Essay by Sharandeen Bulaqa

Marketing is the fundamental aspect of any business. Marketers are those who are responsible for
providing us the best image of a specific brand. Not an easy task! In fact it is the most difficult duty for any
person to handle. According to Phillip Kotler, a famous American marketing guru, the best marketers can be
described as having the ability to create, maintain, protect and enhance their brands. It is very true that all of
these qualifications are vital to make an exceptional marketer in this complicated field. So how would
marketers go about using those abilities to produce the most extravagant brand of their dreams?!

Creating a brand is considered the first step in obtaining the ‘customer’s value’ and becoming a distinctive
marketer. Building on a solid foundation is the imperative for any brand. This can be done through
understanding the ‘brand audience’ with both their expectations and perceptions. The ability to reconcile the
gap between an expectation and a perception will help in delivering the most favourable brand to the brand
audience which marketers try to identify. Therefore, creating the appropriate brand for the targeted audience
should be done with clear understanding of ‘what a customer wants’. This point has been clarified by
famous marketer, Levitt, who said, “You don’t buy drills, but ways to make holes.”

Launching a brand is of course an important step, but it is still only the first step and needs to be backed by
several other core tasks. Maintaining the brand should be next. After creating the desirable brand,
presenting it to the targeted audience, and gaining their loyalty at some extent, it is important to keep this
loyalty up as an ongoing habit, avoiding customers’ disengagement or ‘retention’, as it is known in the
marketing language. Promotions offered to customers by professional marketers would keep them loyal.
So, the whole idea of maintaining the brand is based on keeping up the brand’s high quality, which will
encourage customers to ‘want’ to buy it. Marketers are keen to build mutual relations with their customers
and try to fulfil all their wants as much as possible, to establish the ‘superior customer value’ tactic.

Following the previous two steps, next, comes the ability to protect the brand from any harm or attack. A
marketer has all the responsibility to shield a brand from any possible threat from competitors. This task is
to launch the brand in the market and not allow any false claims to ruin its image in front of its loyal
customers. For instance the Pepsi brand has been claimed by anonymous directions, that it stands for “Pay
Every Penny to Save Israel.” I don’t believe that these claims stand! What it, in fact, is doing is that it is
ruining the brand’s image and is trying to force the Arab community to stop buying it. So a professional
marketer should try to always make sure that the brand is not being attacked from a source of anonymity by
continuously publicising correct information about the brand.

Last but not least, another ability of a marketer is to enhance the brand overtime and improve its standards,
quality and image in the eyes of its consumers. This task has been successfully handled by very well known
brands from all over the world. The Nokia cellular phone has enhanced its phone over 20 times in the last
four years which makes it one of the best cellular phone in the world of marketing. So the ability to use
intellectual creativity and innovation by the professional marketers would allow a brand to prosper in the
market.

In conclusion, a professional marketer is the person who has all these special abilities in accordance with
Phillip Kotler’s description. But despite having all these qualities, a marketer could still fall in a very
dangerous ‘mousetrap’ which might spoil all the good work he or she has done. The ‘better mousetrap’
fallacy is a trap where a marketer would fall in love with his or her brand over their customers. This could
result in losing current and potential customers. So let me close it with Peter Drucker’s words, “the game is
not to think brand, but think customer.”

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Sharandeen Bulaqa