What is Brand Advertising in Japan? Explanation and Tips for Success

What is Brand Advertising?

What does brand advertising look like?

Brand advertising in Japan refers to advertising that is used to increase awareness and understanding of a company, its products, or services, and to establish a positive image of them.
As the name suggests, it is advertising for “branding.”

So the goal is to increase awareness and understanding and establish an image?
What does it mean to do that?

Features of Brand Advertising

In Japan, brand advertising is advertising to strengthen and improve the brand power of a company or the products and services it offers.
It aims to increase awareness and understanding of the company itself, its products, and services, and to create a positive image.

Brand advertising does not directly aim to get people to buy the product or service.
The goal of brand advertising is to create the perception among customers that “XXX is that product!”, “XXX is that company!”
This is how products and services are naturally sold.

Originally, this was done through mass media such as TV commercials, newspapers, and magazines, but recently, many brand advertising using video has been distributed on social networking services (SNS), such as Twitter and YouTube, and the web.

Differences from Response Advertising

The opposite role of brand advertising is response advertising.

Response advertising aims to obtain a specific response (purchase, inquiry, request for information, etc.) from the person who saw the advertisement.

To deliver advertisements efficiently to the target audience, this type of advertising is often used in direct mailings, Web listings, banner advertisements, and other forms of advertising.
To directly encourage users to respond, response advertising includes information on the price and content of the product or service, as well as where to make purchases and where to inquire about it.

Brand advertising and response advertising have different expected results for businesses.
Therefore, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of each to effectively manage them.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Brand Advertising

The following are the advantages and disadvantages of using brand advertising.

Advantages

The number one advantage of brand advertising is that it is effective for branding.

Branding is a marketing technique that increases the value of a brand by raising awareness of a company, product, or service and creating a good image among customers.
Successful branding can have the following effects.

• Differentiation from other companies
• Increase the number of repeat customers
• Able to set aggressive pricing
• Reduce advertising and sales resources

Branding adds value to your brand, making your brand’s products “the products of this company/brand” valuable to your customers.
This will make your products and services a natural choice for your customers.

Brand advertising is one of the ways to promote branding.
Therefore, it can be said the benefits of branding = the benefits of brand advertising.

Disadvantages

While brand advertising has the great advantage of “helping to brand,” it also has the following possible disadvantages.

It takes time and cost before the effect is shown.

The purpose of brand advertising is to increase brand awareness, understanding, and image.
Therefore, unlike response advertising, it does not lead to an immediate purchase.

It takes time for a brand to establish itself. And how much time is unknown.
Therefore, one aspect of brand advertising is that ad placements are long-term and costly.

Effectiveness is difficult to measure and analyze.

In response advertising, when evaluating the effectiveness of an advertisement, the indicator is “how many responses were actually received.”
This is very easy to understand because the effectiveness of the advertisement is expressed in numerical values, such as the number of orders or inquiries.
On the other hand, such quantification is difficult with brand advertising.

In addition, branding is usually carried out through various other means in addition to placing brand advertising.
Therefore, even if sales actually increase as a result of successful branding, it may be difficult to clarify whether the increase is a result of brand advertising or non-advertising means.

It is difficult to compete with strong competition.

If there is already a successful branded competitor in the area in which you wish to launch brand advertising, you will have considerable difficulty in establishing your position over their brand.
Careful consideration must be given beforehand to ensure that the results are worth the cost.

Surprisingly, there are some disadvantages.
In particular, we have no control over the fact that it is difficult when there is a competitor.

Certainly, if your goal is to increase sales in the short term, brand advertising is not the way to go.
This is because branding itself requires a long-term, strategic perspective.
Conversely, if your company succeeds in branding, you will be in a position to be unmoved by the entry of other companies.

I see.
Besides working on it early, it seems “which field to fight in” is also important.

What to do to make brand advertising successful

Since brand advertising is one means of branding promotion, a major key to the success of brand advertising is to have a solid strategy for branding itself.

Analyze your company’s products and services

First, it is important to thoroughly analyze your company’s strengths and features and understand what appeals to customers.
From this, you will be able to determine to whom, in what terms, and with what image you should present your products and services.

Careful target setting

Set the target audience for your advertisement in detail.
Without detailed characterization, the information and message to be conveyed will be blurred and the content will not touch anyone’s heart.

Take a long-term perspective

As mentioned above, branding is not something that can be completed overnight.
Even once brand awareness and image have been established, it is necessary to maintain that awareness and image thereafter.
When managing brand advertising, it is important to work for the long term and not be concerned with immediate costs or sales increases or decreases.

About Branding Strategy

For an overview and explanation of branding strategy, please refer to this article.

Summary

Brand advertisements are advertisements that are launched to promote branding and help increase awareness and build brand image.
They do not directly sell products or services but aim to become the company, product, or service “chosen by customers” through branding, and therefore require a long-term strategy and plan.

Branding requires the establishment of a “trademark” related to the name of the product or service.
And to use the trademark safely for a long time, “trademark registration” is essential.

For those who are registering a trademark in Japan for the first time, we recommend Amazing DX!
Amazing DX is an online service for trademark search, application, and registration in Japan operated by a major international patent firm.
It is a revolutionary service that offers easy operation, reasonable prices, and reliable procedures by professionals.

Please use this convenient online tool to successfully brand your products and services!