Information for Prioritizing Image and Brand Decisions: New Zealand Bank

Introduction

Customers are the key to the success or failure of any business in the economy. With effective branding it helps in making companies product and services recognized in the market, attract new customers, building customer trust and loyalty on company’s products, and promote company’s products and services in the market. Companies are using branding to create margin in the market and gain a competitive advantage over their competitor. Most of the companies use social listening and customer feedback to develop brand health tracks that maintain the strength of the brand in the market. This paper discusses the information branding in making brand decision mostly in the financial sector by identifying the business objective, the information needed to achieve the set goals and the research design related to brand health tracking. The research focuses on branding in Australia New Zealand Bank, which is one of the biggest banks in the Australian financial service sector.

Business and Research Objectives

The financial service sector is one the most sensitive area to customer and business player take more caution when coming to branding. The main goal of Australia New Zealand Bank is to develop a brand that is differentiated from other competitors making it easy for customer recognition. Its objectives are to ensure their brand present the core value the customers are looking for financial services by providing continuous total quality brand management (Seddon, 2015). It focuses on improving customer satisfaction and loyalty with the main aim of attracting new customer, retaining them, and developing a sustainable brand. The bank also focuses on creating a competitive advantage through branding penetration.

The brand health tracking focuses on ensuring the company’s brand name is well-positioned in the market and gaining brand reputation from existing and prospective customers. It aims to ensure brand delivery by evaluating customer satisfaction, loyalty and their likelihood of referring other customers (Seddon, 2015). It also focuses on creating brand awareness to reach target customers. It also aims to develop productive customer relationship to build brand equity to understand how strong the company’s brand is associated in the market. The main aim is to identify the strength and weakness of the company’s brand that guides in making an informed decision.

Information Required to Fulfil the Research Objective

One of the critical information in marking brand decision is to establish the brand position in the market. The purpose is to evaluate how the customer position the product and services from Australia New Zealand Bank in their mind compared to other brands in the market. It involves establishing the critical component of brand association in the mind of customers and other essential elements that differentiate the brand and the established competitive superiority (Garg, Swami, & Malhotra, 2019). The primary purpose is to identify the core value that customers are looking for, what makes them choose the Australia New Zealand Bank as their priority bank, and what drives them away from other financial services providers in the industry. Identification of brand position in the market helps the banks management to identifies the challenges their bands are experiencing in the industry and make informed decision aimed at improving the brand positioning in the industry. It also helps the management develop ways to gain competitive advantages by ensuring their brands come first in the mind of the customer when the bank is mentioned.

Another aspect that leads to the achievement of the set objectives is identifying the brand relationship with customers and the public. It involves examining the nature of the relationship that customers have and what they want to have concerning the company’s brand (Wedel & Pieters, 2017). It focuses more beyond customer satisfaction and loyalty to elements such as self-concept connection with the banks, the behavioral interdependence of the customers, the brand partner quality, and the commitment attached in both the bank and the customers. It focuses on finding the core value that attached to customer and the banks the help to build a compelling brand relationship.

The aim is to identifies what cultivate the customer-brand relationship through marketing activities such as advertisement, promotion, customer services, and online platform and resources affect the customer relationship. The profitability of identifying different customer relationship depends on the type of product and services produced by the company. It also establishes how customer desired relationships with the brank are evaluated (Fatma, rahman, & khan, 2015). This helps the management in understanding the desire of their customers and providing a measure to meet the desired need with the aim of improving the customer-brand relationship. It also guides the management in developing policies and produces regarding the customer relationship and platform offering customer relationships such as customer care, online resource and advertising.

Another aspect involves a brand experience that can help management develop strategies to effectively manage the customer’s entire experience with the company’s product and services. The element consists in creating the brand experience of the sense, feel, act, think and relate to customers (Wedel & Pieters, 2017). It entails identifying brand-related experience the Australia New Zealand Bank is under control of their customers, the impact of brand experience in improving customer loyalty, and how the customer responds to control of the brand experience. The information help management in identifying ways to create brand controls and making a crucial decision regarding marketing thinking.

Another aspect is brand consistency in the market. The main aim is to identify brand consistency in the heart of customers despite the situation of the financial industry. It looks at customer loyalty to the brand and the reliability of the company’s brand to deliver what customers need or desire. It includes things such as the visual consistency that help in building brand recognition and attracting new customers, and consistency in providing brand prices (Çifci Et Al., 2016). It also focuses on the consistency of brand behave in delivering the promised quality aid at building customer loyalty and brand experience. Another consistency is the message on the brand that creates attention to the public and interested customers. The information helps the management in developing strategies that improve customer satisfaction, retainment and loyalty to the company brand name. It also guides management in developing consistency their brand offer that helps in creating brand recognition and experiences to prospective customers such easy identifications of brand name due to its message and visual color compared to others financial companies in the markets.

Another critical source is understanding brand personality such as competence, excitement, sincerity, and sophistication that guide the customer in choosing the brand of their choice. People are different and driven by a distinct personality in setting their consumption rate and making a purchase decision (Çifci Et Al., 2016). The company need to establish customer personality in the brand or what drives customer in liking their brand such as passion, competency, peacefulness, safety and privacy of their information. The data help management in identifying what drives customer in making a purchase decision and what they value most on the company. The outcome facilitates making decision aimed at aligning the company product and services with the customer personality to improve customer satisfaction and boost brand equity. It also helps in driving customer preferences and loyalty when looking for financial services and comparing different financial providers.

Information about the target market, market segments and the need and preferences of the customer can be developed through creating brand awareness. The target customer needs to be aware of the values, attributes and character of the company’s brands through various promotion and marketing style. On the other hand, management needs to understand the effective promotion program or the marketing channel that reach the target market and customer and the best form of delivering the brand (Wedel & Pieters, 2017). Brand recognition and awareness play a vital role in creating attraction to the new and prospective customer, improving customer satisfaction, and retaining most of the customer. Management faces the challenges of identifying the best method to create awareness to the public, but with information form customers feedback can help in making an informed decision on brand awareness.

Another significant aspect is establishing information on brand reputation to the customer and public. This involves how the society and public view the company name, culture, product and service offered, and perception of the community. It involves evaluating the brand image in the market, such as examining what Australian citizen say about Australia New Zealand Bank. It includes the kind of reputation the banks have on offering it services to the public depending on the previous customer experiences with the bank. The information help management in developing strategies that will maintain good brand reputations and prevent bad reputation form speeding.

The Research Designs

Analyzing the customer and public feedback of Australia New Zealand Bank brand is an effective approach in collecting data on the company’s brands in the market. Customers play a significant role in the success of the business, and their view and opinion about the company’s product and services can help in making an informed decision concerning branding (Acharya, & rahman, 2016). Customers are full of information concerning any change in the brands taste and preferences, the reason as to why they choose a particular brand other the competitor’s brand, and why they like or dislike about a particular brand in the market. They also have information on brand reputation among citizen and why other people like other brand compared to theirs as well as why they prefer to be loyal to the brand.

This data can be collected from a customer using various customer feedback forms such as establishing customer services desk. This method allows the customer to employee face conservation where the customers express his/ her excitement about the company while the employee takes notes of the critical things that can be used to improving their brand. The approach involves an in an in-depth interview with the customer to understand their inner motive and drives of choosing the brand over the others (Acharya, & rahman, 2016). The method is effective in collecting data related to brand awareness, loyalty, experiences, personality and reputation, among others. It also helps to analyze customer complains about particular company product and service or the employee’s conduct that can be used to understand the sentiment of customers.

Another method of getting customer feed is by providing the customer with a questionnaire to fill while receiving their services. The customer can be asked various question relating to company product and service received, and they’re perceptive concerning the company brand awareness techniques used, their loyalty, people conscious about the bank and band equity. The approach is used in collecting information of a various group of customers the Australia New Zealand Bank has and help develop more understanding of brand reputation and positioning the market.

Another effective method to gather data and gain customer feed is to conduct a survey. The survey can be conduct in person or face to face with community, through mobile phone or online. It is one of the effective and efficient methods of collecting customer view, opinion and desires on brand and product categories (Seddon, 2015). It is one the useful method in the development of a brand or when a company wishes to change the brand by considering the customer desire and perceptive concerning the market and competitors. It is also effective since it can cover a wide range at once depending on the type of research and the kind of information need to due to easy of sharing and efficiency in collecting people views.

The survey can be conducted using various form such as questionnaire or direct interview with customer and member of the community where they asked to provide their views about the company brand awareness techniques, the satisfaction with the banks services and product, why they chose this brand over the other, the reputation of the brand in the market, their loyalty, and anyways they wish the brand can be improved (Larsen, 2017). Different survey platform forms a various set of biases that need to be considered in collecting information and analyzing the data to provide effective results.

Social listening is another effective method of collecting customer feedback and those of society. Recent advancement in technology has developed may social media and other social listing tools such as brand watch analytics that provides insight into the company’s brand on several levels. The information can be collected on analyzing what customer and public have said on social media about a particular product and services (Larsen, 2017). Brand awareness and effectiveness of the channels used to create brand awareness is collected depending on the number of people who have reacted to the launch of the product and services.

The methods also help to collect both the positive and negative review of our brand from the public that helps to understand the brand reputation form the society. This help to collect information about brand positioning in the market by looking at how people talk about our brand such if the brand is aligned with company image created or the public an entirely different view about the company image and position (Pinto & Yagnik, 2016). It is also effective in capturing data on how loyal customer and employee show their brand loyalty to the public by how they spread the company information and protect company brands through various online platforms such as company Twitter and Facebook.

Social listening also involves factors such as social engagement and blogs that help in collecting ideas on how brand content is reaching society and being amplified by individuals. It shows social interaction in the community regarding the company brands, and its positions in the market and the loyal (Mills & Plangger, 2015). It helps to socialite information of the brand awareness in the community, the appropriate methods of developing brand awareness, the brand image and reputation to the public.

The Company website is another way of collecting brand information from the customer and society. Advancement in technology has led to most of the company website to design a web chat platform that allows the one on one interaction between the customer and public with the company employee without necessary meeting each other (Levy & hino, 2016). It is a platform that enables the customer to experience their personality, identify what they want and like about the company or even raise a complaint of the company product and services received. The information can be effective in understanding customer brand personality and reputation.

The company can also develop direct traffic to the company website, external link and earned media that help to capture the information on brand awareness in the society. The method allows logs to be collected by the company any time someone searching for their website or show interest in the company website that can be analyzed to identify the number of people who are aware of the brand.

Conclusion

Brand health tracking is an effective method that helps to achieve the brand set goals and objectives. It can be measured in the number of ways such as brand awareness, positioning, equity, reputation and delivery. The company objective is to establish a sustainable and continues improving the brand in the market that helps to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, retainment, and gain competitive advantage. The primary purpose of brand health tracking to establishing how the brand is positioned in the market, brand awareness, customer relationship, and brand reputation in the society. The information that can help in brand health tracking include customer loyalty, why they chose Australia New Zealand Bank compared to a competitor, how the public view and comment on the company brand, effectiveness of the channel and methods of creating brand awareness, and the brand image concerning competitors. These data can be gathered through establishing customer feedback platform and forums such as customer service, social listening, and survey.

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