"Branding is the effort of a company to evoke a particular response in the end-user/consumer's mind about a particular product or service". Keeping in mind the importance of assigning brand names to financial services, the author conducted a survey on brand awareness of financial services and its relevance. This is rather well proved by the success stories of the joint ventures in private insurance sector. Both the participants already had established their brands in their own fields. All that the customers had to do was to recollect the brand and strengthen its position in their minds.

Brands are all about emotion. I like to categorize brands into three groups: First, there are products, which people can touch and feel; second comes services; third and most intangible is creating and embellishing a symbol, like a corporate brand.

In business, anything that revolves around the customer is considered very challenging and in order to be in the `challenge', every organization has to be innovative; financial services being no exception to this. In order to become innovative, an organization should not lose the ground due to the fact that it just could not balance itself for want of proper foundation. Here the foundation stone referred is, what people call as `brand'. And the process of laying the foundation stone is connoted by everyone as `branding'. All innovative efforts should act as mere extensions or elevations that are erected from the strong base that is `brand'. In other words, innovation should not make the organization lose or forget its foundation. Service marketing has a very sensitive aspect where the strategy revolves around the customer. Building a strategic relationship with the customer is very essential. Since services marketing involves adding a value to their services and thereby differentiating the offering, a marketer has to be very thorough on the facets on which he is going to keep leverage. "The process of adding value is in essence differentiating one's offerings effectively in the eyes of the consumer and this is where branding services becomes important."

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