Consumer education : The right path to build a brand!

Brand Knowledge is a function of awareness, which relates to consumers’ ability to recognize or recall the brand, and image, which consists of consumers’ perceptions and of associations for the brand

A strange feature at a popular branded watch store made me realize one thing. When people at the board room, decide to come up with a concept of teaching their customers about usage of their products and brands , does it ever really trickle down to the store level with that same intensity ,enthusiasm or spirit .

Do their lower level employees see any value in teaching their customers , how to use it the right way ?

This particular watch store i was referring to , had a beautifully designed board , which read Do’s and Dont’s for a watch.A very useful and knowledgeable info , which can be immensely useful to the customer . Yet, it didn’t serve its intended purpose , because it was hung inside the servicing room/storage area where no one else can enter and see.

Whats the point of hanging a information board inside the store room , to be read by the service mechanics and the employees ?

The “brandpower.in – helping you buy better” advertisements is a great initiative to start a concept called consumer education in India , but the the brand associations and the promotion of their supporting brands are so obvious and ends up like one of those typical Surf Excel ads , that people actually switch it off , or do not really register in their minds

Very few brands have adopted this concept and there’s a major gap between the developer or the manufacturer’s recommended way of using, and the way the buyer actually ends up using it .

Consumer education is not about teaching the interface , or operating the machine with the buttons , or giving a thick manual to read from. It’s about reaching to the customer , helping them to ease things, teach them to use the product in a more productive manner , which can increase performance and longevity and thereby improving customer satisfaction

When a person uses a product in a wrong way , for example , he charges his Nokia cell the entire night with a charger , the battery life comes down drastically and finally goes off.The person , though , assumes that the quality of the Nokia cell or the battery is poor and advocates to people to buy something else.
Little does one realize , its not because of the poor quality that the product fails, but because of a wrong usage of it , that ultimately causes it to stop working .

If a brand new shirt has shrunk or the color faded , one does normally argue , that the store guy failed to tell me the proper way to wash this particular kind of fabric ?
The employee argues , my job is to sell , if he wants to know the method , ask him to read the tag in the product or read up the entire manual

Whose fault is that ?
The buyer , who used it in the wrong way or the brand ,who failed to teach the customer the recommended and proper usage of the product ?

Advantages :

• Your clients turn out to be the biggest Product champions and end up doing consumer advocacy when they become comfortable with that brand , and know its way in and out, using it to the maximum efficiency.
• The usage and usability of product increases which can increase longevity or performance hence improve the brand image
• A huge brand loyalty following
• Comfortable and ease factor while usage
• Increased marketing communication effectiveness
• Greater perceived differentiation and brand equity