Business Brand Awareness

I teach a mix of Modern History, Ancient History, and also Business. My real passion is my Modern History subject, but my first degree and job was in the business filed.Every year in my senior business class we have a unit on Marketing. We started about a week ago, and this week we did an activity that everyone enjoys -  The Blind Taste Test. We started talking about the Marketing Mix -The 4 P's; Product, place, Promotion and Price. The first focus is the actual Product and establishing the Brand. We discussed packaging, labels, name, symbols, colours and how the actual product needs to stand out in crowded marketplaces. I introduced branding with a few short clips and then we do an activity based on the top Superbowl adverts of the year.

What is Branding?

Superbowl Top Ads from 2013

The lesson explains how important is creating your brand image, and what the major companies do to promote and safeguard their images. I'm planning on the next lesson to link how they create their own brand on the internet by their activity on social media, and how to actively build it and protect themselves.

So 'The Blind Taste Test':

I have 4 different well known brands and 4 store brands. The items are placed in bowls and numbered. They then have to try them and write down which product they think it is. The brand names included Schweppes Lemonade, Doritos, Allens and Tim Tams. These brands are what the kids grow up with, what their families buy and which they identify with when thinking of these products. It is a fun lesson, and by the end of it everyone is usually quite surprised by the results. For most of the products they preferred the no-name/store brand products. They believed that they were eating the well known brand name, the 'better tasting' product, but they were wrong in more than half the results. This was to highlight how the actual brand, with its reputation, packaging and emotional connections, actually influence our purchasing habits. their all time favourite chocolate biscuit, Tim Tams faired the worst. Only 2 out of 10 identified it right, they were shocked by this. Helps with putting the point across about expectations.

 

 

Everyone had a great time and at the end the message came through clearly on how branding influences our purchasing habits. This will hopefully make them consider what products they buy next time they go shopping.