Building a great Brand - By Anshul Agarwal

Introduction- Anshul Agarwal

Hello everyone. I am Anshul Agarwal and this is a picture clicked some time back, with me sitting on the Anchor at Navy Pier, Michigan Avenue, Chicago. Chicago is a windy city, and as you can see here the wind is in my face, my hair are swept away, my eyes are shut and I have to clutch on to anchor to hold me still.

Last day we introduced ourselves in class and recited an interesting thing about ourselves. I told how it took me long to learn swimming. Carrying forward that introduction, there’s one more interesting thing I want to tell about me. I am an expert at Yoga and was once a yoga instructor at a small health community in my hometown. I can teach yoga & asanas with proper breathing techniques in my native language, Hindi. I think trying in English shouldn’t be too hard.

A Branding Perspective

From my knowledge in this domain, I am putting a brief perspective on Branding here, throwing light on an important subject matter in this field.

There are many things which go into the making of a brand- a promise, a personality and a positive user experience. And a thorough Consumer Research is a crucial ingredient in this brand building recipe. While a good amount of consumer research can make your brand suit the taste of your target market, yet an insignificant amount of the research on the same front can make your brand bland. In other words, your consumers can make or break your brand. They can communicate you when the things are right and they can give you the feedback when the things go wrong. Hence, a significant amount of time should be spent in conducting an in-depth study of the consumer segment, in order to build a strong brand.

Let me cite the example of Facebook to illustrate this. As I noticed in the movie The Social Network, during the initial stage of his startup, the founder of the company gets an idea while roaming at his University campus. He sees that young people (who make his product’s target market), when befriending opposite sex, are very interested in knowing their relationship statuses. They are curious to know if their friends are committed, or engaged, or make potential available mates. This idea led the facebook team to add the ‘relationship status’ under the profile information. Then ever, Facebook has constantly excelled in its ethnographic studies and has led a consumer focused approach. It has almost transformed a real being identity to the virtual world. Remember the times when we used to visit relatives’ places, and they used to show us their marriage albums, or the Kodak-print photos their children have sent them from abroad, or long conversations about mutual experiences from a vacation or birth of a baby. What we see on facebook today- sharing of pics, status messages, comments- is a clear reflection of the past. Facebook, the social networking site, has clearly researched the why, who, what, how & when of social network routine. Today, it provides a fulsome Brand Experience to the consumers, which is reflected in the way consumers consume it.

In sum- Think, Design, Build and Evaluate your services with your Customers. With each step, you will gain great insights into your consumers’ behavior which will lead you to build great brands.