Branding is a specialist Brand Agency helping companies to easily describe, communicate, and market their business.
Our 10+ years’ experience providing high-performance brand optimisation allows us to create brand stories which are strategic, creative, and connect with your audience to inspire actions.
Fulcrum Brand Optimisation, using digital experiences and journeys builds customer loyalty and trust. This is the foundation that will ultimately drive your business and open opportunities for growth and investment.
Better Brands = Better Business Our team formulate better ideas, better designs, better brand clarity, and better brand experiences = better results.
Fulcrum Specialist Brand Agency are business marketing and sales experts!
We bring to the table experience, knowledge, and a sense of realism of what WILL work and IS within your budget!
With offices located in mumbai, you can rely on us to help you take your business ideas, and convert these to a brand story that will be irresistible to your customers.
Fulcrum work with companies within Hi-Tech, Franchise & Retail Groups, Trade & Service, Sports & Lifestyle, Hospitality, CPG, FMCG and Entertainment Personalities.
What we do
Branding has been helping companies to more easily describe, communicate, and market their business to drive sales and growth opportunities.
Our experience in high-performance brand optimisation allows us to create brand stories which are strategic, creative, and connect with your audience to inspire actions.
Fulcrum has built the business by nurturing relationships with clients through professionalism, trust, and also being passionate about their results. You can rely on Fulcrum to listen as well as act, to push constantly against the ordinary to produce extraordinary results that are state of the art. Fulcrum cares about whom you are, and what you and your company stands for. Their team immerse themselves in your company’s culture and analyse your competitors to benchmark your service delivery offer to create 'best practice'.
Non-price competition in oligopoly may also take the form of product innovation whereby rival firms attempt to gain a larger slice of the market by constantly seeking to improve the quality and/or style of their existing products, or by developing entirely new products. This innovation usually has to be backed by extensive research and development(R&D), and has the effect of causing rapid obsolescence of consumer durable goods, a renewable source of demand and certain decline for those firms unwilling or unable to engage in such innovation. Most car manufacturers, for example, are constantly in the process of changing the design and other features of particular models so as to generate new demand, and the few large firms that dominate the pharmaceuticals industry are locked into a perpetual struggle to develop new and better drugs.
This process fits well with the writings of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) who took a long-run, dynamic view of monopoly to argue that over time it would be far more efficient than perfect competition. He argued that the static method i.e. taking a point in time approach, of comparing perfect competition with monopoly, overlooked the likelihood of technical advances which may lower costs and prices as output expands. Although Schumpeter’s analysis relates specifically to monopoly, it is appropriate to apply it to contemporary oligopolistic markets.
Schumpeter identified two main reasons why monopolies would be more innovative than competitive industries: firstly, because of the earning of long term supernormal profits, the monopolist would have greater access to the funds necessary to finance inevitably expensive research and development programmes which are the basis of most innovation; and secondly, the monopolist would have a far greater inducement to undertake R&D in the first place – in highly competitive markets, any technical advantage gained by one firm would only permit the earning of high profits to be made for a relatively short period of time, as new entrants and existing firms copy the innovation and bid any abnormal profits away; the monopolist however would be the sole beneficiary of technical advance and would thus be able to reap the benefits of lower costs and higher profits indefinitely.
However, empirical evidence on the subject suggests that whilst smaller firms, i.e. those not possessing substantial monopoly power, tend to undertake little R&D, no clear, positive relationship between the amount of R&D spending and company size exists beyond a certain minimum size of enterprise.
Advertisements are usually classified according to whether they are informative or persuasive.
Informative advertising
As the name implies, this type of advertising is concerned with the dissemination of information about products or services, e.g. as regards availability, price or performance, and such information would be of a factual type. For instance, an advertisement for a car could focus on such things as its fuel consumption, its safety features, the time it takes to reach certain speeds, its price, the names and addresses of main dealers etc.
Persuasive advertising
The main feature of persuasive advertising is that it provides consumers with little, if any, meaningful information about the products being advertised; rather it seeks to persuade consumers to buy one particular brand of a product rather than another through a combination of ‘catchy’ jingles and appealing images.
If the advertising is successful, the images and jingles register into our consciousness and create strong brand loyalty, e.g. the lines, ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’, and ‘Coke, the real thing’ are extremely widely known, but provide consumers with absolutely no information on the sugar, fat and chemical contents of the products in question.
Often the images are sexual and are intended to lead consumers to believe that their relative attractiveness to the opposite sex will be enhanced by the consumption of the good. Many advertisements for such things as cigarettes, alcohol, cosmetics, sports cars and even ice-cream fall into this category.
Task
The next time you watch commercial television, make a note and brief summary of the advertisements which appear during your first hour of viewing.
Classify these advertisements into informative and persuasive. Which type of advertising predominates?
The following table provides a summary of the potential advantages and disadvantages of advertising to consumers, firms and the economy as a whole, although its overall impact on such factors as prices, costs, competition and resource allocation is, as with many aspects of economics, very much a matter of judgement.
Advantages
Disadvantages
For consumers
Acts as a medium of communication between buyers and sellers, provides information on product availability and facilitates wider choice
Persuasive advertising may render consumer choice irrational and destroy consumer sovereignty
May lead to lower prices if (a) larger sales and production levels result in economies of scale and lower unit costs and (b) the advertising is based on price competition
Through its portrayal of a fantasy, largely affluent world, it creates unnecessary wants by generating feelings of inadequacy and greed
May lead to higher prices because (a) there may be higher costs, particularly if economies of scale are not achieved and (b) advertising may act as a barrier to entry of new firms and thus increase monopoly power, particularly where established firms engage in saturation advertising which cannot be matched by smaller firms
For firms
If successful, advertising will (a) shift the demand curve to the right and (b) make the demand curve more inelastic.
Lower profits if costs of production are increased without raising sufficient extra revenue, or without shifting the demand curve making demand more inelastic
It may enable firms to maintain their monopoly power through the creation of brand loyalty and barriers to entry
Greater profits may be earned if higher sales and output levels lead to economies of scale and lower costs
For the economy as a whole
A greater level of employment if the level of sales and production increase
Advertising may lead to a misallocation of society’s scarce resources as the pattern of production may reflect the skill of the advertisers in manipulating consumers’ tastes, rather than what consumers actually want / need.
Certain sectors of the economy only survive because of the revenue which advertising earns, e.g. commercial radio, newspapers and magazines
The generation of negative externalities through tasteless or unsightly advertising
Task
As a group task, in a formal debate, discuss the following motion:
“This house believes that goods which have to be advertised ought not to be produced at all.”
Select two main speakers to support the motion and two speakers to oppose it. Other class members should prepare points either for or against the motion so that they can contribute to the proceedings when the discussion is thrown open to the ‘floor of the house’.
The creation of consumer loyalty to particular brands is mainly achieved through advertising, and it is in oligopolistic markets where branding, backed by extensive product promotion, is most prevalent. The markets for soap-powders, cereals, cars, confectionery and cosmetics provide a few notable examples.
The main aim of branding is to make particular goods, produced by particular firms, appear as if they have unique features which the products of competing firms do not possess. On occasions these features may be real, e.g. the distinctive quality of a BMW car or a Sony camcorder. However, often the ‘uniqueness’ may only exist in consumers’ minds, but a difference, real or imagined, in how consumers perceive branded products, may be sufficient to allow goods to be sold at very different prices e.g. well known brands of soft drinks, sports-wear, bars of soap and shaving creams are all sold at higher prices than their ‘own brand’, or lesser-known, equivalents.
Thus, if successful, branding will reduce the degree of substitutability for the good, make its demand more inelastic, allow for higher prices and profits to be earned and enable the brand to become unassailable.
Moreover, the practice of multiple branding serves as a very effective barrier to entry of new firms e.g. go to any supermarket and you will see several brands of soap powders on the shelves, but these are mainly produced by just two firms, Unilever and Procter and Gamble – the costs of breaking into such a market would be formidable as any new entrant would have to compete against numerous brands of soap powder, requiring an enormous outlay on advertising; obviously if Unilever and Procter and Gamble only produced one brand each, the task of contesting the market would be made considerably easier.
Once a company understands its buyer personas, how can it match those to real people who will buy its products or services? Today, companies use significant amounts of data and complex technology systems to create the right match in what it offers to individuals and groups of buyers.
The American Marketing Association defines customer relationship management as: A discipline in marketing combining database and computer technology with customer service and marketing communications. Customer relationship management seeks to create more meaningful one-on-one communications with the customer by applying customer data (demographic, industry, buying history, etc.) to every communications vehicle. At the simplest level, this would include personalizing e-mail or other communications with customer names. At a more complex level, customer relationship management enables a company to produce a consistent, personalized marketing communication whether the customer sees an ad, visits a Web site, or calls customer service.[1]
Customer relationship management brings data and technology together with the marketing mix to increase the personal connection with the customer. Let’s look at an example. Harley Davidson has a famously strong brand. This video provides a glimpse into the relationship that customers have with the brand and shows how a new technology is assisting the company in expanding its connection with customers.
What are some elements of the Harley Davidson buyer persona?
How is technology being used for customer relationship management?
Key Terms
Buyer persona – Fictional, generalized representations of an ideal customer that help a marketer understand current and potential customers better.
Customer relationships management – A discipline in marketing combining database and computer technology with customer service and marketing communications. Customer relationship management seeks to create more meaningful one-on-one communications with the customer by applying customer data (demographic, industry, buying history, etc.) to every communications vehicle.
Check Your Understanding
Answer the question(s) below to see how well you understand the topics covered in this outcome. This short quiz does not count toward your grade in the class, and you can retake it an unlimited number of times.
Under Armour promotes its products through sponsorship agreements with celebrity athletes, professional teams, and college athletic teams.
Market penetration: focus on current products and current markets in order to increase market share
Market penetration requires strong execution in pricing, promotion, and distribution in order to grow market share.
Under Armour is a good example of a company that has demonstrated successful market penetration. The company sells performance apparel, and in recent years it has surpassed Adidas to become the number-two athletic-wear provider in the U.S. The company has persistently focused on selling athletic footwear, clothing, and accessories, and was able to capture a leadership position in the market with that strategy.
Throughout 2014, Under Armour fueled its growth by focusing largely on promotion, distribution, and consistent product. As a result the company could claim major success—especially relative to major competitors Nike and Adidas—in the fight for its share of the fitness apparel market.
Like Nike, Under Armour’s has been very effective at developing inspiring advertisements that feature well-known male and female athletes. The following video ads are examples:
