1st Step of Building a Brand: Be Audacious

                                                                            
After writing extensively on Blue Ocean Strategy the author will like to keep it off for a while and will like to delve once again into his favorite domain that is Brand building.
Brand building and its management is definitely a very complex phenomenon which takes care of various dimensions into account such as product design, product management, media channels, logos, symbols, distribution networks, ambassadors, mascots and above all commitment of individual employees towards their respective duties but the very first thing which has to be taken into account is the audacious acceptance of the superiority of your product. All the employees and concerned individuals of a product must admit the fact that they are associated with one of the best brand, no matter that might be the reality or not.
The logic for this is very simple; marketing is fundamentally a psychological warfare, a battle of mind where a marketer always attempts to promote his product in a bombastic way, with some degree of exaggeration attached with it. (one must know that all marketers are liar and all customers are irrational), so it becomes very important that before hitting your customers with your exaggerated tag line, the general belief of superiority of one’s product must be shared by its own employees. As long as one himself is not convinced with the superiority of his/her product how the hell is he going to position it to the customer. It is very essential that one must believe in the superiority of his product even that calls for becoming audacious.
But again one must understand that there has to be a fine line drawn, no doubt there will remain a fine gap between what your product actually is and what you want to make other believe by your audacious acceptance of your product as something extremely fantabulous, but this touch of audacity should not become so strong that rather than promoting your product in the right spirit it is making you as well as your product a laughing stock. The line is delicate one and one has to draw it himself, Few examples that might explain it better could be :-

1>Lets say your B-school belongs to the higher ladders of the 2-tier B-school, then rather than proclaiming that you belong to a 2-tier B-school and getting yourself mixed with a lot of B-schools which are inferior to your B-school the wisdom lies in the idea that you must exaggerate and say that your B-school is among the top tier B-schools (of course in the lower ladders)

2> Let’s say you have a business which is facing fierce competition from an emerging competitor and in the recent quarter the competitor had done fairly better business than you. Under such circumstance rather than patting the back of your competitor the best strategy should be not to accept your competitor's victory and keep on persisting on the fact that you are still the best. Like the Romans you must have the conviction of not accepting your defeat at any cost. (Though in the next quarter you must be in a position to beat your competitor to prove it.)

Having said all this the author will again like to reiterate that branding is a very long term phenomenon that considers a lot of stuff into account but anyone who is seriously thinking to build the brand of his product first needs to be audacious enough in accepting the superiority of his product even that calls for moving a few steps on the line of exaggeration.