What is my customer's connection with my brand?

By asking this fundamental question regarding your brand you are a step closer to effectively differentiating your business offering and optimizing your marketing budget.

In his Harvard Business Review article, Ivey Business School marketing professor Niraj Dawar reveals that ultimately a customer’s connection with a company’s brand depends on:

• How a company through it's brand influences customer purchase criteria.
• How a company innovates to solve customer problems.

Regarding innovation, it is interesting to note that while technology can be a game changer in how a company solves customer problems, the ultimate benefit to customers of such innovation depends on the marketing clout of the company.

Winning through marketing: Challenging traditional strategy

By influencing how consumers perceive the relative importance of various purchase criteria and by introducing new favorable criteria, your business can overcome the relentless commoditization of upstream activities – such as production and logistics. As business people understand how to manufacture a product or generate a service by adopting best in class practices, the challenge is that every other business out there knows how to adopt such best in class practices also.

Therefore the key to differentiating your business and valuable brand is to pose a simple question: ‘ What else can my company do for our customers?’ rather than ‘what else can my company make?’

By addressing this question your business will invariable look outside its offices into the customer and the marketplace. Upon drafting a product or service that answers this question, your key to success will be to communicate your offering through effective marketing communication material, packaging and web tools such as social media to shape the way your customer relates to your brand.