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Branding Strategy: The Company plans to invest and efficiently manage its branding strategy to achieve its growth objectives. The core of the company’s success lies in implementing a relevant and coherent branding strategy. Defining each and every element of the branding strategy will enable management, customers and employees to understand what the brand vision is and what the company aims to achieve.
This is really important if the company has to fight and grow in a competitive market place. Kotler, (2009), believes that brands are great assets that need to be properly managed and developed over time. A comprehensive brand strategy will help in many ways – it helps create consumer awareness and loyalty, it helps the company build new extensions and launch new products, it helps the company to fight competition and get a premium price for the product.
Consumers perceive brands as a reflection of their own self and identity. Therefore it is important to understand consumers, their behavior, lifestyles, usage, and then plan the right branding strategy. The brand needs to be relevant and engaging to the core consumers, in order for it to survive and win in the market place. Our branding strategy will involve many elements – its Core purpose, history, positioning, brand architecture, brand identity and assets (Blackbaud, n.d.).
The Core purpose of the brand iTravelLite is ‘style and convenience for the frequent traveler’. The company aims to attract many busy executives and frequent travelers with the help of this strong value proposition. This segment of travelers has historically been neglected, although their propensity to pay more for quality goods and services is high. The company believes that there is a huge need gap that has not been addressed until now.
Our history is being created as we launch and implement our plan. Our brand history is our big idea for travelers. The next aspect of branding strategy is Market Positioning. Positioning our brand in the right slot will help us capture the consumer’s mind and gain rapid awareness and acceptance of our product.
Positioning is achieved by measuring 3 factors – attributes, benefits and emotional appeals. Our Benefit statement for consumers also defines what the product and brand has to offer. We hope to be perceived as a high convenience and value brand with style and exclusivity as the core benefits.
In terms of emotional appeal, we will position iTravelLite as a brand that ‘reminds you of home’ and family. It lets you travel well and wisely, giving you a feeling of a ‘home away from home’. The advertising and promotional strategy will be developed with these messages and will aim to create a deep emotional connect with consumers.
Our Brand Architecture will be consistent with the aims and vision of the company. The company will begin by launching iTravelLite followed by many other travel linked convenience-based product lines.
Since brand architecture defines the organizational structure and the relationship of its various brands, we will follow product-centric brand architecture (Sanchez and Rajgopal, 2004). There are many ways to develop brand architecture.
In some cases, it is defined in terms of brand profitability but in more modern practices, it is based on the purchasing power of the consumer. In terms of Brand identity the core purpose is to create a unique type of brand association with our customers.
It defines a promise to our customers, with a core promise and extended promise (Ghodeswar, 2008). The core promise is the main essence of the brand and is defined by product attributes, consumer profile and product quality/performance.
An extended identity is defined by other elements like name, color, logo, personality, relationship, relevancy to customers and must depict the objectives of the organization over time (Aaker and Joachimsthaler, 2000).
Brand Assets: Our core brand assets will be protected by using a trademark and legal
provisions in the countries we will operate. The brand assets and guideline document will be produced for distribution to our partners and other agencies to help protect the brand identity and its usage.
In the future, the brand will be extended to include a range of other products to help busy travelers. The company would aim to look at the core brand idea of convenience and add products like a laptop bag and a suitcase.
Brand Name: The brand name chosen is iTravelLite. A Simple Touch of Home. The name is closely linked to travel and creates a feeling of ‘lite convenience’ and home away from home.
It has very strong appeal is meant to create quick awareness and resonance among our core audience. The idea was to create a name which is easy on recall value and has the element of travel within it.
Logo: The logo will be a color rendition of iTravelLite - with two tone colors to create freshness and attractive brand identity in the category. It will also feature a ‘swoosh and a plane’ to denote air travel and appeal to frequent flyers.
A Simple Touch of Home Astoh
Slogan: The brand will need to connote friendliness and a feeling of being a ‘helpful assistant’ for busy travelers. It will also convey the longing for home and all its goodness. Our slogan to support the branding strategy will be ‘A Simple Touch of Home’.
Pricing Strategy: We will adopt the Demand side pricing strategy, based on
consumer behavior and the value that they perceive in our product. Since the market is very niche we will use a Niche pricing strategy.
The idea is to offer a quality, differentiated product to very discerning consumers at a high price. Since the production cost will be high, we will command premium pricing in the market (Berends, 2004).
We have estimated the following in terms of production costs:
Cost of Labor per unit: $1.5
Cost of Raw Material per unit: $3
Cost of Contingency per unit: $1
Cost of Overheads per unit: $1.5
Total production cost per unit is $6.
We aim to produce the kit and sell it at a price of $10.
Distribution Strategy:
We will use a multi-modal distribution strategy, targeting our core consumers. The plan will involve a sample kit to hotel customers and a demonstration to hotel managers with the aim of direct selling.
We will also target key duty free outlets at airports and malls closer to airports. Our distribution strategy will be direct model since we are operating in a niche market and the margins for distribution will affect profitability.
Partners will be encouraged to place orders directly via a 1-800-GRT-BAGS or online through an ordering system. We will also target certain specialty travel stores selling bags, travel shoes, skis, golf equipment and so on. Customers can also place an online order on our website www.iTravelLite.com/.
Details of the launch plan with 5 sales team members are given below. We will assign a total of 10 hotels to the 5 team members in the first month of operations. In this way we will cover at least 10 hotels with 4 visits each to convert hotel customers.
Competition: Primary competition to our brand is from mid to high premium stores and duty free shops which stock luggage and associated goods (Inter Competition); and
mass market unbranded travel kit products (Intra Competition).
Differentiation: In comparison to other store brands and cheap imports, we analyzed competitive perceptual maps and have come to the conclusion that iTravelLite will capture the High Value and High Price quadrant.
The product attributes are well differentiated as compared to competition, since we will offer many different types of grooming materials in the travel kit which is unique in nature and not readily available.
Industry leadership: The company aims to launch the product in one city in the U.S. and expand to other cities in future. Considering the target customers and their behavioral characteristics, we will test market the strategy in Basking Ridge.
This test will help us to understand the success or failure of our launch plan and take corrective actions in future. The follow up launches will be in major cities which have large air passenger traffic.
We will specifically target cities from where there are large number of corporate travelers – New York, Chicago, LA, SFO, Atlanta, Boston, Washington D.C. Our expansion plans will include Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.
As far as the niche segment is concerned, the company aims to be a leader in the ‘exclusive travel kit’ segment. Considering the niche play, we will remain followers in the overall industry context but will operate on a lower volume, higher margin strategy.
Social Media: The launch plan will have local Media Press Release which will be posted online through PRNewswire and other such sites. This will be a joint press release and a press briefing with select members of the Basking Ridge press corps and some national media. This will include Print and TV journalists and travel experts.
We will specifically target 2 Social Media channels – LinkedIn and Twitter to gain virality and quick awareness. Our corporate customers are highly engaged on LI and Twitter. We will launch with actual posts and stories from hotel customers, to whom we have sampled our kit. The stories will therefore be real and believable.
This will help us build relationships and strong engagement metrics with the social media campaigns. The metrics for the social media and promotions will be monitored and measured on a weekly basis.
Measurement will include qualitative and quantitative results. In qualitative methods, we will measure ‘sentiment’ while quantitative results will consist of data like number of members, Likes, Shares, Re-Tweets, ROI and so on (Turner, 2012).
Integrated Communications: Our overall advertising and messaging strategy will coalesce to form one unified message and brand image. It will have exclusivity and class. The message will be about corporate travelers, their stories and their longing for home.
The advertising and messages will be real, as far as possible. It will feature well-known CEOs and some Celebrities with unique travel factoids and anecdotes. The creative treatment will be sophisticated and charming.
It will involve the family of the main characters too. The creative execution will be based on tongue in cheek humor and corporate anecdotes. We will include many brand vehicles in our plan to build a comprehensive campaign with wide reach at lower costs.
We will begin with PR releases, online ads, Airport posters, Search ads, catalogs and in-flight magazines. All the creative elements will feature the same creative strategy, tone of voice and treatment to help create a consistent brand image and appeal.
Understanding the behavior of consumers is critical, so we will use advertising research techniques in all our markets to assess the success of the campaign and to tweak it to attain better results in the next wave of the campaign.
References
Aaker, D.A. and Joachimsthaler, E. (2000), Brand Leadership, The Free Press, New York,
NY, pp. 13, 27, 40, 48.
Berends, W. R. (2004). $Price & Profit%: The Essential Guide to Product & Service Pricing
and Profit Forecasting. Berends and Associates. Oakville: Ontario.
Blackbaud (n.d.). Defining your Brand: Strategy. GuideCreative.com.
Retrieved from: https://www.blackbaud.com/files/presentations/DefiningYourBrand_Strategy.pdf
Ghodeswar, B. M. (2008). Building brand identity in competitive markets: a conceptual
model. Journal of Product & Brand Management 17/1 (2008) 4 – 12q. Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 1061-0421], [DOI 10.1108/10610420810856468]
Kotler, P. (2009). Marketing Management. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009.
ISBN 0273718568, 9780273718567
Sanchez, R and Rajagopal. (2004). Conceptual analysis of brand architecture and
relationships within product categories. HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1479-1803 BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 11, NO. 3, 233–247.
Turner, J. (2012). How to Use Social Media Monitoring Tools. Pearson Education. Upper
Saddle River: NJ.
