The Essay Explores The Brand Hierarchy And Value Of Toyota Automobiles Company.

Brief Description of Toyota Automobiles Company

Discuss about the Communication and Promotion Decisions Making.

Brand management is the planning that defines how brand will recognize in the market to achieve the targeted goals (Qian, 2014). This report will emphasize the brief description of Toyota Automobiles Company and its brand hierarchy. The values of the product are important for the company as it helps to enhance the brand image of the company. The appropriate strategies will be identified to for a product and the importance of brand elements will be described with the help of promotional tools.

Toyota Motor Corporation is a Japanese Multinational automotive manufacturer company that headquarter is in Toyota, Aichi, Japan. It is the leader of selling number of hybrid electric vehicles, and one of the largest company that motivate the mass-market adoption of hybrid vehicles all over the world. It has more than 360,000 employees worldwide and it was the 5^th largest company in the world by revenue (Chiarini & Vagnoni, 2015). The brand quality of the products of Toyota is superior. The market position of the company is strong in different geographic across the world. There are various products offered by Company such as Cars and minivans, Hybrids &RV, Crossovers &SUVs and trucks (Coyle, 2013). It is providing various factors to the customer for buying a new car such as quality, safety, performance, values, fuel economy, technology and design.

A brand hierarchy summarizes the branding strategy by showing the figure and nature of common and characteristics brand elements across the company’s products, enlightening the precise ordering of brand elements (Chart, Industry & Industry, 2010). The brand hierarchy of Toyota is given below:

Functional value is based on the product characteristics that offer the consumers with functional utility. It has huge functional benefits that have the effective impact with consumers and sustain the firm position of the products relative to competitors.

Emotional value provides the positive feeling to the customer at the time of purchasing product of particular brand. It helps to adjoin depth and richness to the experience of using the brand. It enhances the emotional benefits and includes the feel-good factor (Durrani, Ravnløkke & Niinimäki, 2016).

Social value denotes the high importance of something or action that increase the value of the products. It refers to broader financial and non-financial impacts of organization, programmes and involvement which include the welfare of the communities and the environment (Thakor and Katsanis, 2011).

Brand Hierarchy of Toyota

It is effective value that provides the opportunity to someone to express him self-image to others. It helps to increase the connection between the customer and brand by considering on something that is connected to his or her personality.

Toyota has the values of products and it is very successful due to its superior quality in the products. The functional, self-expression, social and emotional values are associated with Toyota in an effective manner. The descriptions of these values with Toyota are defined below:

The functional values are higher in Toyota Company as PD and PE engineers work together to improve geometry and enlarge Laser Screw Welding (LSW) technology. It helps to take less time of conventional spot welding and less space of the floor to provide the effective body of the cars (Morgan, 2016). Toyota Company does not compromise with quality and nothing less would have been acceptable. Another priority regarding product of Toyota is to decrease weight to enhance fuel efficiency.

The social value of Toyota is effective as it contributes in its founding principles. It has been taken various actions in various fields such as society and culture, education, environment and traffic safety to enrich the lives of the communities. Toyota has great contribution in activities to protect the environment such as forestry activities to make the sustainable society, Global Environmental Protection and Preservation and many more. The involvements of Toyota in various social activities help to enhance the value of the products in the view of customers.

Toyota is using various strategies to promote its brand to the market. As a Brand Manager, it has been found that Toyota use the Pinterest boards to put together motivational content which is an effective approach in comparison of traditional print and media advertising. The brand of Toyota comes across as friendly and appealing to the emotional aspects of customers without being the artificial.

A self expressive benefit is linked with the personality of the customer permanently. The brand personality of Toyota cars builds self-expressive advantages that the customer can utter his personality by this brand. It is based as per the brand customer relationship and differentiation.

There are various strategies for a product that would be helpful to handle within the brand hierarchy. These strategies are branding strategy, pricing strategy, brand extension strategy and Brand leveraging strategy. Branding strategy involves number of the levels of brand hierarchy. It can be handled within the brand hierarchy by linking brand elements to multiple products. There are different products of Toyota in Hierarchy that is why it is necessary to manufacture the cars as per the affordability of the different people. Pricing strategy would be helpful to distinguish the rates of the car as per the features. A brand leveraging strategy uses the power of existing brand to increase the competition without producing new products, it interest into new market (Kim & Hall, 2015). Brand extension strategy includes two kinds of strategies such as centralized and decentralized. Centralized strategy refers the leverage of extension of the parent position, reputation and brand name the revenues for a business. Decentralized brand extension strategy defines the leverage’s extensions in manufacturing, delivery and economies of scale but in this strategy, the parent name do not share in the new market (Delgado-Ballester & Fernandez Sabiote, 2015). These strategies are useful for Toyota which helps to handle the brand hierarchy of Toyota in an appropriate manner.

Values of Toyota Products

Toyota is famous for its trucks, cars and related to automobile product all over the world. The logo of Toyota is having the simplicity with significant meaning.  The logo of Toyota is mentioned below:

Promotional tools help to encourage the number of customers to switch the brand or trial a product. The importance of promotional tool in brand element is huge as it helps to buyer identify the need to make a purchase. Buyers of Toyota’s product can be able to evaluate products after the purchase and compare advantages and features of competing products with the help of promotional tools (Mangold & Faulds, 2009). There are some promotional tools mentioned which can be effective for brand elements of Toyota.

Advertising: Advertising is an effective promotional tool that facilitates buyer to identify the requirement of purchase to make a purchase. The brand elements of Toyota can be effective with the help of advertising as it can approach number of customers at one time. Advertising can be done via television, radio, and newspaper and posting banners.

Personal Selling: personal selling is the approach where Toyota hires the people to sell the products after meeting face to face with the customers. It increases the high customer attention towards the product and opportunity to close the sale. The main advantage of this approach is that it can maintain the customers’ loyalty.

Sales Promoting: it supports customer to trial a product or switch brands. It can use both media and non-media marketing communication for increasing the demand of the customers. Buyers of Toyota’s product can choose the product that are a good value and decided to buy them.  It is the best technique to communicate information to the customers about the product (Shamout, 2016).

Public Relations: it is an effective strategic communication process that help to create the mutually relationship between organization and publics. There are public relations professional in Toyota who contributes to make it success all over the world because the successful brand always comes from customer with their support for the company brand (Ailawadi, Beauchamp, Donthu, Gauri & Shankar, 2009).

Direct Marketing: direct marketing focuses limited resources on targeted promotion. It is an effective promotional tool which helps to increase the revenues of Toyota Company by selling number of products of it. Brand elements can be influenced due to this promotional tool because it relatively easy to measure response and success (Ndubisi & Moi, 2013).

Strategies for a Product

Conclusion

It can be concluded that brand management is essential component for the growth of Toyota Company. The brand hierarchy of Toyota has been elaborated in this report. The importance of values of product is huge for Toyota Company as it has been discussed about functional, emotional, social and self-expression value in the context of Toyota Company. Various appropriate strategies have been discussed such as branding strategy, pricing strategy, brand extension strategy and Brand leveraging strategy. The discussion has been made on promotional tools which can be effective for the brand elements.

References

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