BRAND OBJECTION
No Objection, No Rejection, No Dejection

 BY JAGDEEP KAPOOR

In my experience over two and a halfdecades of brand sales and marketing, I have found that brand marketeers and sales and marketing professionals get dejected whenever their brand is objected to and their offering is rejected. Thus a very critical element of success in brand marketing is to be able to face and handle objection so that consumer rejections do not lead to team dejections.

Let us go to the root cause and find out the various reasons for he state of affairs and also the various solutions that can be handled and given to increase brand sales, brand growth and brand profits.

Why does a consumer have an objection to a particular brand? Why is it that the consumer accepts a competitive brand but rejects the brand offering of another company? Why is it that the brand marketing and sales team gets dejected when there is an objection or a dejection and how can the brand marketing team address this and convert this to a positive situation.

OBJECTION
Firstly, let us look at the objection front. Consumers raise objections to a product brand or service brand because they may find certain gaps either in their understanding or in the sufficiency of information or just the fact that they don’t like the marketeers.

Objections are natural behaviourial elements from consumers. Consumers may object to buying a product brand or a service brand if they do not comprehend what the brands stand for. It is very important that objections from consumers be clearly understood and addressed and responded to immediately. For this it is very important that the brand marketeer must have thorough product or service knowledge and must communicate the benefits of the brand to the consumers. This would improve the understanding of the consumers about the brand and objections would go down.

Further, objections could be reduced if there is sufficient information given to the consumers and there is nothing done to mislead or confuse the consumer. Brand marketeers must consider objections positively and use them as opportunities to build their brands and increase sales and market shares.

Sometimes consumers object not to the brand but to the person marketing the brand. One must be very careful in ensuring that a credible and appropriate brand ambassador is chosen who is acceptable to consumers so that there is a greater acceptance of the brand. This will help reduce or overcome objections opening the path to grand brand sales.

REJECTION
A brand could face Rejection because of poor product or inferior service or merely because the consumer is not aware about the brand.

Brand faces rejection from consumers for various reasons. If these reasons are removed there is a very good probability that consumers would choose the brand and not reject it. Inferior product or poor service could be a reason for the consumer rejecting the brand. Non-relevance or non need could be other reasons for the consumer rejecting the brand. Even non-familiarity or unawareness could lead to a brand getting rejected. In all the cases it is important that world class quality be offered to the consumer with proper awareness and need assessment so that the consumer is able to benefit and improve his standard of living and quality of life. This would help reduce or eliminate rejection and increase consumer acceptance.

DEJECTION
A brand marketing team could get dejected because it is human nature to feel low and depressed whenever there are barriers and objections raised and whenever a brand offering is not accepted or rejected.

Brand marketeers get demotivated and dejected when consumers do not accept the brand or switch to other brands leading to the moral going down as also the sales. The right solution is to regularly train the brand marketing team and make them internally tough and at the same time externally sensitive to changing consumer needs. The Brand Marketing team must be alive to adapting their brand so that the consumer gets the best benefit and this definitely would spread enthusiasm amongst the team and avoid dejection.

Thus we see that if the root cause of consumers facing objections is tackled and the main reasons of brand rejections are solved then there will be little scope for dejections especially if the marketing team is regularly trained and motivated to face a number of these issues. You must move towards an environment of No objection, no rejection, No dejection to build winning brands.

The author is Brand Guru Jagdeep Kapoor, Managing Director of the successful Samsika Marketing Consultancy Pvt. Ltd.
Tel: 022 28597700/7701 Fax: 28597699 E-mail : jkapoor@samsika.com

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