brand loyalty is reduced.

Range branding is a mixture of the two. For example, Toyota created the Lexus brand in order to establish a new brand for its luxury cars. The Toyota brand already had too much of an established market identity in order to compete in the high-priced market segment.

Atma Yoga is following the unique branding strategy (or possibly range, it’s too early to tell). One might consider call it Krishna Yoga, or even ISKCON Yoga, but an unsuccessfully executed corporate brand strategy prevents that from being a good idea. It will take considerable time and effort to establish brand loyalty and awareness, but the potential payoff is also quite high.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 4:01 pmand is filed under apple, management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.