Launching a brand is an exciting project. It is difficult to execute a brand launch, but if done correctly, it can revitalize an old business or kick off a new one with a bang. Brands are very important to customers- they are the face of the product, in a way. So launching a new one involves a lot of careful planning and strategy in order to ensure that the launch proceeds smoothly and that the customers will have a positive image of the new brand.

It should be cleat from a simple examination of the evidence that brand launches are fraught with danger. The past few decades are littered with discarded brands that failed to catch on after their launch. The food and beverage industry is notorious for this: soda giants Coke and Pepsi roll out new brands frequently that are reformulations of their existing product lines all the time. Most of these don’t survive past a few years because the parent company doesn’t target the launch appropriately and time it to the current environment. Now, in 2015, there is a new trend in food towards health and natural ingredients, so new brands that boast sugar over processed sweeteners are performing well. However, this kind of success is rare, and brands that are launched based on a recent trend might not survive past the end of that trend. Cereal is a similar example. The big cereal companies roll out many new brands and products, and few of them ever last.

There are a few facts that link together poor brand launches. The first is timing. Getting a new brand developed and on the market is not easy and takes time. Trying to react to a sudden new trend is dangerous, because by the time that development process is over, the trend is likely to be over as well. That means the new brand no longer has a good target audience- interest in the brand has evaporated.
This point follows from the first one. The launch of a new brand must have a specific plan behind it. It is not enough to simply decide to open up a new brand and hope for the best, while raising awareness as much as possible. Instead, design the brand with a certain target audience in mind. Most people do this already. More importantly, all of the materials and marketing surrounding the launch itself need to follow this same targeted pattern. If the target audience doesn’t know about the brand and understand how it can add value for them, then how are they supposed to buy it? Structure the launch so that the target demo sees the brand and learns about it before and during the launch, so that their interest will be stoked enough for them to make a purchase, and the launch will be a success. Of course, this is easier said than done.

One of the larger challenges associated with the launch of a new brand is coordination. The marketing team needs to prepare a lot of different things in the same short time period- brand design, a strategic plan for marketing the brand once it has launched, a plan for launch day, how to market the brand during the leadup to launch day, and so on. There are a lot of marketing responsibilities that will be lost if the team does not coordinate their efforts. The result can wind up looking contradictory, low-effort, or unappealing when the teams working on different parts of the launch don’t talk to each other.
Launching a new brand is a complex problem that requires careful thought and planning. In fact, one of the most valuable ways to get some insight into the way you are running a brand launch is through consulting a marketing firm like us. At DotCom Web Design, we take pride in the fact that we have helped oversee the launch of many client brands. Our strategic abilities and experience mean that we know quite a bit about the best thing to do for your brand launch. We understand the depth of the problem and how many different moving parts need to come together in order for it to go just right.
Launching new brands isn’t the only service we have. There are many different marketing and strategy areas with which we can assist you. We believe that the synergy between different members of our teams with different experiences and specializations is what sets us apart- we know what a brand launch should look like not just because we have helped launch brands before, but because we have so much experience working with brands at all parts of their life cycle that we know exactly what they need.

This is much more than just a job for us- providing great value through marketing and strategy is our passion. There is nothing we love more than seeing how all of our effort pays off in the form of a better bottom line for you, the client. That is a core part of our philosophy- the focus of marketing should be on how it improves the brand’s performance in terms of real business measures, like sales and revenue. We stand by the fact that marketing is more than just putting a brand name in people’s heads- it’s a way to contribute to the core value of the business.