Brand Marketing: Is it still important in the 21st Century?

Answering whether brand marketing is still important in the 21^st century or not really depends on a company’s or individual’s focus. In short, yes, brand marketing is important but to understand the complexity of the question, let’s look at a few other questions that define the worth of brand marketing in the 21^st century.

Does the individual want to make money or be famous? A lot of entrepreneurs really just need and want to make an income. Having a brand is the furthest idea from their minds. Plus, brand marketing is a lot work especially if your service is regional. A plumber doesn’t really care whether someone knows his name 300 miles away from where he lives and conducts business. The basic necessity of earning a wage makes brand marketing unimportant but there are still plenty of people who dream of reaching higher heights which makes it undoubtedly vital.

Brand marketing creates a legacy for one’s heirs and pushes the business into perpetuity. For those individuals who have children and grandchildren to support, successful brand marketing is the key to ensuring the life of the business or product. The brand may become very lucrative and even after the creator or founder is gone, it may continue to support other family members.

Brand marketing can mean a lot of money if bought out. When a product or service develops an identity or personality of its own, it is worth much more as a brand, then when someone is just selling a business that depends solely on herself. If you own a design agency and you create all the designs for clients, you could sell your client list, but the business is not worth much without you. But as a brand, it has intangible value which can be quite appealing to a potential buyer. Even having the license to a brand is profitable.

I think there are still many excellent reasons why brand marketing is still important in the 21^st century, but I can also see why many entrepreneurs do not share the vision. If you look back a hundred years ago at the major companies in existence, the focus of the owners was to have their names on everything. Car manufacturers and retail stores all carried the names of their founders. Joint ventures were named after the two who owned them. Names were brands and it was expected that to be successful, your name had to mean something.

Further, back then, business dictated that your brand had to be the biggest and the best. Everything had to revolve around the owners’ names. Companies had plants and offices in many cities, the more the better. The mindset of earlier entrepreneurs was to control every piece of their operations. To be seen as successful, you had to have large numbers of subsidiary locations. Today, businesses are more inclined to outsource. And in a way, this dilutes the original form of branding. Today’s business owners do not necessarily see the need for their names to be on everything. Cutting costs is the most important factor to the business.

But having said that, it still remains that brand marketing is an important facet of many modern day businesses. For many reasons, CEOs and sole proprietors see the wisdom in developing an image that makes their brand stand out from the crowd. Thus, it means that brand marketing is still important in the 21^st century.