Marketing Aptitude: Brand

Brand represents the product image, quality and value. It influences the customers in making their buying decisions and also reduces their searching time in finding products with desired features. Thus, a brand or trademark is an integral part of the symbol appearing on the product.

According to American Marketing Association, “a brand as a name, term, symbol or design or a combination of them which is intended to identify the goods and services of one, seller or groups of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors”.

Brand Testing

The brand plays an important role in marketing the product. If the brand gets popularity among the consumers, the demand of the product increases and if it doesn’t get popularity, the demand for the product or service come down and the business firm doesn’t get required success in its marketing efforts. Hence, every producer wants to choose a brand which may get favor from consumers. For this, the producer wants to test the brand which he proposes for his products. He wants to know whether the proposed brand may get popularity or not.

Thus, Brand testing is a technique for knowing it. Some of the important techniques of brand testing are as follows:

Memory test

Under this technique, some brand names are choose and are showed before the selected people from different spheres of life. After a specific time, same people are again invited and efforts are made to know which of the brands are remembered by them and which are most liked by them. After that, the same brand is selected for the products of the firm.

Preference Test

As per this technique, some brands are choose and are showed before the selected people from all spheres of life. They are requested to memorize these brands in order of preference. The brand which is most preferred by most of them is finally selected.

Learning Test

Here, some brand names are selected and some persons are selected for the purpose of test. These brand names are presented before these persons and they are requested to pronounce and re-write these words. The word which is most correctly written and pronounced by most of them is finally selected.

Association Test

Here, some brands are chosen and are showed before the selected people. They are requested to tell or write a name of the brand which strikes on their mind first. The name which is written or told by maximum number of persons is finally selected.

Unique Test

Here, the producer selects only one brand name for his products.  This name is presented before some selected persons and they are requested to tell the names of some other products which may confuse them with this name. The final selection of brand name is made on the basis of the analytical study of the replies collected for this purpose.