Tuesday 26 October 2010

The 'Bra' of Branding

A bra is an article of clothing that covers, supports and elevates the breasts.

Going by the definition, the 'bra' is an integral part of branding and metaphorically speaking does the same job of elevating the business as done by bra to the breasts. I'm definitely not going to include any images of Victoria's Secret for this post just to increase the traffic or flirt with my readers' hormones and stimulate the flow of natural juices. Even though I might have slightly done that by now, I'm sure you would have enjoyed fantasizing some voluptuous, busty bosoms. If you haven't done so, you can always use the 'qVik Search' on the top to treat yourself for some eye pleasing visuals.

Getting back to business, I honestly believe that broadminded women will be able to relate appropriately to this post. For convenience sake, whenever I use the term big breasts, you can relate them to the big businesses having a turnover in millions. Similarly small breasts can be associated with SMEs. Big is always not necessarily better. The super size option is not only unhealthy in McDs but also in real life. With big breasts come loads of added overheads and even though it might look great from outside, one really needs to talk to that person to understand their problems. Google offices and the salary might seem like an "opportunity which you want to grab with both hands", but you do not get to know about the 60+ hours of work that people are putting in every week so that you can type "How to pick up girls in a bar" and probably help you score. Just like a breast which looks at numerous aspects like shape(C,D), size(32,34,36), strap, color before its finds its suitor, every business needs a customized branding strategy to make it look better. While the core aspects of a business are taken care of by a different department, the department of brand management looks into numerous aspects like brand image, positioning, social media strategy, advertising and appeal created by the brand. Once all these factors are worked out properly, a customized branding strategy is adopted. If this goes wrong it can lead to a lot of adverse effects in the future like decreasing the rate of brand recognition and recall similar to a bad fitting bra leading to back aches and undesirable, unattractive outlooks with undesirable protrusions.

Some of the SMEs, at some point decide to become a player in a different market by increasing their size. Either through integrations or acquisitions or by increasing their capital, many firms take that big risk of going all out knowing that a failure will lead to a permanent dent to their image. Similarly, some of the women who are adipose challenged in their upper body and who are unhappy with this condition decide to take a vital step in order to entice a broader segment of the opposite sex. Some of the cosmetic surgeries might help them achieve the desired results but they forget the fact that big is not always better. This in turn leads to all the problems discusses previously. A considerable solution is using the push up or padded variants. The upside of this approach is that it projects the entity in an appealing manner and until one gets close to it, it is hard to actually estimate the value of the assets. Numerous firms have adopted this approach by projecting themselves as a player in the different league and have actually done well as a result of the right 'bra' used in branding.

This post was in a way dedicated to the problems faced by women which some of them find it tough to discuss even with their closest pals. Most importantly dedicated to the realization that the toughest problems have the simplest of solutions and one has to know where to look :P.

P.S - A lending ear is better that a staring eye.

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