Samsung is one of the fastest growing companies today; its value having risen by about 30% in a short span of time. How do you think this happened? They have been targeting new customers in the high-profile sector with their flat panel TV monitors that can be hung on walls like paintings and by aggressively promoting their new “Digitall Experience”. Samsung is a perfect example of strong corporate branding.

Is there a secret formula for branding? Is internet branding any different from offline branding? No, not really.

Let’s take a look at a brick and mortar company that reinforced its corporate Internet brand image by using the net. IKEA, the global furniture brand that provides inexpensive, well-designed furniture to the masses used internet branding to add value added service to its customers.

Apart from offering a multilingual, colorful and attractive website and product catalog, they also offer a few interesting interactive features. Among them are a kitchen-planning tool that permits users to drag and drop virtual kitchen pieces into a layout, view objects in 3-D, try out different colors and layouts and then obtain a price quote, a bulletin board, a link to their TV commercials and so on, thus further bringing out their credo of “self-service”, which is the essence of the IKEA brand.

This is a fine example of corporate internet brand strategy and marketing.

Creating a corporate internet brand and then developing it is both a creative and strategic exercise that should be undertaken only when the complete value of the brand to your business is understood.

What is a brand?
A brand is a part of an intangible asset and is the personification of the organization, its products and services. People relate to brands as they relate to people. A “brand is a person” in the same way as a “person is a brand” too. Brands are primary sources of relationships with customers, promises to customers and customer loyalty. Branding is all about focus – focusing on a specific target audience, a specific value that you want your brand to deliver and the specific tone that it will adopt when talking to this target audience. The same is true of Internet branding.

Why brand?
Cause-related branding: Brand equity is the relationship level or the trust level that it generates with your customer. It’s what will determine how loyal your customer is. It’s about customer service, quality services or products and the resulting customer devotion to the brand. So, a measure of brand equity is the loyalty of existing customers and the attraction of new customers. The image and value that a brand conveys pulls in the new customers while loyalty and value retain the old customers.

Corporate brand building and maintaining strategies
What makes the big difference between an average corporate brand and a great one? One that inspires employees to enthusiastically and actively engage in delivering the promise of the brand in everything they do. This is what makes an average brand a living brand. The entire organization, starting from the top management to the security guards should align themselves to the culture of the brand. A brand belongs to all the employees of the company and they need to nurture it.

Here are a few steps that are necessary to building and creating a strong brand:

Start with a solid understanding of the customer
Define the target customer.
Deliver a differentiated, purchase-motivating benefit to the customer and see how your organization is uniquely suited to delivering this promise.
The customer need that your brand is addressing should be something that your competitors are not currently speaking to.
Use market research, customer feedback, ideation and market need anticipation to build your brand.
Your brand and its products or services must exceed customer expectations (Starbuck’s Coffee made coffee drinking into an indulgence). Brands thrive because they exceed customer expectations.
Some of the key factors that drive customer brand insistence are awareness, relevant differentiation and an emotional connection.

Awareness
Customers need to be aware that there are different products in the category that you sell. They must then be aware of your brand in particular.

Relevant differentiation
What consumer-relevant, consumer-compelling benefits does your brand offer? This is what will measure the profitability of your brand tomorrow. We are not talking about price here, instead qualities like emotional, experiential and self-expressive benefits, customer service benefits and those qualities that fit into the “total brand experience”.

Emotional connection: customer-centric
This is where you can gain customer loyalty. When your brand talks in a unique manner to your customer, makes them trust it and interacts with them in a manner that never disappoints them.

Constant product and service innovation
Reinvent your branding strategy constantly. Study your customer’s unsatisfied needs and address those emerging needs. Exploit distribution channels, apply new technologies and target new customer groups. Internet branding is a fast and easy method of achieving success.

Create a sense of community
Through directories, bulletin boards and chat rooms, surveys, guest books, forums, extranets, and portals.Finally, study customer behavior on your corporate website.

Internal brand building
The corporate brand becomes the focal point around which an organization defines how it will deliver profits to customers. This is delivered to the customer through the services, products and customer communication. This has tremendous organizational implications – from alignment with organizational vision and mission to recruitment, resource allocation and strategic planning.

Let your customers help you build the brand
This reinforces the fact that the marketplace is not where some people gain and others lose. A mutually beneficial relationship with companies that may traditionally be considered competitors enforces the fact that organizations can become stronger at forging value-added relationships.

Although there are opinions that talk about the death of the brand, nothing could be further from the truth. The sequences of economic slowdowns that we’ve been through have shown that those with a strong brand identity are the winners today. But looking at a brand from more than the traditional perspective is the key to creating a winning and coherent brand experience. You can’t escape your brand. Either it defines your customer experience or it gets defined without you. It’s how your customer experiences what you do.