The Brand Equity Diamond – Make Your Brand Shine Brighter
Brand Equity Diamond is a tool frequently used by brand managers in the FMCG and white goods industry to understand and enhance the value of their brand. Before we delve into this diamond, let’s ensure we’re all on the same page regarding the understanding of brand equity. Brand equity is the reputation or value that a brand gains from people simply knowing its name. Brand equity has three basic components:
- The perception of the prescriber about your brand.
- This perception can have negative or positive effects.
- The resulting value which emerges from the above two.
In other words, it is the reputation which a brand earns. This reputation comes from how prescribers view your brand, whether they think positively or negatively about it. This reputation in turn affects the profitability of the brand. In the pharma world, companies can compete based on how strong their brand reputations are.
In other words, brand equity is reputation. It reflects the degree of awareness and esteem a brand holds among its prescriber and even non-prescribers.
Imagine two brands of pain relievers. One brand Crocin is a household name, trusted by millions for generations. The other brand let’s call it Vivacin, which is a generic version of Crocin.
The brand with the stronger reputation (brand equity) – Crocin – will likely be the one customers choose, even if Vivacin works just as well. Brand equity can be built through things like advertising, positive customer experiences, and a history of quality products.
Companies compete fiercely to build strong brand equity, because it can lead to higher prescription generation and profits.
That’s the reason why the brand equity dsiamond is crucial pn brand building. A brand equity diamond isn’t actually a type of diamond, but a strategic marketing tool used to visualize and develop a strong brand.
Let me back this with an analogy. Imagine you are holding the Kohinoor Diamond in your hands. The sparkle and cut (identity) of the Kohinoor Diamond make it visually appealing, but its value also comes from its hardness and brilliance (benefits).
The brand equity diamond provides a comprehensive framework for analyzing brands. It incorporates both the functional benefits a brand offers and the emotional identity it projects. Developing both elements is crucial for establishing a strong brand presence in the marketplace.
A brand equity diamond helps you develop both those aspects of your brand for a strong market presence.
A brand equity diamond is a strategic framework you can use to analyze and understand the key components of a brand’s equity, or its value and strength in the marketplace. The diamond model typically consists of four interconnected components:
1. Brand Awareness: This refers to how well-known your brand is among your prescribers. It includes both brand recognition (the ability to identify the brand when presented with its name or logo) and brand recall (the ability to remember the brand when prompted with a product category or need).
You remember Fevicol because of its logo of two elephants.
2. Brand Association: This component examines the qualities, characteristics, and associations that your prescribers connect with the brand. These can include attributes like quality, reliability, innovation, and emotional connections. Strong brand associations create differentiation and preference in consumers’ minds.
The brand association with Raymonds Suiting – Premier suiting for very special occasions.
3. Brand Loyalty: Brand loyalty measures the degree to which consumers repeatedly purchase or choose a particular brand over others. It encompasses both behavioral loyalty (actual purchase behavior) and attitudinal loyalty (positive feelings and intentions towards the brand).
My wife is loyal to Tanishq because it gives her a positive and an aristocrat feeling when she wears a Tanishq necklace.
4. Perceived Brand Quality: This component reflects consumers’ perceptions of the overall quality of the brand’s products or services. It encompasses not only the functional aspects but also the experiential and emotional dimensions of quality.
For the past 34 years I have been a fan Maruti-Suzuki just because of their after-sales services.
The brand equity diamond is useful in building a differentiated brand for four reasons:
- Strategic Focus: It provides you a structured approach to assess and prioritize areas for your brand development and improvement. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each component, your brand can focus their efforts on areas where it has the most potential for differentiation and growth.
- Competitive Positioning: The brand equity diamond model helps you identify the unique selling propositions and points of differentiation relative to your competitors. By strengthening brand associations and perceived quality, your brand can carve out a distinct position in the market that resonates with target your prescribers.
- Long-Term Value Creation: Building brand equity is essential for long-term success and sustainability. A strong brand with high equity enjoys numerous benefits, including price premium, customer loyalty, and resilience to competitive threats. The brand equity diamond helps brands cultivate these valuable assets over time.
- Consumer Insights: Through research and analysis of each component, brands can gain deeper insights into consumers’ perceptions, preferences, and behaviors. This understanding enables brands to tailor their marketing strategies, messaging, and product offerings to better meet consumer needs and desires.
In essence, the brand equity diamond serves as a powerful tool for building and strengthening your brand’s competitive advantage in the marketplace, ultimately driving growth, loyalty, and profitability.
The ultimate goal of a brand manager goal is to build the intangible dimensions on the brand, since these are the things you can own over time.
The Framework of the Brand Equity Diamond
Its framework is shaped like a diamond, with two sides representing different aspects of your brand:
- The left-side of the diamond displays brand benefits, which are both rational and emotional. It focuses on what your brand offers to the prescribers. It considers both functional benefits (like product features) and emotional benefits (like feelings your brand evokes).
- The right-side displays your brand’s identity, which includes both what you do in the market (lower right) and the reputation you build (upper right). It includes the reputation you build (what prescribers think of you – upper right) and your brand image (how you present yourself – lower right).
- We shall also develop a diamond for a product, let us call it Brandex, indicated for Alzheimer’s disease and other memory loss conditions.
Let me elaborate this with a brand, let’s call it Brandex. Brandex is for the management of Alzheimer’s disease.
At launch, the brand manager has to primarily work on the bottom part of the diamond (rational, functional benefits, and presence), which are the tangible dimensions you can control.
Ultimately, the goal is to gradually build up the intangible dimensions of the brand, as these are the elements you can cultivate and possess over time. The ultimate goal, achieved through a series of strategic steps, is to cultivate the brand’s intangible dimensions. These elements, unlike tangible assets, hold enduring value and provide a long-term competitive advantage.
Brands can leverage any quadrant of the brand diamond to differentiate themselves.
Brand Tans-X, with its unique transferosome technology, and Brand Ucacol, with its highly technical colon-targeted delivery, have used the bottom quadrants that are functional and tangible.
On the other hand, Brand Acidex and Brand Brandex have used the upper quadrants, which reflect the emotional and intangible effects.
This brand equity diamond helps you as a brand manager to differentiate your brand. You can make your brand shine brighter.
By focusing on these four quadrants, you can build a strong and successful brand that doctors and patients will love and trust.