Christ university department of professional studies research proposal

Brand activation can be defined as a marketing process of bringing a brand to life through creation of brand experience. Brand experience essentially requires the customers to live out some essence of a brand in physical form. It includes participation in events conducted by the brand, trying out samples of the product, witnessing demonstration of the product, and so on. Hence, in simpler words, brand activation is a process in which the targeted customers are directly associated with the brand in the form of an event conducted by the brand.

Brand Awareness

Brand Awareness is defined as the extent to which the consumer is familiar with distinct features of images of a particular brand or company of products or service. It is the likelihood that the consumers would recognize the existence and availability of a company’s product or service. Brand KnowledgeBrand knowledge is defined as awareness of the brand name and belief about the brand image. Brand knowledge refers to all of the thoughts, feelings, images, experiences, and beliefs that become associated with a brand. It is a broader concept than brand awareness as it also includes customers’ interaction with the brand elements, not merely awareness about them.

Statement of the Problem

Conventional media of marketing and communication like television, radio, print, billboards, banners, hoardings, social media, etc are becoming more and more congested day by day. On an average, a consumer gets exposed to over 5000 different marketing communication everyday through different media but only pays attention to 2% of it and retains mere 0. 5% of such messages. Therefore, millions of rupees spent on advertisement go waste as it fails to reach the target audience. Moreover, communication through these channels lacks personal touch and lacks incentive for targeted audience to participate in it.

A strong need was felt to come up with an effective marketing tool that would overcome the shortcomings of conventional media and attracts more attention from the consumers and give them a strong personal response from the brand or the company. Companies increasingly started coming up with Brand Activation programs in past few years. Review of LiteratureThe excerpt from the book ‘ Building Strong Brands’ fundamentally talks about the importance of brand activation and its role in the overall marketing strategy of an organization. It emphasizes on three key features of brand activation strategy which are critical for its success.

Firstly, creating a positive experience leverages the recall value of the brand along with creating a strong, favorable and unique association with it. Secondly, the brand activation activity should deliver the promises made by the brand in their slogan and ad campaigns. And lastly, brand activation should be interactive so as to generate immediate feedback from the consumers in terms of both brand salience and revenue. (Aaker and David, 2013)There have been many brands that do the activation from the sampling to be involved in various events at school, shops, malls, to the road-show around the region.

The goal of such activation is to make the consumer feel first-hand experience provided by the brand. Some even used the game as media brand activation, but the game was still physical. (Hatammimi, 2011)This research provides important link by validating the credibility of field-based brand activation. A lot of companies, including Coca Cola are skeptical about limited reach and less return-on-investment on field-based brand activation. This article justifies by establishing a long term link between investment and the benefits derived from it. (Sharon and Houston, 2009)

The research will use secondary information from Coca Cola’s zonal office located in Bangalore as well as from information available on public domain, primarily on internet, including Coca Cola’s Annual Report for 2012 – 2013.

Sample Size and Sampling Technique

A sample of 100 people is to be used for collecting responses on questionnaire for this project. Sample will be selected as per the convenient method whereby, the sample will be selected depending on the availability and ease of approaching as well as respondent’s willingness to respond to the questionnaire. It has to be carefully planned so as to maintain the diversity in terms of demographics for the final respondents.

The data collected from multiple sources shall be channelized into meaningful information by application of various statistical tools on it so as to derive meaningful results from it and achieve the objective of the research. The primary source of data is responses that will be collected on a carefully drafted questionnaire for meeting the objectives of the research. Secondary data used in this research will comprise of information collected for review of industry and the company. It can also be used as source for drawing inferences from interpretation of data that will be obtained from primary sources. Sources of secondary data include online refered journals and web articles. It also includes reading on various websites and blogs as well as text books.