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Dimensions of Brand Personality While Marketing Products and Services

Brand personality refers to human personality traits which are associated with a brand. While branding a product, especially if it is new, or is being launched in a new market, in depth understanding of the Dimensions of Brand Personality is of utmost importance to the product manager or the brand manager.

Consumers often describe brands (at least in their sub-conscious level of understanding) by using descriptors of personality traits. Marketers attempt to use this consumer behavior to create or reinforce these perceptions by their positioning strategies. Now successfully positioning a product’s ( or a services’ ) personality within a product category requires the application of multiple measurement models.

The dimensions of Brand Personality was first proposed by Aaker (1997) in his famous and highly cited work on the brand personality framework consisting of 5 dimensions of every brand that impacts branding, brand association and brand recollection. Again brand association appears to partially mediate the influence of the competence dimension of brand personality on brand attractiveness.

The 5 main dimensions of this framework are Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, Ruggedness. Consumers interpret sincere brands as being down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, and cheerful. Consumers perceive exciting brands as being daring, spirited, imaginative, and somewhat with a cutting edge. Consumers perceive Competence from Reliability, intelligence, and success symbols from a brand. A brand that is perceived to be sophisticated is viewed as being charming and with a higher snob value and thus fit for the upper classes. Similarly rugged brands are perceived to have characteristics of being outdoorsy and tough.

Now, since high branding equity tends to develop when consumers have numerous positive and strong associations related to the brand. Brand association, which is defined as “anything linked in memory to a brand” is one of the major components of brand equity. Brand association, which results in high greater brand awareness and greater brand recall has a positive correlation with brand equity because it can represent brand quality and brand commitment. These in turn creates the basic platform for the product (or service) to harness strength to pull consumers, i.e. implement a pull strategy by the marketing manager.

Now recognition of the product or the service uniquely by the potential target segment with a strong association can successfully managed only through careful long-term marketing strategy, which involves advertising, pricing, and product development. No wonder that in current times, millions and billions of dollars are being invested in advertising and other forms of marketing communications in order to create product (or service) awareness and product (or service) association, so as to be able to implement a pull strategy.

Today, with increased focus to creating a unique marketing mix, be it for the marketing mix of products or for the marketing of services, understanding this framework is of utmost importance to managers managing a product or a service or a category of the same, so as to be able to create a rich differentiation.

Do let me know, if you have any clarification regarding the understanding of this article.

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Your New Shopping Companion Launched

Do you think you are spending your lot of hard earned money on your necessities and at the end feel dissatisfied? The only reason is you find the same things somewhere at less price or better quality or even both. You would have got the best thing at best price if you had compared the prices and traits of the products you wanted to buy. But who has time to go places? Compare and again turn to the store where you think the deal will be the best? Who has that extra time? And so to give a shopping aid to buyers like us, the best price comparison sites are launched which allows users to search, compare and buy sitting at their home/office.

Just one mouse click and we get all products relevant to our search request listed along with the traits and price and the seller information. We can read the testimonials written about the vendors by other buyers who have already used the products. This helps to find a vendor who we feel is trustworthy. Once we choose our product after all browsing and comparison, it redirect us to the vendor. We can shop either online and if we have chosen a local store we can message/email the store and simply pay and collect our product.

Simply join the trend. Use the latest technology i.e., World Wide Web to aid you and make your shopping experience simpler. Log on to the site. Search and browse the best product list created just for you. Go through all product characteristics and prices. Compare according to your focus whether cost or some specific product quality. Choose a product and then finalize your buy. You will be redirect to the vendor and you are done with your reasonable and confident shopping. Have a never before satisfying shopping experience.

To make it clearer I will tell you one of my shopping experiences and I am sure you can relate it with your experiences. I wanted to buy a card reader. It was an urgent requirement for me at that time. I saw a discount tag at a mall and quickly bought it. A few days later a friend of mine was carrying a better quality card reader than mine and the worst thing was she bought it at much cheaper rate. I was so disappointed with my shopping decision. It would have been better if I had compared the qualities along with prices at different shops and then bought the reader. But always in such situation caused by wrong and hasty buying decisions we tend to find excuse for ourselves that, “I did not have time. So my deal was relevantly fine;” But out of the blue I learned about online price comparisons that could save a lot of my time and allow me to compare my dream products such that I can buy them at my dream rate. I used product price comparison site and it changed the whole idea of shopping. I can simply compare one product available at several different stores and that too sitting in an easy chair at home or while working and in fraction of time. My options increased, I got satisfying quality at reasonable rates. And I was so confident that I am buying the best thing at the best price. I, a customer like you guarantee that once you start shopping with price comparisons sites, you will not find a better shopping companion than this.

How an Unique Selling Proposition Helps You Sell Your Products

You know the importance of creating a brand in order to make your product more widely recognized. Yet the majority of internet businesses don’t really do much to distinguish themselves from the competition. If you want to beat the competition at its own game, you need to create an unique selling point for your product. If you want your potential customers to believe your product is one that’s worth buying, this is the way to do it. Once you have an USP, you won’t even have to do much marketing for your product, as people will start to spread the word about it naturally.

Help Them Save Money: Figuring out how to save money for others with your product will help you figure out your USP. This doesn’t just work in every niche; it works for every product too! As long as you can tell your customers how your product will help them save more money than those of your competitors, you have a winning USP. Do not try to make a product that is cheap, though…you need a real balance. Don’t be a Copy Cat: A large percentage of internet businesses release products that are hard to distinguish from many others that are being sold. How do they claim theirs is any different? They’d have to point out some tiny advantage that their product has allegedly has over the competition’s. You can’t have an USP in this manner, as when you offer something that’s similar to what’s already out there, you’re obviously not being unique. It’s a mistake to assume that you can do things like everybody else and fool your customers into thinking you’ve created something original. Instead focus and put your hard work into giving a real solution to your target market, without really trying to be a “me-too” product that lacks individuality.

Your Customer Service Must be Great – One type of USP that’s very powerful is giving customers top notch customer service. There are many businesses in different niches that have marked a place for themselves by simply being there for their customers. If you can simply focus on serving your customers, answering their queries on time and help them in the best possible way, you’ll automatically be known in your market as a business that cares -which means it will make you stand out, attracting new customers to your business simply through word of mouth. That’s why you should never skimp on offering the best customer service you can.

The USP of a product, as we’ve seen, is of the utmost importance and something that should be a priority for any business. Many online businesses fail, not because their product is no good, but because they haven’t been able to show that they have something original to offer. The more you focus on differentiating yourself from the competition, the better value you will be able to give to your target audience and help them get the solution they’re looking for. Simply creating a product and launching it in the market is not the key to success, but the real key is letting your target audience know why your product is really worth buying.