---
title: "Why Would Anyone Be So Determined to Build a Brand?"
description: "Many companies aspire to build a brand, but brand is merely a means to make money, not the ultimate goal. Whether to build a brand depends on the customer type and development stage; for B2B or early-stage companies, it may not be necessary."
author: "空手"
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published: "2019-08-07"
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# Why Would Anyone Be So Determined to Build a Brand?

> Many companies aspire to build a brand, but brand is merely a means to make money, not the ultimate goal. Whether to build a brand depends on the customer type and development stage; for B2B or early-stage companies, it may not be necessary.

Click to read the original text for details.
I've visited many companies, and as soon as I walk in, I see huge slogans painted on the walls like "Build a century-old brand." When I chat with the boss, he'll tell you that our corporate mission is to create a well-known brand, an international brand, a century-old brand.
But if you ask him how to build the brand, larger companies might say, "Look, we've invested in advertising." More companies will tell you, "Look, we've designed a brand manual, published many soft articles, and even paid someone to write a brand story, created a LOGO and VI..."
It sounds quite...
Do companies really need to build a brand? If a company is doing well, why not focus on making money instead of constantly thinking about building a brand?
Moreover, is building a brand just about advertising and creating materials?
You should know that building a brand is not the fundamental purpose of a company's existence; the brand is just a means.
**What is the brand a means for? Of course, it's a means for the company to make money.**
**The fundamental purpose of a company's existence is to create customers, exchange high-value products with customers, thereby retaining customers and earning profits.**
What does the brand have to do with this?
A company only needs to produce good products (improve quality, control costs, optimize technology), and then strive to seek trading opportunities with customers (build channels, do communication, and promotion). That's it.
**The role of the brand is to help the company make money continuously and at a high premium.**
**Continuous profit-making—**
Customers are not just one-off transactions; they become loyal users and continue to purchase.
This requires using the brand to establish a relationship with customers, making them trust, like, and identify with you, believing that your brand represents their image, attitude, and lifestyle. This way, you can continue to make money from them.
**High-premium profit-making—**
The same car, with a Porsche badge, is more expensive than with a Zotye badge. This is the value of the brand. The brand can enhance customers' perception of product value and give the brand intangible value.
Especially emotional and symbolic value (or cultural and social value). The brand creates a high premium for the product, helping the company earn excess profits.
**These two roles are from the perspective of product value. Additionally, from the perspective of expanding customer trading opportunities, the brand has two more roles: reducing customers' search costs and decision costs.**
**Reducing search costs—**
The brand can improve communication efficiency, allowing more people to know and understand you faster, distinguishing you from other brands. The brand helps customers choose what they want to buy more quickly and conveniently, reducing the cost and time of gathering information and comparing different products.
**Reducing decision costs—**
People always think that big brands are better and more reliable, and choosing a big brand is not wrong. Because the brand means trust; it is an endorsement of quality.
At the same time, since humans are social animals, we often consider others' opinions when purchasing products. The brand means gaining recognition from others, and buying certain brands can improve our status and image in social groups, thereby reducing social identity risk and helping customers make purchase decisions faster.
Since the brand has so many benefits, does every company need to build a brand? No.
**First, it depends on who your customers are and what their core needs are when purchasing your products.**
If your customer base is extremely limited, communication is close, information is symmetrical, and they only care about physical attributes when buying, not emotional value, then building a brand has little value.
For example, B2B companies. Let's take an example: you are a company producing car batteries, and your customers are a few new energy vehicle companies.
Do you need to build a brand to increase awareness and expand your customer base? No, because you have only a few customers; a visit will let them know you. Why advertise?
Do you need to build a brand to increase product added value and give the product emotion and personality? No, because your customers probably only care about physical indicators such as battery quality, price, safety, technical level, range, and lifespan.
Do you need to build a brand to establish customer relationships and form long-term transactions? Yes, you need to build relationships with car company customers, but you don't need to do it through branding. It's more practical to visit them more often, send WeChat messages during holidays, and give gifts.
**B2B companies don't need a brand, but they need marketing.**
Understand customer needs and industry trends; thereby formulate correct product strategies, improve product quality and technical standards, reduce costs; establish distribution channels and promotion teams; and do a good job in customer CRM management.
**Second, the brand is a high-dimensional design of the company. Companies in the early stages of development do not need to start brand strategy too early. It's better to focus on products and channels, and quickly expand territory.**
Many companies start with certain resources held by the founder, such as supply chain or channel resources. Gradually, when resources are almost used up and the company's growth hits a bottleneck, they think of building a brand and advertising.
In the era of traditional media, especially when TV dominated, companies could just pay the media, shoot a TVC, no matter how stupid the ad was, whether it shouted "sales are far ahead" or "industry leader," they could create awareness. With awareness, they could recruit nationwide distributors, open stores, and stock products, then make money from awareness.
Investing in advertising to create awareness is something any company or local boss can do; it has no technical content. But awareness is not equal to a brand; a brand is a systematic project. Creating awareness is easy, but building a brand is difficult.
A brand is not built in a day. Building a brand means all-around investment, from product innovation, design optimization, store packaging to refined management, customer experience design, advertising, brand image enhancement, brand value design, and brand connotation extraction.
Each of these items means a huge investment of manpower and financial resources. Building a brand requires a professional team proficient in brand management and operations; it also requires a lot of money for optimization, improvement, and promotion.
Not every company has the ability and motivation to build a brand. So many companies retreat; they just want to make quick money and easy money.
In recent years, we have seen too many brands that were famous in the TV era decline and die; or abandon the industry and investment in building the brand, turning to faster money-making industries such as real estate and investment.
In China, there are many successful companies. Their initial development was due to filling a market gap; their growth came from enjoying certain dividends, such as demographic dividends, channel dividends, and media dividends.
But when the dividends disappear, market competition becomes fierce, and there is no gap at all, the good days are gone. At this time, the value of the brand emerges.
**The brand is powerful, but it also means you must pay more and invest more to get the returns from the brand.**
Take the agricultural products industry, for example. The degree of branding has always been relatively low. Why? On the one hand, customers don't pay much attention to brand differentiation and added value of agricultural products. When buying a cabbage, I only care if it's delicious, safe, and cheap; I don't need brand connotation or emotional value. On the other hand, agricultural products usually have low profit margins, so there is no money to build a brand.
Another example is the development of e-commerce in recent years. At first, everyone didn't care about repurchase rate and customer churn rate; they only focused on customer acquisition, because the cost of acquiring customers was low. The cost of acquiring a new customer is far lower than the cost of maintaining an old customer, so why build a brand? It's better to quickly attract people and expand capacity.
This is the result of the demographic dividend caused by internetization. But as the traffic dividend peaks and customer acquisition costs rise, e-commerce must focus on managing old customers, increasing repurchase rates, and reducing customer churn to amortize the increasingly high acquisition costs.
This is the meaning of the brand; the brand is a weapon for cultivating fans and loyal users.
As mentioned earlier, the brand is a means for companies to make money, but it is a high-dimensional means after the dividend is exhausted. So if your company still has dividends to enjoy, congratulations, you don't need to worry about building a brand so early.
But it's always right to prepare for a rainy day; dividends cannot last forever.
Moreover, **if you are just running a business, you can be a successful businessman or boss. But only by building a successful brand can you be called an entrepreneur.**


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