Industry Understanding - Competition - Reputation Effects

Reputation effects include brand awareness and perception. Customers often prefer to buy from companies with which they have had successful transaction in the past, or companies they know well via friends, family, or companies with effective branding effects.

Focus on serving new customers in new ways to make the reputation of the existing competitors irrelevant.

Marketing is everything from product design, development, advertising, promotion, distribution and pricing. The brand is what remains after the marketing has swept through the room. It is what sticks in your mind associated with a product, service, or organization.

Dimensions of brand equity:
1. Brand awareness: familarity with the brand
2. Perceieved quality: based on desired features
3. Brand associations: connects the customer to the brand
4. Brand loyalty: bond or tie to the brand

Ways to build brand equity:
1. Create and communicate your image
2. Build awarenness and familarity
3. Build associations: name, logo, design, packaging, colors, right price, placement and affilations.
4. Build loyalty: rewards, special pricing and special benefits.

This blog post is based on my learnings from the course on ‘entrepreneurship’ offered by Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, University of Maryland through Coursera (2014).