Apexia kicked off its marketing and branding journey by organising P2P-Projects to Products in collaboration with the Student Development Club (SDC) on May 3, 2024.

The main aim of P2P was to introduce the audience to the non-tech side of Apexia, that is, marketing and branding.

First of all, branding was explained.

What is BRANDING ?

Branding is creating a unique identity for your company or product in the market.

A brand is a result of how well your product or company has been established in the hearts of your consumers.

• Then, the basic elements of branding, like typography, consistency, colour, etc., were explained.

• Also, many common branding strategies that many of the big companies also use today were discussed with the audience.

• After that, the power of digital branding and social media was explained to the audience.

Then came another very crucial element of branding: personal branding.

For this, the audience was first asked a question:

"Who comes to mind when you think of large brands like Facebook, Apple, etc?"

The audience replied: Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs.

Because these people themselves are a whole brand. Now, no matter who becomes the CEO of Facebook in the future, it will be remembered by Mark Zuckerberg’s name only.

So, by this example, the people understood the power of personal branding.

What is Personal Branding ?

First let’s know what a personal brand is?

Perception of an Individual :- Based on their experience, expertise, actions & achievements within a community, industry or marketplace at large.

Personal Brand-ing is :

What an individual:

• Does

• Actions they take

• What they build

To establish that PERCEPTION

Afterwards, the 3 R’s of personal branding were discussed. They are:

• Recognized

To have Public awareness & building credibility

• Remembered

To recall in people’s mind

• Revered

To have Belief, trust, faith in you

After this, a few basic yet important points for building a personal brand were also discussed with the audience, which are listed below:

How to get started:

• You don’t have to Know everything (just more than the people you’re intending to help)

• Know what do they need

• What are u trying to achieve to build a personal brand?

• Build your Visual Identity

• Find your voice

• Develop content calendar

• Hit that publish button

• Main goal: Become Magnetic

Another important thing that helps promote a brand or product in the market is marketing.

What is marketing?

Marketing is any action that a company takes to sell its products or services.

• First of all, the audience was explained, about the importance of market research by giving the example of the brand Maggi and how it gained dominance in the Indian markets by doing its market research properly.

• After this, the AIDA formula came into play.

AIDA is one of the most important and commonly used formulas in the world of marketing.

A- Attention

I- Interest

D- Desire

A- Action

By using this formula correctly, the marketing of any product or brand can improve significantly.

One of the most amazing quotes that I still remember from the talk is:

“IF YOU TRY TO SELL EVERYBODY, YOU WILL END UP SELLING NO ONE.”

This quote focuses on the fact that rather than trying to sell to everybody, try to sell to the people that will benefit the most from your product.

• After this, some basic psychological hacks to understand consumers better were also discussed.

• Lastly, the power of social media and how important it is to create hype for the product were discussed with the audience.

Lastly, there was one of the most exciting sessions, namely, the real-life examples of projects and products.

1. The first project was DripIn.
   This project was developed by Srujal Shah, Parth Parmar, Sarthak Bhave, and Shivang Parmar during one of the hackathons.
   Here, the audience was made to explain how they developed this product, from the ideation stage to testing and marketing it.

2. The next example was Burbn.
   The audience was first asked which app they were using at present, which was Burbn.

   The answers were distributed; many thought it was Snapchat, whereas some others thought that it was Instagram. But the correct answer was Instagram. Burbn was just a project app developed by Kevin Systrom, which Mark Zuckerberg bought and turned into one of the most popular social media apps in today's world, Instagram.

By doing so, the power of branding and marketing was explained to the audience.

After this, the audience was also encouraged to interact and share their own stories.

Many people from the audience raised their hands and shared their own stories of developing or contributing to any product, whether it be for a hackathon or any family business.

In short, P2P was a bang!