Have you recently analized brand behind your products? If you have a brand for your product line, have you ever thought about brand refresh and why its important to keep brand currant? For many companies, products take on a life of their own. They can often develop into entities that are separate from the parent company, sort of sub-brands. That’s because products can be targeted to an audience that the parent company isn’t known to target. In such a case, it becomes very important to manage the brand of the products to its maximum.
To provide a good case for the brand refresh, here’s a hypothetical case study to think about. Let’s imagine that there is a company that sells competitively priced hard drive for computers. They’ve had success for a long time by branding the products as reliable hard drives that are affordable. Naturally, competition grows over the years and there are other companies offering hard drives for affordable prices, with a strong brand proposition and one that solves challenges of todays market. Lets also add that this brand is exceptional in storytelling and native content marketing. At this point, the advantage of having a brand that’s well known for reliable hard drives at competitive prices starts to disappear.
The company starts to see a decline in sales month after month and decides that there needs to be some kind of change. One of the things that they recognize is that many customers that buy hard drives complain about hard drive failure rates and the lifetime of the hard drives they purchase. These are important concerns because these customer save important files in these hard drives for backup storage. It can go viral spreading across a lot of social media and effecting company’s reputation.
The distinct thing that the company recognizes is that the life of their hard drives are longer than those of their competitors and they also have a significantly lower failure rate than the industry average. The company decides that it’s time to capitalize on this asset and undergoes a brand refresh for their hard drive product line. They come up with a new niche line for their hard drive product line, make a few improvements to their product, and target consumers that are specifically in those niche markets.
As a result of creating a new brand for their product line, they are able to capture a new market momentum by appealing to consumers that are looking to pay more for reliability and task specific hardware. In addition, they also gain the attention of consumers who have never considered their brand as a option. The brand decides to focus on unaware consumers and tells the stories about data behind hard drive failure and lifespan. They go on to explain the reliability of their products compared to others. They talk about real life experiences and most importantly encourage customer interactions and story sharing across digital landscape/
Because of the rebranding efforts, the company has built a strong reputation on the web. They cover all their bases by introducing refreshed and refocused brand and design on their mobile website, print ads, and social media accounts. They start to capture a larger portion of the hard drive market with each passing month and are known as the go-to brand for consumers that are looking to use hard drives to store and backup important data.
Through this story, can you see how beneficial it would be to undergo a product brand refresh for your own line of products? How can your products be rebranded to target a different audience or adjust to the changes in the industry or marketplace? What aspects of your products can you focus on to show that there is a distinct advantage over the products of your competitors? If the sales of your product line has been decreasing over some time and it’s not due to any problems with marketing, then it’s time that you start thinking about how you can rebrand it.