How to build a premium brand?
For a premium brand everything is easy.
Business partners are eager to cooperate, customers buy your products at high prices and feel happy about it and competition is not an issue.
So the question is, how to become a premium brand? Is it about great marketing or to have the best products in the market? Can every business become a premium brand?
A good product is not enough for a premium brand
Let’s start with products or services.
It is simply impossible to create a strong brand on weak products. A strong brand evolves always from exceptional products. On the other hand, a good product is not guarantee for success. Thousands of companies have become bankrupt, although they had exceptional products. And by experience, a premium brand does not mean necessarily to have the best product in the market.
Value vs Desire
Customers and companies very often seem to follow a “good value for money” logic. But what does this mean? In the end, good value for money can be translated, products to be relatively cheap and a good catch.
A premium brand never will use the good value for money concept. Would you ever consider a Louis Vuitton bag to be good value for money?
The key in premium branding is not to be perceived as good value, but to create DESIRE.
Desire is a feeling, which has to be beat logic. Customers know very well that premium products are overpriced, but they feel great buying them. Premium products are not about characteristics and specifications, but about a story. A story which is able to create the right pictures in the head of the customers and to stimulate strong emotions.
How appealing is your story?
When companies are trying to build a premium brand the use to make the mistake of, either to focus on the product characteristics or on advertising. They are missing the story to tell.
Customers buy premium products only for the story! There is no exception in that. And there is no product or industry, where a strong story is not generating added-value.
Talking about premium brands people use to think of consumer products, but this is not true. You will find premium brands in medical services, leisure and entertainment, architecture and construction, even in industrial goods!
The thing about the story is that it has to be appealing and consistent. And the story has to be communicated in the right way and in the right place. And there is one more important thing: the story must be true! If you try to make up your story, customers sooner or later will find out.
Premium environment for premium brands
The environment is everything. Is is about where you advertise, where you sell your products, where you meet customers and business partners.
It is surprising how often companies are eager to sell their products to wholesalers and distributors , without to examine the points of sales. Wrong placement of your products can damage your brand in no time! And once this happened it is almost impossible to achieve a relaunch. Of course the placement has to be in correlation with the products and the promotion. To get this triangle into a good balance is a difficult act.
The storyteller
The crux is, most of the entrepreneurs are not good storytellers. They can talk for hours about their products and services, but no story there. No desire comes up. This is the explanation for why many companies with good products fail to become premium or even fail at all. To become premium you need to work on your story and then to communicate the story in the right way.
Communicate, communicate, communicate
If nobody knows about you, the good story is worthless. A premium brand generates high profit margins, but at the same time it needs to invest in premium, intensive communication.
All companies know exactly what money they have spent for their production equipment. If you ask them about the marketing budget, many of them have no clear answer. They consider production equipment as investment while marketing costs as expenses. This is not the right mindset to build a strong brand.
Premium branding requires exceptional products, a good story and most important, the company needs to be ready to invest sufficiently in marketing, generating awareness and communicating the story. This triangle needs to be in an optimal balance and to be operated persistently. To become a premium brand is never a one-night success. As in all aspects of business, you first have to be absolutely committed and to invest before you can harvest results.
