Impact of branding strategy on customer buying behavior

With the dynamic and suddenly changing external environment, it became inevitable and important decisions of the organization to retain competiveness and get rid of turbulent marketing conditions. Now-a-days, the success of the company greatly depends upon how effectively it gathers and analyzes enough set of information about their market in which it transacts and operates. Marketers need to research and investigate about user requirements, desires, buying preferences and purchasing habits as well. In order to ensure sustainability and better survival, business units are greatly interested in creating and building strong branding position, so that, long-lasting relationships can be maintained with the final users. In this respect, firms inject enough time and resources to study the sociological and behavioral aspects so as to get deeper insight towards buying pattern of the consumers (Patha and Lim, 2016).

With the changing period, branding has emerged as vital and key elements of corporation’s marketing strategies and represents corporate reputations and image in the mind of customers. In order to build a good reputation and image, companies often employ various branding theories, concepts and strategies, so that, a unique preposition can be developed in customers to build loyalty and competitive strengthening (Hayran and Gürhan-Canli, 2016). With the shift and movement in marketing paradigm, business units give high focus towards marketing research so as to underpinning the key variables that affect buyer’s decisions such as attitude, preferences, perception, cognition, learning, spending pattern, likes and dislikes & so on. In the competitive market, it becomes important for the marketers to determine that what consumer expects and what are the unsatisfied need and wants, how they make purchase decisions and prefer a particular brand over others and so on (Gürhan-Canli, Hayran and Sarial-Abi, 2016). With this, they will be able to set appropriate plans and policies like production, goods quality, pricing policies, logistic supply, designing, packaging and labeling to drive success. Supply of desired quality goods exactly in which it user expects leads to strongly satisfy their requirement, boost sales, maximize repetitive buying and make them loyal towards specific brand (Olbrich, Jansen and Hundt, 2017).

Apple Inc. is an American public limited company traded on NASDAQ and founded by Steve Jobs in the year 1976. Headquarter of the business is established in California, US and operates in consumer electronics industry. It is the leading supplier and distributor of latest technological products and devices around the globe. It has an superb goods portfolio comprising variety of items such as iPod, iPhone, Operating System, TV, iPad, Watch and many others. It transacts and deliver its services in number of countries such as UK, US, Canada, Spain, Germany, Hong Kong, Sweden, Brazil, Switzerland, China & others. Its Operational management (OM) policies such as quality management, better design, process & capacity development, layout designing, supply chain management (SCM) and others are the main reasons behind the success of the business.

The target of the present thesis is to determine various branding strategies and concepts that are being available to Apple Inc to influence audiences positively. The report will also critically examine that how branding ways will enable managers to strengthen competitive position & promote success to the firm. Along with this, the dissertation will also analyze the usefulness of branding theories and concepts in the context of Apple Inc to affect buying preferences and purchasing decisions of the people positively to satisfy them, build loyalty and create superb corporate image.

1.2 Rationale of the study

In the current complex and competitive corporate world, though many companies have excellent and superior quality product portfolio and able to deliver better products and/or services to the customers, but still, they fails and unable to survive and gain competitive edge just due to poor branding operations. However, in the current era, only that company can run operational activities successfully and ensure stability that have excellent competitive strength, in such regards, strong & well-established brands have full potential and capacity to generate loyal customers and retain them for a longer duration (Khan and et.a