Building a brand costs money and time so it is only natural for businesses to invest heavily to protect it. A great brand is a combination of a wonderful product, attractive packaging, impressive life correlation imagery and effective marketing. This input in making a brand is the key to beating your competition. Well, in your local market perhaps! When you introduce your brand online, you expose your business to intrabrand competition.
What is intrabrand competition?
First and foremost it is important to understand that this form of competition only exists on the internet. You have listed your product on amazon but when customers want to buy, they first go to the product details page. Here they will come across other brands that serve the same purpose as yours. That is not the problem, until they realize that the other products are cheaper to what you are offering. Aside from choosing from brands they already know, consumers now have to deal with making a choice based on the price offer. Brand protection is possible with the following actions;
- Setting the right price
Consumers often get the impression that low cost items are of low quality compared to their high priced counterparts. This notion can be easily dismissed if you strive to provide quality items over time. Have you noticed that some of the most popular brands of electronics, clothes, shoes and cars are not cheap? It is easy to get tempted into setting the price of your products lower than that of your competition. Is that the right price? To help consumers associate low prices you set with high quality, how about psychological pricing. Always have a before and current price tag or use nines in the price amount.
The right price can also be based on target audience buying habits. This is known as dynamic pricing. Set the price low at low peak buying times and higher at peak buying times.
- Defeat Stolen Goods and Counterfeiters
Some businesses bear the grunt of brand abuse when goods stolen from their inventory or counterfeits sell as their own. You can easily tell your product even if it has been posted in a pseudo name or bears different colors. Report the seller both to amazon and to an online brand protection company for action.
Conclusion
Selling on amazon is a good way to expand your market without having to invest heavily on physical infrastructure. In the same breath, it is a potential brand killer as far as price wars are concerned. Consumers see the wars taking place and when a good product suddenly drops its values, it could mean that the authenticity of the brand is going down. Is that the case?
