Branding: the 360 degree edge

Today author intends to write on a very important field of marketing and branding known as 360 degree of branding. It should be known that between any brand and its target audience there happens to be many touch points, there are many media channels through which a target audience can get to know a particular brand. It can be the regular once print media, TV, radio, hoardings, live shows and demonstrations, emerging once like web medium or even something unconventional as theatre or street plays. Often it had been seen that just one or two medium is used to promote a brand but when a company decides to use each and every one of the available medium, when it tries to communicate at each and every one of the touch points then this approach is known as 360 degree of branding.
It is quite evident that 360 degree of branding is an expensive as well as time consuming approach and cannot be used too often, but it becomes extremely essential when a brand has to be launched in the market. Whenever a brand is launched it needs a very high degree of recognition. If all the existing media channels are not used then the chances are very high that the nascent brand might not get the amount of exposure it should have got to be successful. One must understand that whenever a brand is launched the very first thing which it needs to be successful is awareness among the general public. Once the awareness sets in and people began to start making perceptions for the product then only the final selling can happen. If the general awareness itself cannot happen at the first go , perception for the brand let alone final sales is never going to be realized. So it’s very essential that whenever a product or a brand is getting launched companies rather than choosing one or two media channels must go for a 360 degree kind of approach where the newly evolving brand can be communicated through end no of media channels. A point that has to be considered over here is that often 360 degree branding does not end up in huge sales figure ,the reason being that communication efforts get diluted over a large no. of channels but it does provide a huge amount of brand awareness that can be capitalized over a period of time in making sales.
One reason the author intends to write this blog is that often start ups are not willing to spend much on brand promotion. Rather than going through the 360 degree frame work, now day’s entrepreneurs prefer just one two media channels in which the web medium predominates. Given the rate at which web penetration is increasing day by day the importance of the web medium along with the social networking sites cannot be discounted but at the same time it will be fool hardy to neglect other regular channels like the TV, radio, newspaper, magazines ,hoardings etc. Every medium has its own importance; every medium has its own takers. So it is in the interest of startups that they should try utilizing whatever touch points they can in order to create brand awareness for their newly launched product. One must understand that for a newly launched product branding should be wide spared covering as much audience it can cover.