Case Studies on

Brand Management – Vol. I

Edited by
Nusrath Jahan Maldar
Icfai Business School Case Development Centre

Icfai Books
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Icfai Books
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Product or corporate names may be registered trademarks. These are used in the
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Case studies are intended to be used as a basis for class discussion rather than to
illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a management situation.

Copies of individual case studies are available for purchase from www.ibscdc.org

ISBN: 81-314-0696-2

Editorial Team: Priyanka Srivastava and Uma Ramaswamy

Visualiser: Ch. Yugandhar Rao
Designer: K. Sree Hari Rao
 Case Title Page No.

AmorePacific: Creating Global Brands 1

Brand Extensions – The Marico Way 13
Branding – The Asian Dilemma 23
Branding Service: The McDonald’s Way 31
Burger King – Revitalizing the Brand 43
Cirque du Soleil: The Making of an Entertainment Brand 59
Corporate Co-Branding: Case of Yum! Brands, Inc. 71
Dainik Bhaskar: The Innovative Marketer 85
Dasani’s European Misadventure 93
Destination Dubai: Building a Brand 101
Electrolux in India: Branding Blues 121
Euro Disney: Failed Americanism? 131
GAP and Banana Republic – Changing Brand Strategies with Fashion 143
Global Branding Strategies of LG Electronics 159
Haier: Developing A Global Brand 175
Hyundai’s Global Branding Strategies 185
Internal Branding: The i-flex Way 193
ITC’s Branding Strategies 205
James Bond – A Meta Brand? 219
La-Z-Boy: Changing Style 227
Louis Vuitton: The Making of a Star Brand 239
Managing Brand Reputation: The Case of Coke, Pepsi and Cadbury in India 249
Master of Wine: Creating a Unique Brand 257
Mattel Inc.’s Barbie: Brand Merchandising Strategies 267
Puma: Reclaiming its Pride 281
Real Madrid: From a Football Club to a Media Brand 295
Roger Deromedi – Solving the Brand Portfolio Problems at Kraft Foods Inc. 311
Sam Adams’ Repositioning Strategies 329
Samsung Electronics: Mr. Yun’s Efforts for Upscale Image 341
Taiwan’s OEM Industry: Acer’s Branding Dilemma 353
 OVERVIEW

One of the most important aspects of strategy in modern business is ‘Branding’. Throughout
most of the twentieth century, the Western brands were dominant. The American and
European companies were the first to realise the power of strong brands and invested
heavily in building them. The Japanese followed suit, with Sony leading the way. The
companies in the Eastern world, which, until then, had served as low-cost manufacturing
bases for Western companies, were the next to catch on. For instance, Samsung of South
Korea, which was once known for low-cost and low-quality products, benchmarked its top
rival and invested heavily to reinvent its brand. China’s Lenovo took the route of purchasing
established brands (Compaq) to strengthen its brand portfolio. Original equipment
manufacturer, BenQ of Taiwan, invested the profits from its current business into building
its own brand and thereby took the risk of directly competing with its current customers
(like Dell, IBM, etc.).
Although there are many advantages to owning a powerful brand, not the least of which is
the option of premium pricing, building a brand is a costly and consistent affair. As brands
have proliferated the marketplace, the risk of failure has grown exponentially and brand
managers have been forced to take a re-look at their notion about brands and branding.
Branding is often misunderstood as merely being an advertising function and is therefore
widely mismanaged. Brand managers often view branding as a supplementary task, involving
the management of a product image that can be separated from the main business of
product management. However, new-age thinking provides an alternative perspective,
stating that,
• Branding is a strategic point of view, not a select set of activities
• Branding is central to creating customer value, not just images
• Branding is a key tool for creating and maintaining competitive advantage
• Brand strategies must be ‘engineered’ into the marketing mix.1
Traditional business thinkers often assumed that product value as experienced by the
customers, and product value as measured by the company, were one and the same. That
is, if a company builds a better product, the customer will experience an increment in
product value, and vice versa. Marketing, however, makes a crucial break from this
assumption, emphasising that customer value is always perceptual as it is shaped by the
subjective understanding of customers and is, in fact, never objective.
A brand is therefore the product as it is experienced and valued in everyday social life, and
branding refers to all the activities that shape customer perceptions, particularly the firm’s

1
Holt Douglas B., “Brands and Branding”, Harvard Business School (Note), Harvard Business School Publishing, March
11th 2003, page 1 [ECCH Ref. No. 9-503-045]

i
activities.2 To be successful, brand managers must realise that although a product consists
of a bundle of tangible, functional attributes, a brand’s offerings go much beyond that. For
instance, Coca-Cola is not just a beverage that customers like. The fact is that Coca-Cola
conveys the image of being an optimistic, American product that attracts consumers. The
brand can therefore be thought of as the culture of the product. Brand culture is formed
when images, stories and associations are created around the product, mostly by the
company and customers.
To comprehend the value and hence the importance of a brand, a brand manager has only
to evaluate the difference between what a customer is willing to pay for a branded product
and a generic product. The brand value can be stated to be an assimilation of four dimensions:
Reputation Value, Relationship Value, Experiential Value, and Symbolic Value (Exhibit I).

Exhibit I
What is a Brand?

BRAND = STORES, IMAGES, ASSOCIATIONS

Reputation Value Experiential Value

Stories imply perceived Stories shape experience of
quality of product features. the product.

THE PRODUCT
(objective features, quality
standards, augments)

Relationship Value
Symbolic Value
Stories imply that firm is a
Stories imbue the product
long-term partner that will
with values and identities.
attend to customer interests.

Source: Holt Douglas B., “Brands and Branding”, Harvard Business School (Note), Harvard Business
School Publishing, March 11th 2003, page 1 [ECCH Ref. No. 9-503-045]

2
“Brands and Branding”, op.cit.

ii
Building strong and sustainable brands requires developing a well-conceived brand strategy.
To be successful, all aspects of the brand strategy must deliver a consistent message that
is in tune with the overall goals of the business. However, there is no universal rule that
governs the designing of brand strategies. In a Harvard Business School note, ‘Brands
and Branding’, author Douglas B. Holt outlines this four-step process for developing a
brand strategy:
Step 1: Identify goals that branding can address
Not all business goals require or demand a branding solution. Therefore, a brand manager
must identify those business goals which are amenable to branding. In the cases, where a
business goal can be achieved by enhancing perceived product value, brand strategies are
most appropriate.
Step 2: Map the existing brand culture
Mapping the existing brand culture involves evaluating the brand culture across the four
components of brand value described in Exhibit I. This requires collecting information in
tune with the four different components of brand culture. In this step, it is important for a
marketer to identify the points of divergence between the firm’s current brand strategy and
brand culture.
Step 3: Analyse competition and environment to identify branding opportunities
Analysing competition involves mapping the competitors’ brand culture as done in Step 2.
This step must be carried out because achieving competitive superiority in brand value
requires benchmarking against competitors’ brands. Carrying out mapping of competitors’
brand culture will enable a marketer to improve the firm’s brand culture over those of its key
competitors, and at the same time, identify and work on any possible weak-points that may
enable the competitors to make inroads into the future.
The other, and perhaps the more important aspect to be taken into consideration while
branding is the shift in environment. Identifying opportunities in the environment –
consumers, technology, infrastructure, etc. – that competitors have failed to identify or
react to, is the way to create the most significant brand value.
Step 4: Design the strategy
The final step involves creating a blueprint of the path that a firm should take to make a
transition to the desired brand culture. This design must chart out the firm’s existing brand
culture, outline the opportunities identified in Step 3 and then, finally detail the desired
brand culture (Exhibit II).

iii
 Exhibit II
Brand Strategy

Existing Brand Culture Strategy Drivers Brand Culture Goal

• Product Reputation Environment • Product Reputation
• Relationship Perceptions Changes • Relationship Perceptions
• Experience Framing Competitive • Experience Framing
• Symbolism Benchmarking • Symbolism

Brand Engineering

Product Design Advertising Channel Policy Pricing

Service Delivery Personal Selling Retail Design Promotions
Service Quality Public Relations Customer Interface
Packaging Corporate Comm.
Corporate Actions

Source: Holt Douglas B., “Brands and Branding”, Harvard Business School (Note), Harvard Business
School Publishing, March 11th 2003, page 1 [ECCH Ref. No. 9-503-045]

The brand strategy should specify which marketing mix elements will be used and how they
will be integrated into the overall plan to produce a consistent branding effort. This part of
the brand strategy deals with implementation or engineering the desired brand culture
across all the relevant aspects of a marketing mix and allocation of the requisite resources
for achieving the desired end.
Once a brand strategy has been created and implemented, it must be evaluated to assess
whether it is working or not. Brand managers can use any one or a combination of the
following to evaluate the effectiveness of their branding effort:
Behaviours: Behavioural loyalty is one way of measuring the strength of a brand. That is,
all other factors being constant, when a brand’s value increases, a customer will purchase
the brand more frequently and will be less likely to switch over to other brands.
Attitudes: This measurement recognises the fact that strong brands share certain consumer
attitudes. For instance, the brand may be associated with influential users. Traditional market
research and informal feedback methods like websites can be used to gather information and
identify attitudinal measures – to make comparisons and deduce attitudinal strength.
Relationships: Another measure is determining the relationship strength. This works on
the principle that when brand value is high, customers will depend more heavily on the
brand, and hence develop a deeper relationship with it.

iv
Equity: This is the ultimate or the most widely used technique of measuring the brand
value. Among several techniques for measuring brand equity, a common one is to determine
the selling price of the brand in the current market.3
The case studies included in this book span a broad range of industries, from fast food,
entertainment and sports to automobile and electronics. These case studies are based on
the branding efforts undertaken by some of the world’s most renowned companies. The
case study, Managing Brand Reputation: The Case of Coke, Pepsi and Cadbury in India
details the different kinds of strategies, the companies can implement to manage their
brands when things go wrong, while Dasani’s European Misadventure and Euro Disney:
Failed Americanism? highlight the pitfalls of improper brand management.
Destination Dubai: Building a Brand details the successful attempt of the royal family of
Dubai to brand their country and James Bond – A Meta Brand? takes a look at the evolution
of a literary character into one of the world’s most recognised style icons, all due to careful
brand management efforts. The dilemmas encountered during co-branding are highlighted
in the case study Corporate Co-branding: Case of Yum! Brands, Inc. and the case studies
Branding – The Asian Dilemma, Taiwan’s OEM Industry: Acer’s Branding Dilemma,
Samsung Electronics: Mr. Yun’s Efforts for Upscale Image and Hyundai’s Global Branding
Strategies look at the challenges encountered by companies in Asian countries in their
attempt to build a global brand.

3
“Brands and Branding”, op.cit.