DIGITAL MARKETING, BRANDING AND STRATEGY

DIGITAL MARKETING, BRANDING AND STRATEGY

Introduction

Brand revitalization is a strategy used by many companies for marketing a product that has reduced profitability and has matured in its product life cycle. It is trying to bring back a product in the market to secure the equity sources e.g., consumers of the product. A brand can be revitalized to increase in competition, improvement of the relevance of the brand, meet the needs of different customers in the world, merging of two companies, and change in technology or legal issues. (Keller, 2015) A product can be revitalized by changing its name, repackaging it, or repositioning the location of the product. For instance, “Brand Revitalization of Heritage Enterprises for Cultural Sustainability in the Digital Era: A Case Study in China.” This was to resolve the simultaneous decline in the brands of Heritage to ensure that they attain cultural sustainability and improve on the commercial utilization of the brands.  (Li, et. al., 2019)

A brand first gets established in the market, grows, expands, and becomes successful, or becomes popular amongst the users. In their existence in a market environment, competition from other brands is experienced. But, no matter how competitive a brand grows in the marketplace, they end up aging and lose value to its competitors (brand aging). This, in turn, forces managers to revitalize the product’s brand to maintain its competitiveness and increase the life span of the product. As mentioned above, the various methods named in the first paragraph help to revitalize a product brand and make it improve on the sales of the product and become profitable. (Keller, 2015)

North America is one of the most marketable regions around the globe. It has managed to establish a wide variety of brands produced in the area throughout the world and mostly in European countries. The region has diverse production of several resources and sale of processed products and services that are traded in the world market competitively. Most companies in North America are competitive, but many have experienced revitalization to be where they are at the moment. For instance, McDonald’s has undertaken several strategies into account from the day it was established to date for it to be an outstanding supplier of fast foods in the marketplace. This is because the company wants to experience a vast number of customers all over the globe. This will lead to the expansion of the range of consumers and maintain the brand’s name and value in the marketplace. Moreover, the various branding strategies that the company has used to come up with a broad customer base are the reasons why many people prefer services and products offered by McDonald’s in that particular industry than any other fast food industry in the globe.

Nevertheless, North American countries still rely on the support of outside funders/donors to support some of the activities undertaken in the regions to keep the economy stable. The tax revenues and national income from the citizens do not entirely support the events that occur within the country. Hence, the companies and organizations in this region do not depend on the productions, profits, and revenues from their outputs for funding the government’s needs. For instance, many political organizations and parties rely on public support, and other countries support to foster their elective ambitions. Since the year 2000, the United States of America funds from the citizens of the country have majorly funded the presidential elections through the use of mobile phones and the internet, who donate willingly on the presidential candidate they prefer. (Navarria, 2019) Facebook has been the most featured social media platform that some USA presidents use to carry out their campaigns. In return, some of their fans end up donating to their campaigning efforts. (Hossain, & Shifat, 2015)

The services offered by this organization have boomed over the years, and giving back to society is what makes it complete. The McDonald’s has further opened a charity organization (Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC)) that offers hospitable residents for sick children to improve on their health issues in some of the North American countries and Australia at large. (Edmondson, Ward & Roy, 2017)

Therefore, the organization has online sites such as rmhc.org and rmhcincinnati.org/donate/donate-online/, social media sites like Instagram i.e., #KeepingFamiliesClose, online filling forms to submit donations, email gifting, bank deposits or even provision of mailing addresses where gifts can be dropped. (Mejova, et. al., 2014) These are the places and sites that people, including public and private sectors of the governments, can supply their donations to the organization. People or other organizations can apply to become donors under the RMHC, supporting the activities done by the McDonald in helping the needy in society. But despite the high attributions that the organization has from these donors, it has a problem in maintaining them over the long run. This is because some of the donors lose interest in their engagement with the organization. Also, their targets may not be aligned with what the organization offers in return. These are among the things that have facilitated McDonald’s to establish a strong brand for itself in the market and help it to survive.

Therefore, concerning the success and reinvention of brands to become outstanding, this report is going to focus on how brand revitalization helps to maintain the nature of brands in the market and ensure they are profitable. Brand auditing and development of concept maps aids in the establishment of strong brands and contributors for the future of the brand. The case study of North American brands such as McDonald’s and RMHC (Ronald McDonald House Charities), will be used to identify what brands have done to undergo brand revitalization and how the process was implemented. More so, it will focus on the metrics that were put in place to ensure its achievement and the communication strategy that can be used to ensure brands become outstanding in this digital world.  (Ward & Edmondson, 2015)

Brand auditing and map conceptualization of the brand

Brand auditing is the thorough testing of the position that a brand currently holds in the marketplace in comparison to competitors and get a review of how effective it is. A brand audit assists in determining the weaknesses and strengths of a brand or the opportunities and inconsistencies so that it can be developed again or improved. Moreover, it also helps in guiding an organization to align its offers to customers’ expectations. It enables the brand to be at par with how people perceive the organization (either positively or negatively). Hence, managers need to establish a strategic brand audit to continually assess the importance and profit of having a brand in the market to meet demand.

Many regions, countries, and organizations carry out brand audits to know whether the organization, state, or province involved in the production is up to the standards of the economic block. Therefore, some institutions are put in place to ensure that the brands in a particular region meet the set standards. (Kesimli, 2019) However, there are general rules that guide how brand auditing in a given area is done i.e., strategies, steps, types of analytics, and metrics used to carry out brand auditing e.t.c. For instance, CPA consultants are incorporated in many auditing companies to help in the analysis of financial data and information for clarification of the company’s performance in the fiscal year. The North American company MGI North America (branch of MGI Worldwide), is mandated with the responsibility of doing audits on organizations in the region. In the year 2020, as from January 1st, it will merge with the CPA Associates International for auditing firms in North America. MGI North America offers auditing services ranging from Employee Benefit Plans, Financial Statement to Regulatory Compliance, and Internal Audits. (Baumgarth, Kaluza & Lohrisch, 2016)

Therefore, the McDonalds website is part and parcel of the selling companies in North America, and brand audits are carried out every year to know the position of the company both financially and competitively. The procedures that this company uses to audit every firm, including MacDonald’s website, equally and fairly are drafted in this report to show how brands can rely on its services to improve performance in the market. The strategies include:

• Creating an auditing framework to examine a brand’s website.
• Analyzing the website
• Examining of the consumers of their preference of a brand to other competitors
• Take the position of the customer i.e., to explore the brand from a customer’s perspective.
• Action planning and monitoring of the brand is done after the audit process.

Carrying out of brand audits is a continuous process and needs to be repeated regularly to ensure that the business is healthy. McDonald’s has been extending their product line and revitalizing some the products they produce that are why the brand of this company has never faded in the market regardless of the stiff competition from other fast-food companies like KFC.

The concept map of McDonald’s has helped individuals to recognize the path through which the company has undertaken in its existence to be competitive up to date. A conceptual map is a network of brand associations that are favorable, unique, and strong. They make up brand equity of a company i.e. the perceptions that the customer/consumer has towards the brand. The brand concept map helps to recognize the brand’s associations, which have a direct or indirect link to the label/brand. (Böger, et. al., 2017)

• This map helps to identify the brand image, uniqueness, and value to the customers.

For instance, the McDonalds brand concept map shows the associations that are connected to McDonald’s brand directly, e.g. value, service, social involvement, kids, fun, family, and meals. This means that they are connected to the initial meaning of the brand. The other associations such as convenient, hassle-free, Big Mac, Egg McMuffin, and consistent are linked to other associations of the brand such as service, brands, products e.t.c. The map also shows some significant associations are related to one another yet not linked to other core associations.

Figure 1: Conceptual map of McDonald’s

(https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=conceptual+map+of+mcdonald%27s+brand&id=59F0E4797D7FD5680EC2805040A8C5266AA1AA9A&FORM=IQFRBA)

Hence, the development of concept maps is vital for the definition of the length and width of stretching your brand. It also shows how the associations under the company’s brand name are related to the meaning of the business, and the perceptions that consumers have towards the brand’s product line.

Brand contributors and target audiences

Brand contributors are the people who support the full functioning of the brand both in the production and marketing of the brand. They can range from the fan contributors who promote a brand despite the efforts of the brand to support it. The marketing of the brand is widespread to nurture the relevance of the brand in the market. On the other hand, the contributors who currently lead the development of the brand to this moment are core stakeholders. For instance, the hamburger university nurtures its employees of the company on the various aspects of managing a restaurant. The Ronald McDonald House Charities markets the brand through the advertisements of the charity works that the RMHC conducts in North America.

On the other hand, the target audiences are the people that the brand anticipates capturing to improve or widen the market base. They are the forces that drive a campaign of a given brand. The audiences are the people that detect the brand’s quality and competitiveness in the market. As for McDonald’s, in the ’80s, it mostly focused on advertisements that met the interests of kids. But, nowadays, they have widened their target market to everyone interested in fast foods e.g., adults running late on the job, adults who want to relax and enjoy Wi-Fi services and children. Therefore, the company employs different personas for each target to adequately define the audience’s preferences and exploit their interests. (Parsons, Maclaran, & Chatzidakis, 2017) The personas are created to represent several types of consumers aiming to mold a character that suits the content of a reader.

For instance, the target audience demographic is a persona that focuses on the demographics of a given geographic segment or location. This persona focuses on the type, size, and culture of the companies where target audiences are employed and the age, location, education, salary, and the gender of the audience. Moreover, it covers the job details that a particular audience i.e., the title, role challenges, goals, fears, and values. These types of target audience mostly use Facebook to interact with other people. (Wheeler, 2017)Therefore, an effective way to communicate with them is through this social media platform as they spend most of their time. The persona of this particular target audience is defined in the template below.

Another type of persona that can be developed is the youths on campuses and the working ones outside the North American borders. University students are generally lazy in doing some activities such as cooking, washing, and even reading. Therefore, a profile that meets the needs of these audiences is essential and giving the profile a face and a name makes them feel more real. Given that many of the audience in this persona are Instagram, Twitter, and generally Facebook users, it is easy to relay the information through to sites. It should be represented as below:

Analysis of Media Landscape in North America

The media landscape is the shift in the use of technologies by the citizens/market/audiences in a given region/country. The change in the use of different media, because of evolution in media sources, in relaying information to the consumers and attending to them fosters the shift in the landscape of media. The North American media has been improved and improvised every time to ensure that the customer’s service delivery is as per their needs. (Buxel, Esenduran & Griffin, 2015)

From displaying the products and services of companies on television sets and radios to directly advertising them on customers’ phones. The media landscape has helped companies in North American countries to sell and promote their products. (Gurgu, et, al., 2019) The media landscape benefits the region in the following ways;

• It helps the brands to have more control over the content to be relayed on their websites.
• It promotes a more direct and closer connection of the brand to the customer/target audience.
• Brands can connect with its audiences through videos whereby a visual library is created containing visual content e.g., the use of Netflix in a partial advertisement of a company’s goods and services. This results in attracting the attention of users in the market. (McDonald, & Smith-Rowsey, 2016)
• Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Instagram Live, Twitter Live, and other social media sites assist the brands to have a real-time live connection with its audiences.
• Social media accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, e.t.c., are becoming more important these days. Even many journalists collect data from these sites to relay to their viewers; hence are more efficient in a brand’s advertisement. (Kesimli, et. al., 2019)

These media landscapes help the target market to get first-hand information from the organization’s website and physical store. This helps the organization to promote and facilitates the actual sale of products and services through these sites. (Ahmad, Musa & Harun, 2016)

Communication strategy

A communication strategy is a scheme that brands set to achieve a set of objectives of communication. It is a determinant of how information between the workers, managers, and consumers will flow. It is used in the marketing, public relations, and the internal communication of the departments for data and information relaying. (Andrews & Shimp, 2017) The objectives of generating an effective communication strategy are to:

• Generate influencers and media interests from the target audience when launching a plan.
• Create awareness of the brand’s services and products to the targeted audiences of brand products
• Create the knowledge of the target market of the brands existing output and innovations.
• Create a demand for the product of a brand.

Therefore, for companies to manage and ensure sufficient control of the resources and targets is efficient, an effective communication strategy has to be put in place for company goals and objectives to be met. For instance, the target audience named above can be communicated to using the following communication strategy to manage them effectively. (Confos & Davis, 2016)

Figure 2: A Communication Strategy to the Target Audience in North America

Figure 2: A Communication Strategy to the Target Audience in North America

The above is a customer journey map that shows how customers/potential donors can be engaged to achieve a given objective of a brand. (Föhr, et. al., 2018)

Metrics and performance evaluation mechanisms

Metrics are systems that are used to measure the performance of a brand in the market. They are the standards of measurement of production and are an integral part of an organization’s brand strategy process. Some organizations consider them as Key Performance Indicators (KPI), which are the indicators that evaluate the importance of the brand’s existence. These metrics help to detect errors in the brand’s system, provide a better understanding of employee engagement, profitability, working environment, and productivity. They also help in knowing if the brand is within the customers’ expectations and values and competitors. (John, & Eeckhout, 2018)

Brands can be evaluated through the following brand metrics: behavior, perception, and performance metrics. The behavioral metrics help to examine factors outside and within the brand. Internal factors/branding strengthens the culture i.e., encouraging employees to become brand ambassadors, while external ones help in reinforcement of perception of customers. (Coleman, 2018)

Perception metrics assist in knowing how the customers/donors review the brand i.e., the brand funnel and brand image. The performance metric, on the other hand, helps to monitor the organization’s performance with the set goals and targets. (Kumar, 2018) It also assesses the customer and financial perspective. It helps to figure out how consumers of a brand product perceive the product to be — an excellent brand performance results in effective brand loyalty. (Farris & Ailawadi, 2017)

These metrics help in assessing the performance of a brand in the marketplace irrespective of target audiences.

Issues in the organization

Generally, companies, especially organizations, have a significant problem of retaining their pledge-donors/customers. This is because not everyone is willing to keep on donating for a long time, and many customers lose interest in giving donations to these organizations to support them financially. For instance, the RMHC brand has issues to retain its interns after the provision of the internship period. This is because they offer their services freely, and therefore, the workers of the organization get little or no payments for the service they provide. (Miles, Grimmer & Franklin, 2016) This demoralizes the worker and reduces the number of the functioning of the organizations functioning activities. As for the customers, one may be a donor, but he/she is not necessarily interested in the business done by a particular organization.

Hence, these issues can be solved by the above state solutions to retain the donors for a long while. This can be done through carrying out continues brand audits i.e., every quarter and development of concept maps regularly to know the associations of the brand and the perception of the brand by customers. After that, recognition of the target audiences and the contributors to the brand will be done. The development of media personas of the pledge-donors and an analysis of the media landscape will be conducted after brand auditing, to know how communication will take place. Then a critical and effective communication strategy with the audiences and contributors will be developed to manage and control their interests as they are linked to the overall purpose of the organization. Finally, the performance metrics and evaluation of the performance of the brand will be conducted t monitor the progress of the brand in the marketplace as it competes with other brands for donations/customer. (Saccomani, 2017)

Refrencing list

Ahmad, N.S., Musa, R. and Harun, M.H.M., 2016. The impact of social media content marketing (SMCM) towards brand health. Procedia Economics and Finance, 37, pp.331-336.

Ailawadi, K.L. and Farris, P.W., 2017. Managing multi-and omni-channel distribution: metrics and research directions. Journal of retailing, 93(1), pp.120-135.

Andrews, J.C. and Shimp, T.A., 2017. Advertising, promotion, and other aspects of integrated marketing communications. Nelson Education.

Baumgarth, C., Kaluza, M. and Lohrisch, N., 2016. Brand Audit for Cultural Institutions (BAC): A Validated and Holistic Brand Controlling Tool. International Journal of Arts Management, 19(1), p.54.

Böger, D., Kottemann, P., Meißner, M. and Decker, R., 2017. A mechanism for aggregating association network data: An application to brand concept maps. Journal of Business Research, 79, pp.90-106.

Buxel, H., Esenduran, G. and Griffin, S., 2015. Strategic sustainability: Creating business value with life cycle analysis. Business Horizons, 58(1), pp.109-122.

Coleman, D., 2018. Building Brand Experiences: A Practical Guide to Retaining Brand Relevance. Kogan Page Publishers.

Confos, N. and Davis, T., 2016. Young consumer-brand relationship building potential using digital marketing. European Journal of Marketing, 50(11), pp.1993-2017.

Cooper, H., Miller, D. and Merrilees, B., 2015. Restoring luxury corporate heritage brands: From crisis to ascendency. Journal of Brand Management, 22(5), pp.448-466.

Edmondson, D.R., Ward, C.B. and Roy, D.P., 2017. Is McDonald’s” Clowning Around” with Ronald McDonald House Charities?. Journal of Critical Incidents, 10.

Föhr, J., Hietanen, H., Khvatov, A., Lepistö, T., Liukka, N. and Dahanayake, A., 2018. Customer Experience Evaluation in the Omnichannel Environment. Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XXIX, 301, p.21.

Gurgu, E., Andronie, M., Andronie, M. and Dijmarescu, I., 2019. Does the Convergence of the Blockchain, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence Changing Our Lives, Education and the Known World of the Internet?! Some Changes and Perspectives for the International Economy. In International Conference on Economic Sciences and Business Administration (Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 69-88). Spiru Haret University.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=conceptual+map+of+mcdonald%27s+brand&id=59F0E4797D7FD5680EC2805040A8C5266AA1AA9A&FORM=IQFRBA

Hossain, D. and Shifat, S., 2015. Cyber campaigning via Facebook in Dhaka City Corporation Election 2015.

John, L.K. and Eeckhout, L., 2018. Performance evaluation and benchmarking. CRC Press.

Keller, K.L., 2015. Brand Revitalization. The Future of Branding, p.314.

Kesimli, I., 2019. External Audit in USA, European Union, and Turkey. In External Auditing and Quality (pp. 39-99). Springer, Singapore.

Klostermann, J., Plumeyer, A., Böger, D. and Decker, R., 2018. Extracting brand information from social networks: Integrating image, text, and social tagging data. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 35(4), pp.538-556.

Kumar, V., 2018. A theory of customer valuation: Concepts, metrics, strategy, and implementation. Journal of Marketing, 82(1), pp.1-19.

Li, C., Cui, Z., Chen, J. and Zhou, N., 2019. Brand revitalization of heritage enterprises for cultural sustainability in the digital era: A case study in China. Sustainability, 11(6), p.1769.

McDonald, K. and Smith-Rowsey, D. eds., 2016. The Netflix effect: Technology and entertainment in the 21st century. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Mejova, Y., Garimella, V.R.K., Weber, I. and Dougal, M.C., 2014, February. Giving is caring: understanding donation behavior through email. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 1297-1307). ACM.

Miles, M.P., Grimmer, M. and Franklin, G.M., 2016. How well do AACSB, AMBA and EQUIS manage their brands?. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 34(1), pp.99-116.

Navarria, G., 2019. A Model Imitated: From Dean to Obama. In The Networked Citizen (pp. 67-89). Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.

Nelson, N.N.N., 2016. How companies achieve balance between technology enabled innovation and cyber-security (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Parsons, E., Maclaran, P. and Chatzidakis, A., 2017. Contemporary issues in marketing and consumer behaviour. Routledge.

Roberts, D.L. and Piller, F.T., 2016. Finding the right role for social media in innovation. MIT Sloan Management Review, 57(3), p.41.

Saccomani, S., 2017. Donald K. Carter (ed), Remaking post-industrial cities. Lessons from North America and Europe reviewed by Silvia Saccomani.

Ward, C. and Edmondson, D.R., 2015. A Sad Clown Story: McDonald’s Lack of Support for Ronald McDonald Houses.

Wheeler, A., 2017. Designing brand identity: an essential guide for the whole branding team. John Wiley & Sons.