Should marketers have different approach in their efforts to increase its brand awareness and brand equity for students and employees?

 Hi! it's already new year! :) got some resolutions? I think they are handy in the first days of the year.
One of my resolutions is to finish my writings 8) well it's been so long that I wanted my first post about Economics published here. Yet I was to carefully spending my time to prepare my writings with a hope that they can be published in sequence. After all, here is the first post (and the others will definitely, precisely, be published randomly :D)

If am about to ask you “How much time and effort do you usually spend to search for a complete information of a product that you intend to purchase?” You might answer “it depends!” Yes, we are unlikely to spend some minutes just to find out whether a particular product suits us well or has a higher quality over the others for products such as salt, biscuit, mineral water, lamps, or tooth brush. On the other hand, we usually spend some amount of time to read or hear some testimonies of users of a particular brand of shampoo, to find out what its main benefits offered, or to ask our friends whether they use that particular brand; we do the same for laptop, car, or watch. What makes it different? At a glance, we can say that the first category of products to some extent is not expensive, and the second is much more expensive. Yet what best differs the two is whether a product is important for a particular customer segment. Products which are more important for customers will have higher level of consumer involvement and vice versa. People with high consumer involvement spend more time and effort to find out everything about a product and therefore will be likely to know not just the brand's name, but also all the information inside.



Knowing something, is it worth? Have a minute to think, "How can you be so care to someone if you don’t even be aware of his existence?" This analogy applies the same with marketing strategy. How can you expect someone to like a particular brand of yours when they don’t even know if that brand exists? It is important to set some strategic steps to increase what we call as a business’ brand awareness.

There are two main categories of brand awareness. One we call as brand recognition, the other is brand recall. When we recognize a specific brand, we recognize that the brand exists (e.g. “Acer? Yes I know that brand!”). It is even in a higher level when we are able to recall the brand (e.g. “Laptop? I know Toshiba and Acer!”). One other distinctive difference is that brand recall is unaided whilst brand recognition is aided. Bring to your mind how you used to take a test. A multiple choice test is aided because we are presented one correct answer of some possible ones. (e.g. Who is the first Indonesia President? A. Abraham Lincoln B. Soekarno C. Abdurahman Wahid D. Sri Mulyani). The brand recall is more difficult because we don’t get any aid to answer (e.g. Who is the King of Pop?).

Why is it important to have a higher level of brand awareness? Just take an example when you are on a trip and just on the half way you stopped the car to buy a bottle of mineral water. The seller offers you “Smakone” brand. Will you not ask for another brand? We tend to buy something that we know. The tendency increases when we are very aware of a particular brand which offers a specific benefit. Advertising with no doubt will increase brand awareness with TV as the most supporting media. Some contents in an advertisement can be also designed to maximize the increase of brand awareness.

Moving to talking its “sister”, brand equity, according to Wikipedia, is the marketing effects and outcomes that accrue to a product with its brand name compared with those that would accrue if the same product did not have the brand name. What is so essential to have great brand equity is that a business can charge premium prices from customers (thinking of fact that we feel just easy to buy a product from a well known brand with a higher price but the same quality to an unknown brand with lower price; even though both have the same quality, only the well known brand promises it).

A question arises with the possible relation between consumer involvement, brand awareness, and brand equity. Does consumer involvement influence brand awareness and brand equity? how significant is the influence? Marketers can't affect much the consumer involvement of a product since its importance to consumers varies a lot. However, if there is a difference level of consumer involvement between students and employees (e.g. students have higher level of consumer involvement towards mobile phone than employees), marketers do have to differ their marketing mix offered to both segment. One possible step that came to my mind is, if students have higher level of consumer involvement towards mobile phone, then the advertising contents and packaging should be designed to the likeliness and characters of students'. A mobile phone company can try to emphasize its entertainment function in its package, for example.

What is your idea?
We'll have further discussion on this later on :)