Brand marketing is the work a company does to make people know, trust and choose its brand, before and after a new product goes on sale. For a single launch, it has four stages: asking customers what they think, making the content, staging the launch, and listening to what people say afterwards. Each stage has its own software.
Take, for example, a sports-shoe brand in Bengaluru that is launching a new running shoe at ₹4,999. Months before the launch, the marketing team wants to know what runners think. How much would they pay? What do they dislike about their current shoes? The team writes a questionnaire in survey software. It buys 2,000 answers from runners through online research panels: groups of people who are paid a small amount for each survey they answer. It also shows three draft launch videos to 200 runners. Emotion AI reads their faces through their webcams, so the team sees which moments held their attention.
Next, the content is made. Designers edit the photos and draw the banners in graphic design software. Every website and app needs the banner in its own size, so generative AI for marketing content makes forty versions of it, in the brand's own colours and style. A designer checks and approves them. A marketing executive who is not a designer makes a short animated video about the shoe's new sole with video creation software.
Then comes the launch day. An event management platform runs the launch event in Bengaluru and a live webinar for runners in other cities. PR software sends the press release to journalists. PR, or public relations, is the team that manages how the press and the public see the company.
The brand also pays running coaches and fitness creators on social media to post about the shoe. Each post carries a shopping link. Through affiliate links for creators, a follower buys through the link, the creator earns a commission, and the brand sees which post led to the sale. This is called marketing attribution. On the shoebox, a QR code opens a running plan on the buyer's phone. This is connected packaging, and it tells the brand how many buyers scanned the box, and in which cities.
After the launch, the brand listens. Social listening software reads every post, news story and video that mentions the shoe, in English, Hindi, Kannada and other languages. It sorts them into pleased and angry, which is called sentiment analysis. If a customer posts a video of a sole coming off, the brand sees it within minutes and can answer.
How does brand marketing differ from sending messages to customers one by one? A brand campaign is addressed to everyone at once. Messages to each customer, by email, SMS or app notification, are sent from a customer engagement platform.