Is your Brand Genuine or Sponsered?

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So, You probably would be thinking what genuine Brand and Sponsored Brand. Right?

Let's get to know what it is then.

First of all, Sponsored Brand means a brand created by extensive use of Advertisements without involving the customers view on the products.

Genuine Brand is something created by the customers itself and with spending very low budget on advertisements.

Let's take a real-life example in India. We are seeing two mobile companies using huge sum of money on advertising.

Note: I am not a promoter for any mobile brand. I am not writing this in the fever of anyone. This is just my opinion and I am taking their example to show the differences here ok. I am not against the companies or I don't want to say their marketing strategies is mediocre. So, don't get angry or something.;)


I think you might have already guessed the names. Yes, OPPO and VIVO. I can bet that there is not a single city you go to India and can't see posters of OPPO and VIVO. Even they give the sellers to renovate the shop in their branding OPPO or VIVO. You may go to any market area to buy something and see whole shops in green or blue branding and advertising OPPO and VIVO respectively.

I am not saying they are wrong. But, does it help to increase sells of their mobile? Yes. It helps a lot they are selling great numbers of mobile without a doubt. But they are not the #1 in India. You again guessed it right. :)

As we all know it's Xiaomi. While OPPO and VIVO spend their money on advertising their brand Xiaomi spend money on research and development to provide the best low budget mobile to their customers. They know very well the Indian market and try to understand the need of middle-class people to provide the best mobile in the budget of an average middle-class person can afford. Long story short, they put money in developing better product rather than advertising in every street of India.

What they use is genuine marketing while OPPO or VIVO use is sponsored marketing. We Indian people buy things from advertisements a lot but that doesn't mean we will buy the things if you just advertise it all around us. It's not just that, we become wary of these kinds of Brands because we think that they are spending this much money on advertisements that means something is fishy here. The product must not be very good and that's why they are using extensive advertisements to market their product. And in the last many people don't buy from them because they are irritated by the extensive advertisements the company has done.

While on the other side people using MI phone do the advertisement themselves to their close friends and relatives because the product is affordable and with good quality. So, they don't need that type of extensive advertisements to attract customers. Nowadays it's not easy to fool people just buy advertising. That's the reason we should not go for the sponsored brand and try to build a genuine brand.

This is the main difference between Sponsored and Genuine brand.

The next example is on genuine Brand.

For genuine brand let's take an example of UBER. They didn't put the money in advertising and put that money in giving FREE rides to the customers. When a customer uses the FREE ride he/she will get the experience of what it is like to use their service and if they had a great experience then they will come back for another ride. And then another. Once they are feel good using the UBER they will also recommend it to their friends and eventually, the name of UBER will become a Brand with the really engaging customers rather than just Advertising. We need to know that today customers are well aware of advertising policy and they don't usually fall for the advertisements. So, creating a brand through advertising may help you but that will be costly on the other hand only advertising agencies will get benefited from that. Try to give some free valuable to the customers so that they can experience the marvel of your products and connect with your product creating a brand.

Now, you may say that you can't give your product for free then try to give huge discounts and offers to your customers. Last month Zomato had an offer called "No Cooking December" they can't give their service for free so they figured a way out a way and put it to 50% discount. When you order from Zomato for the first time you also get a 50% discount. In that way, you get at least one-time experience and if you really like their service you won't hesitate to give some extra money for good service next time. This is the way they used to create Genuine Brand for their company. Rather than giving the money to advertising companies, they give 50% discounts to the customers so both can be in the win-win situation they are creating their brand and you are getting benefitted from that.

Use the way of Genuine Brand to build your brand rather than the old fashioned way of Advertising.