IMAGINE it is a terribly busy day, you are in Singapore, you have not slept well last night, and you have a bad headache. What would you reach for to put you out of this misery? Chances are, you’ll say “Panadol”.

“Branding is not about getting your prospects to choose you over your competition; it’s about getting your prospects to see you as the only solution to their problem,” says branding expert Rob Frankel. Your product has to be the solution to your niche customers. That means even if you are a car mechanic in a small town, you can be the “Panadol” for car owners living and working in the area, if you are good enough, and if you can market your brand well enough.

For decades, branding has been the domain of large corporations because of their relative ease to get on television and other media to blare out their brands. With limited media choices, consumers simply sit through all these advertising messages. Consumers can only recall the brand that has been advertised long and frequently enough, and that is what they’ll buy.
Not any more. We now have cable and satellite television, and more importantly, and the Internet to distract our attention. To create a strong brand in the Information Age, you need to know what are the components that make up a brand.

A good brand has three characteristics: visibility, positioning, and functionality. Without one of these, the brand will not work.

Visibility refers to the exposure rate the brand has on your target customers. Before the invention of cable, satellite, and the Internet, visibility can be easily achieved through television and print media advertisements. With more choices of media, visibility has somehow been eroded.

Brand visibility is a reason why some dot.coms failed to take off. If you are selling a consumer’s product, you can still place your products in a supermarket, a petrol kiosk or at bus stands. You can still create substantial visibility. In the online world, it’s either you log on, or log off.

To create visibility, many dot.coms turned to heavy advertising, which in turn burned up much of their capital until they went belly up eventually.

To complement the lack of visibility online, you can enhance your brand positioning. Positioning is the battle for the mind, according to marketing gurus, Al Ries and Jack Trout. It is a reflection of your products’ strengths and weaknesses in the customers’ minds. It is about how people perceive you to be, what you can do, and how you do it.