Brand image

American Marketing Association (AMA) defined a brand as "a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors". Brand image is the perception of the brand held by the market – what is thought and felt about the brand real and imagined.

The product brand may be linked to the corporate brand as it is for many companies such as Coca-Cola, Virgin, IBM, Cadbury, MacDonald, Microsoft, and Marks and Spencer.

Brand image plays an important role in the development of a brand because the brand image associated with the reputation and credibility of the brand which later become the ‘guideline’ for the consumer audience to try and use a product or service then creating a particular experience that will determine whether the consumer will be into brand loyalist, or simply an opportunist.

European countries such as Italy, Spain, and France dictate the fashion trends of the European footwear market thus creating specific shoe brand image for consumers. It is the key of how consumers maketheir choices after gathering information about the particular brand and the alternatives. The main buyers in the European footwear market are the teens, young people and young professionals/graduates both men and women.
Brand image

How to define audience

How to define audience
Defining audience is an extremely important marketing communications task.

Unless the right audience is identified and reached, marketing communications cannot be effective.

Research and analysis is used to identify and develop an understating of audience. Messages and media are then chosen to reach selected targets effectively and efficiently.

The most obvious target audiences are customers, but there should not be thought of as the only targets.

Consumers are another group. Whereas customers are buyers, consumers are users and as such influence the decision to buy.

Sometimes they may be the same people, but often they are not. In industrial purchases this is typically the case.

In family situations, the other may make many household purchases, but do so for other members of the family.

In situations where trade intermediaries are used (e.g. wholesalers and retailers), both trades customers and the end customers/consumers will need to be targeted.

Promotional strategies are known as push (promoting to the trade) and pull (promoting to end buyers and users) strategies.
How to define audience

Value, Cost and Satisfaction

Value, Cost and Satisfaction
How do consumers choose among the many products that might satisfy a given need? Suppose one person needs a travel five kilometers to work each day. A number of products could satisfy this need: roller blades, a bicycle, a motorcycle, an automobile, a taxicab and a bus. These alternate constitute his product choice set. Assume that he would like to satisfy several additional needs in traveling to work, namely speed, safety, ease and economy. We can call these his need set. Now each product has a different capacity to satisfy his various needs. Thus a bicycle will be slower, less safe, and more effortful than an automobile, but it will be more economical. Somehow he has to decide which product will deliver the most satisfaction.

The guiding concepts here are value and satisfaction. Value is the consumer’s estimate of the parodist’s overall capacity to satisfy his needs. Suppose he is primarily interested in the speed and ease of getting to work. If he were offered any of these products at no cost we would predict that he would choose the automobile. However, since each product involved a cost, he will no necessarily choose the car, which cost substantially more than a bicycle. He will have to give up of other things to obtain the car. Therefore, he will consider the products value and price before making a choice. He will choose the product that will produce the most value per dollar. He will form an estimate of the capacity of each product to satisfy his set of needs. He might rank the products from the most need-satisfying to the least.
Value, Cost and Satisfaction