Overview: You have recently joined a branding team where the objective is to increase brand sales. Part One: Brand Performance and Opportunities for Growth (estimate 400 words): Your first task is t

Overview: You have recently joined a branding team where the objective is to increase brand sales.

Part One: Brand Performance and Opportunities for Growth (estimate 400 words):

Your first task is to provide a brief introduction of your brand that outlines key brand milestones, such as how long it has existed, its current owner and markets it operates within both inside and outside of Australia.  

Identify key competitors for the brand and present in a table that shows their brand share. Justify your choice of two to compare and contrast with your brand.

Identify the current challenges to growing brands in the allocated market and the performance of your brand based on industry data available via the library's marketing guide.

Briefly explain how to build Mental Availability for the brand.  

Draw on the text, course references and library sources (use the Marketing guide Company and Industry information to search for relevant information to support your discussion.

Part Two: Brand Audit (estimate 800 words):

Draw on industry publications and conduct an online brand audit of campaigns and other activities that could build Mental Availability for your brand and the two chosen competitors. Industry publications can help with your critique of marketing campaigns or branding efforts, e.g. B&T, Advertising Age or articles from the WARC database. The brand's website, YouTube and social media sites should also be examined as part of the brand audit for Part Two. Please note that social media is only one aspect of a brand's integrated marketing campaigns, so it is important to consider activities in all media channels for a review of Mental Availability. Add examples into an Appendix (not included in word count) and in the report consolidate details into a summary that covers the following points:

Begin the audit with a brief overview of marketing efforts of the brand to grow Mental Availability, critique efforts against evidence on how to grow brands (refer to examples in your appendix of all three brands reviewed - at least five examples of marketing activities for each brand to give a minimum of 15 examples across all brands).

Next, focus specifically on the messaging and branding execution in relation to building Mental Availability. Examine brand messaging across the market for three brands (your brand and two others).  Clearly label examples in your appendix to indicate timing of use and media used for campaigns.

Discuss the type of links being built in the minds of category buyers? Are these being built only with your brand? Write from the perspective of your allocated brand and discuss how successful they are likely to be based on your knowledge of what is needed to build Mental Availability.

Provide a summary table that visually shows potential Distinctive Assets. In the table use rows to group different potential types of DA's. In columns add in visual examples of their use. The first column shows potential DA's for your brand, then repeat the same information for the two chosen competitors. Add in examples from any other brands from the category that look similar to DAs being used by your brand.

Reference the DA table in a discussion of the uniqueness of DAs. Explain what research is required before making changes to the brand's identity and why having consistent execution of branding is important.

Conclude with a recommended DA Palette that identifies existing DAs to test.  Identify if there are any DA types missing that would be useful to build and explain why.

Part Three: Recommendations (estimate 400 words):

Conclude with recommendations on how the brand can improve its Mental Availability.  Explain how strategies suggested can help the brand to grow.

Highlight anything considered essential for successful execution and include specific metrics suggested to evaluate if Mental Availability has changed following execution of your recommendations.

Length: 1600 words, plus a minimum of 15 references and 15 brand examples (across all brands in the sector critiqued). There is no ‘magic number’ of articles or references to use but any claims you make require sources to strengthen your argument. Use the submission template and add headings, because this will provide clarity in the assignment.