Customer branding of commodity products: The customer-developed brand

Received (in revised form): 27th September, 2007

JULIA R. PENNINGTON
is a PhD candidate in marketing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her areas of interest are branding, agribusiness, international marketing, macromarketing and strategy.

A. DWAYNE BALL
is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interests are in the explanation of customer loyalty, measurement of consumer behaviour constructs and marketing systems.

K e ywor ds
customer branding; commodity; undifferentiated product; brand evolution

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the process and implications of customer branding of commodity products. Customer branding is dened by the authors as a process in which a customer or customers dene, label and seek to purchase an otherwise undifferentiated or unbranded product. The customer(s) can be anywhere along the value chain and may be intermediate, industrial or end-user customers. There are many historical examples of customer branding (which sometimes turned into strong corporate brands), and customer branding may be much more common today than marketers realise. As the authors show, it still exists in modern commodity markets. Marketing theory has lost the understanding of this concept. By considering the product chain and the process of branding when customers rather than marketers enact it, the paper provides a new insight into the process of branding in general, and proposes that the evolution of brands can move from a customer-branded product to strong corporate brands. The authors contend that customer branding exists and by understanding the phenomena, value chain participants can increase revenue and improve product movement.

Journal of Brand Management (2009) 16, 455467. doi:10.1057/palgrave.bm.2550131; published online 16 November 2007

INTRODUCTION
There is no such thing as a commodity. All goods and services are differentiable.1

Julia R. Pennington Marketing Department University of Nebraska-Lincoln 315 CBA, P.O. Box 880492 Lincoln, NE 68588-0492, USA Tel: + 1 (402) 472 2316 Fax: + 1 (402) 472 9777 E-mail: juliepennington@global. t-bird.edu

Differentiating your product, niche marketing and branding are all concepts commonly taught to beginning marketing students as they learn the value of having an easily identied product. Typically, products are branded by the manufacturer or producer of the product.2 What happens, however, when a product is not branded in the marketplace by the manufacturer or producer? How, when and why

do customers differentiate and brand the products themselves? Customer branding is dened by the authors as a process in which a customer, or customers, dene, label and seek to purchase a subset of an otherwise undifferentiated or unbranded product. The customer can be anywhere along the value chain, including intermediate and enduser customers. As an example, Levitt3 discusses how televisions in the Soviet Union in the 1960s were unbranded and undifferentiated products. The generic televisions
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were produced in multiple factories with varying levels of quality. Customers discovered that one factory manufactured a higher quality television and learned how to use the small product codes on the bottom of each television to nd out whether it was produced in the desired factory. The preferred factorys product was quickly sold out in the stores while the other televisions remained on the shelves. The codes were never meant to be used as brands, but were made into brands by the consumers. A brand provides an important function in the marketplace by allowing the customer to differentiate products, and either repeat a successful (or avoid an unsatisfactory) purchase or experience. A customer-developed brand allows him or her to quickly evaluate a product that is unbranded by the manufacture or producer. Another term for customer branding could be default branding, because the customer is lling a need for identication that is not currently available to them in the marketplace.4 Duguid5 states the importance of looking at the phenomenon of customer branding:
If we want to understand the development either of individual brands or of modern branding as a practice, we need to look not just as the part of the communication cycle that leads from producers to relatively passive consumers but also at the less-noticed part that begins with active consumers and travels back in the other direction.

agriculture, energy, metal and lately even computer processing and bandwidth. This paper contributes to the marketing literature by extending current branding theory by reintroducing and broadening the understanding of the customer branding process. The paper also contributes by providing an insight into why the customer might feel the need to brand the product independently of the producer or manufacturer. Further, we articulate the process by which brands can move from customerbranded products to strong corporate brands. Some of the key questions that will be addressed are: what conditions must be present for customer branding to take place? How do customers evaluate a customer-branded product versus commercial-branded products in the marketplace? How can a customer brand potentially evolve into a manufacturer brand? The paper rst explicates the activities of branding as carried out by a marketer and suggests through examples how those activities can be performed by customers, suggests several propositions on customer branding and nally examines managerial implications and proposes future research in customer branding. In order to understand the phenomenon of customer branding, it is useful to consider the activities of branding as normally carried out by the marketer.

ESSENTIAL BRANDING ACTIVITIES

A brand is a complex symbol that can convey up to six levels of meaning including attributes, benets, values, culture, personality and type of user.6,7 Although marketers develop their brands in a multitude of ways, there are three essential branding activities that are commonly carried out by marketers: identication and differentiation, maintaining consistency and communicating existence and attributes

The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into the process and implications of customer branding. By understanding the process of customer branding, we can better understand how seemingly undifferentiated markets work. Undifferentiated and commodity markets include some of the largest industries in the world:
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to the customer and channel. We will explore each of these activities and discover how customers can take over the roles normally associated with marketers.

Identication and differentiation

The American Marketing Association8 denes a brand as a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identies one sellers good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. Although the denition of a brand varies by context and discipline,917 the brands primary function is in identication and differentiation. The development of consumer brands by manufacturers and service rms has been the focus of numerous studies including articles on how to build brands,18,19 strategic brand management11,12,14,15 and branding behaviour.13,20,21 Branding by the customer is not as common in the literature as branding by entrepreneurs or manufacturers. However, customer branding has played a key role in the development of brands for otherwise non-commerically branded products.5,22 Only a few articles focus on the branding of undifferentiated consumer products such as the branding of commodity turkeys,23 generic televisions3 and industrial plywood.24 Products can be differentiated by where the product was grown or developed.2528 Differentiation via a sense of place is important to some consumers and has seen a recent surge interest in everything from products to tourism.20,2931 If place branding is carried out by the marketer (eg Italian marble or Idaho potatoes), then it may not be customer branding. On the other hand, if the brand name originated with customers, and was later recognised and used by marketers, then

the early stages of the brand were an example of customer branding. The branding of agricultural commodity products has a rich history. Branding is considered to have originated in the late 19th century when long-distance trade in food and drink began.2,26 The need for identication of the origin of product, however, can be found earlier in history. Branded products can be traced back to ancient Greece, even though some historians argue that physical brands were unnecessary when all transactions were conducted face to face.2 Wine is one of the rst products considered branded and has been heavily studied by researchers.5,3236 Duguid5 notes that
Branding, as in the physical act of marking a container, came naturally to wine shippers, who had long forged iron brands to mark their casks, generally putting their own mark at one end and that of the recipient on the other.

Given the wide variability in the quality of wines, however, customers soon began differentiating wines by the cask marks. The addition of a mark on the wine casks had magical properties and their addition could add 50 per cent to the value of wine.35 Port wine shippers, by the end of the 18th century, used the marks as more than addresses on wooden envelopes.5

Maintaining consistency
The theory of branding states that a product must be consistent to uphold the brand.37 When consumers brand a product, what they are looking for is consistency of quality, but are not otherwise obtaining it, as there is too much variation in the general marketplace. Thus, customers are not seeking to differentiate for the sake of differentiation, but are seeking consistent quality and consistent results. A customer
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desires to reduce the uncertainty of the purchase to the point where a course of action can be adopted with some condence.38 By interpreting the information received in earlier purchases, and using that information to customer brand some subset of an available commodity, the customer can increase his or her condence in future purchases.38 An example of customer branding is bread in the late 1800s in New York City.2 During this time, most bread was bought from street vendors, who purchased from a number of bakers. Bakers were required by the city to mark their loaves with a symbol indicating full weight, so that short-weighted loaves could be traced. Since each baker had his or her own mark, customers quickly learned to choose loaves with particular full-weight marks, in order to meet their taste or quality preferences as well as to obtain full weight. The customer was able to repeat successful purchases and increase product consistency by evaluating the marks on the loaves.

Communicating existence and attributes to customer and channel

Alvin Achenbaum notes that What distinguishes a brand from its unbranded commodity counterparts is the consumers perceptions and feelings about the products attributes and how they perform. Ultimately, a brand resides in the minds of the consumer.39 In normal branding activities, communication about the brand ows from the marketer to the consumer. In customer branding, the ow is opposite. The customer knows what he or she wants, labels it and requests it by label, or by other kinds of characteristics that some actor in the channel will recognise. A good example of communication in customer branding is the case of Vidalia
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onions. In 1931, a Georgia farmer started selling a sweet onion at the local farmers market in Vidalia.40 Ten years later, tourists accustomed to the onion were regularly requesting Vidalia onions from local farmers, although Vidalia onion production was not limited to the area around Vidalia, Georgia. The repeated communications by customers eventually triggered the creation of a normal brand. A national marketing effort was implemented in the 1970s, over 40 years after customers identied and labelled the unique onion sold in the Vidalia farmers market. In 1986, the State of Georgia registered the trademark Vidalia (applied to onions) and mandated that Vidalia onions can only be grown in a strictly dened geographic area consisting all or part of 20 Georgia countries.40 The brand Vidalia onions is currently marketed worldwide. Traditionally, the manufacturer or service provider develops and manages the brand, while the consumer can only control the brand meaning or perception of the brand. The customer branding a product can remove the potentially exclusive, competitive advantage the manufacturer or supplier has with an individual brand. The power of a brand to a business comes from its dual roles: externally by conveying to customers the value that can be expected from doing business with an organisation, and internally as a beacon for organising the rms activities.11 If customers develop the brand, the company loses control of the brands ability to convey clear messages to the customer and focus company activities. The customerdeveloped brand is an extension of the current branding literature. In customer branding, the customer attaches a name, term or other feature that allows him or her to identify one sellers good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.8

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PROPOSITIONS When does customer branding occur?

Customer branding, by denition, occurs when the customer takes over the activities of branding in order to obtain exactly what he or she wants. We propose that there are three key conditions that need to be met for customer branding to occur: there must be product variation in the marketplace, the delivery of general product must be unacceptable and the customer must be able to reliably obtain a satisfactory subset somewhere in the marketing channel that meets his or her needs. In other words, for the customer to expend the effort to take over branding activities that the marketer is not performing, the customer must show certain needs, perceptions and abilities.

Perceived variation in marketplace

The customer must perceive variation in the marketing mixes provided by a commodity marketplace, or variations in the consistency of the marketing mixes provided, in order for customer branding to occur. Under usual conditions, a commodity product should be consistently homogenous, with a standard, welldened grade or specications delivered consistently. Under these conditions, marketers perceive that what they offer to the customer is a consistently homogenous product. We propose that no customer branding will occur if the supply of the product in the chain is also perceived by the customer to be consistently of uniform quality and other attributes. For example, if all corn of a given grade always has the same quality and attributes, and is delivered at an essentially identical price to each particular customer, customer branding will not occur. However if the customer perceives variation or lack of

consistency in what marketers provide him or her, anywhere in the chain, then one of the conditions necessary for customer branding exists. The customer views the market as heterogeneous, while marketers behave as if it is homogenous. The customer can perceive variation that is not recognised by the supplier. One example is university courses. All sections of a course, for example Marketing 101, are treated as a generic product by the university with identical pricing and credit received. These same classes, however, are frequently perceived as differentiated by the student (customer) because they often select classes based on the instructor, day of week, time of day or location. Quality and attribute variation in the marketplace may not be a concern for all customers, but those who desire specic quality and attributes will seek it out. In the commodity grain market, certain types of quality variation (aatoxin or mold count) are of concern for the livestock producer because poor quality can cause major animal health issues,41 but may be of less concern to the ethanol producer, who may be more concerned about starch content. In the previous example, a livestock producer may be more likely to customer-brand than an ethanol producer on one basis, while the ethanol producer will brand on another. A customers concern for quality and attribute variation may change, as witnessed in early 2007 with the pet food recalls due to contaminated wheat gluten.42 Perceived variation seems likely to occur not only in legitimate commodity markets but also particularly in markets for illicit and/or street drugs. Since the production and branding activities are carried out in a nonpublic way, there is a great deal of room for variation, and thus a great incentive for consumers to actively brand. For example, in Djibouti, most of
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the adult male population is addicted to the chewing of a leaf called khat, which is produced in neighbouring Ethiopia. Khat produces a prolonged mild euphoria, and is own into Djibouti daily within hours of its picking (its potency declines rapidly with time). Buyers rush to street stalls after they hear the planes overhead, and try to choose otherwise unbranded, bundled leaves with the highest potency. The highest-potency leaves, called warata by the buyers, can be identied by certain physical properties, like the shape of the base of the stem and the apparent moisture content.43 Khat connoisseurs know the characteristics of the best leaves, and thereby effectively brand them.

ties, and nds wheat from other areas less acceptable. The our processing plant branded the wheat with a place name Wheat from Mitchell, South Dakota. There are alternative names in the market that could also have been used as indicators of attributes including No. 2 Hard Red Spring Wheat, which is the wellknown standard commodity grade for Hard Red Spring Wheat as dened by the US government, which has been used since the late 19th century. The Swedish our miller had alternative, well-known, standardised commodity designations available but chose to brand their preferred wheat using their own label.

Delivery of general product unacceptable

Delivery of general product needs to be unacceptable for customer branding to occur. Somewhere back in the channel the product is viewed as a commodity, and so branding is taking place further down in the channel. The commodity classication must be too broad to meet the needs of the customer and other branding is not readily apparent or available to the customer. Unacceptable general delivery of a product is dened as the case in which the customer perceives that the standardised product offered in the market does not meet his or her needs and is unacceptable for purchase. If the product is unbranded, the customer may brand it for easier purchase in the future. A recent example is a Swedish our processing plant requesting that all its wheat originate from Mitchell, South Dakota.44 The processing plant purchases more wheat than is grown in Mitchell and is actually pulling wheat from surrounding communities. The our processing plant believes that the wheat from Mitchell has better milling proper460

Customer must be able to identify and reliably obtain a subset

The customer needs to be able to identify and reliably obtain subset of products in the marketplace for customer branding to occur. The customer needs the ability to differentiate the products or be able to identify an individual in the supply chain who can differentiate the products with the customers desired characteristics. Identifying a subset of products is dened as the case in which the customer can nd the desired differentiated product in the marketplace at an earlier point in the channel. The customer desires a product that has been sorted earlier in the channel, but then later in the channel has lost the perceived desired characteristics through aggregation or transformation (for a discussion of sorting, transformation and aggregation, see Alderson and Martin45). A recent example of a customer identifying a specic subset is a Japanese meat retailer requesting to purchase I-80 beef.46 The brand I-80 does not exist, except at the customer level. The Japanese retailer is requesting beef from processing plants located along US Interstate 80 which crosses through Colorado, Nebraska,

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Iowa and Illinois. The retailer probably based its choice originally on quality or service attributes and attributed them to a geographic location. The customer created the brand in this example, and it includes multiple suppliers over a wide geographic region. This customer-created brand, I-80, however, eliminates beef packers in towns not located near Interstate 80 that may sell beef with similar attributes. Sometimes identifying a subset in the marketplace may be difcult, as consumers are unclear on what product characteristics are important for their purchase. For example, consumers have difculty comparison shopping for carpeting in the United States, as different retailers sell the same carpet under different names.47 In fact, 80 per cent of the carpeting sold in the US comes from just four Georgia mills.48 Highly advertised brands in the carpet industry are for the carpet bre stain treatment (example Anso, Stainmaster, Wear-Dated) and not for the carpet manufacturer.47 Carpet consumers are also unable to easily identify desired characteristics in a carpet, because basic information such as pile height and tufts per square inch is often lacking.47 Carpet consumers may be unable to identify a desired subset of products in the marketplace and will not then be able to label or brand the subset. Proposition 1: Three conditions must exist simultaneously for customer branding to occur: there must be variation in marketplace, the delivery of general product must be unacceptable and the customer must be able to identify and obtain a subset in marketplace that meets his or her needs.

THE POTENTIAL EVOLUTION OF A BRAND

Brands provide specic functions for the buyers and sellers of a product. Brands perform the function of helping buyers reduce search costs by assisting them in easily identifying specic products.49,50 Brands help sellers by facilitating repeat purchases, the introductions of new products, product promotions, differentiation of product for premium pricing opportunities and communication of a coherent message to customers.50 In looking at open source51 brands, Pitt et al.49 found that the functions brands perform can be linked to an evolutionary trajectory from commodities, through branded goods and strong brands to open source brands. The trajectory (see Figure 1) starts with Commodities where the act of branding does little for either the buyer or the seller, as products are not differentiated by either the sellers or the buyers. The second stage of their model moves to Branded Consumer Goods where the act of branding does little for the buyer but a lot for the seller. Sellers are able to gain from facilitation benets, including the facilitation of repeat purchases, new product introductions, promotion, premium pricing and market segmentation, while the main benets for buyer is only a reduction of search costs.49 The evolution then continues to Strong Brands where the act of branding does as much for the buyer in terms of reducing search costs and reducing psychological and perceived risks, as for the seller in facilitation benets. The fourth stage of their model, which is frequently not achieved, is Open Source Brands where branding does a lot for the buyer and little for the seller. There is usually little incentive for a brand-owning marketer to allow or encourage transitions from stage 3 to

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Lot

2 Branded consumer goods

For the seller, a brand does a .

Strong brands

Commodities Little

Open source brands

Little For the buyer, a brand does a .

Figure 1 The evolution of brands from a buyerseller perspective. Source: Pitt et al.49 (p. 120)

Lot

4. Sometimes, however, such a transition is forced upon them. In effect, open-source brands create the conditions for customer branding for a branded product. When many customers become co-producers, each with his or her version of a brand, the brand name itself loses its original meaning and some of its associated characteristics. For example, there are thousands of variations of the Linux operating system that users have created, each with its own capabilities. Thus, the Linux name still means something, but the meaning has become generic: an operating system that is not Windows, with certain known characteristics, but with other characteristics unknown until the consumer begins to search. Thus, the consumer is forced to take on the branding activities of differentiation, labelling and communication in order to obtain the capabilities that he or she wants.
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We draw attention to the fact that some famous brands have not followed the trajectory as developed by Pitt et al.49 but have developed in a counterclockwise trajectory from commodities to the fourth quadrant: branding that does a lot for the buyer but little for the seller. The product starts out as a commodity, is branded by their customers and then the customer brand is sometimes developed into a strong company brand (see Figure 2). The famous Procter and Gamble trademark moon and stars was not originally developed as a company brand.22 In the 1850s, Cincinnati riverboat wharfhands started marking boxes of P&G candles so that illiterate workers could easily distinguish the P&G candle boxes from the P&G soap boxes. The wharfhands started marking the candle boxes with a crude X, then later on their own initiative, changed the X into a circle around a star.

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Lot

2 Branded consumer goods

For the seller, a brand does a .

Strong brands

4 Open source brands

Commodities Little Customer brands

Little For the buyer, a brand does a .

Figure 2 The evolution of brands from a buyerseller perspective. Original trajectory from Pitt et al.49 (p. 120). Proposed trajectory to/from customer brands.

Lot

Later, a creative wharfhand decided that there should be a cluster of stars within the circle; and part of the circle became a quarter-moon drawn as a rough sort of human prole.22 Candles in the 1850s were a commodity item, with over 18 candle manufactures in the Cincinnati area alone. Customers started identifying the marked boxes as having a product that they desired. After a New Orleans jobber rejected an entire shipment of P&G candles as imitations when the full design including the man in the moon was not used on the boxes, a modied version of the wharfhands design of the moon and stars was used and registered as a trade mark.22 Procter and Gamble did not originally choose the elements of their famous trade mark. Once identied by customers, however, it quickly became a strong customer brand, and then a strong corporate brand. Another example of customers taking an active role in branding a product can

be found in the early years of the port wine industry. Customers played a key role in the branding of port wine in the 1800s and established branding as a method of judging quality. According to Duguid,5 port supply chain customers used shippers cask markings called marca to distinguish various blends by a particular port producer. Marcas that were meant to be used only by shippers were also used by customers as ways of distinguishing the different qualities. The customers developed handbooks of port producers cask markings. The cask markings were not intended to be brands by the producer, but were used for internal identication in the producers warehouses. The markings, however, were used in the supply chain as a brand. Testimonies in lawsuits during this time suggest that customers may have been the rst mover in brand creation.5 Brands developed as world trade developed to help the customer across the value chain identify products.
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Understanding the process of how a customer brands an undifferentiated product also provides new insight into a customers behaviour and a fuller understanding of how brands develop. Duguid,5 in researching marks used on wine casks, notes
[I]n accounting for consumer society, it seems odd to paint the consumer as passive. Such a course seems particularly inappropriate with brand names and trademarks, for which the case law developed in defense not of a branders property right but of the consumers right not to be deceived. What retailers could and could not do with their names and marks turned very much on what consumers made of them. In fact, the record suggests that, in making sense of marks, consumers were very much making brands.5

Customers can be the leading force in branding a commodity or undifferentiated product. Once the brand is developed by the customer, the brand can become a customer brand. A customer brand can then become a strong corporate brand if adapted by the producer or the manufacturer. Proposition 2: The evolution of a brand can move from a commodity to a customer-developed brand and then evolve into a strong corporate brand.

Implications/directions for future research

In a customer-branded product, the customer takes over some of the functions traditionally performed by the seller. The customer does so by naming or labelling the product, which helps buyers in reducing search costs by assisting them in easily identifying specic products. In the
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past ve years, there has been a resurgence of interest in branding;52 however, the focus has been on manufacturer and trade brands, and little research has been conducted on commodity products and customer branding. Customer branding is not a new phenomenon, as has been shown in the examples of port wine, bread and candles. It is, however, a phenomenon that has been almost completely ignored in the marketing literature. Understanding the conditions under which consumers view commodity products as commodities and when they are differentiated will allow companies to better meet consumer needs. For example in parts of California, energy from renewal resources (green energy) can be purchased at a at rate or for an additional fee. The electricity arriving to one neighbour can be considered an undifferentiated commodity, but to another neighbour it can be considered a differentiated commodity if they choose to purchase the green energy. Another example is the recent phenomenon of fairly traded coffee. Fairly traded coffee is considered a differentiated product by a segment of the coffee purchasing community. Customer branding also occurs in illegal drugs (opium, heroin, cocaine), which can be considered the most extensively traded commodity in the world.53 Pitt et al.49 noticed that it is difcult to separate brands from products, products from producers, and producers from customers. We believe that there is a need to understand how a product is branded throughout the product chain from the producer to the nal consumer. Wroe Alderson45,54 noted that the marketing process is the continuous operation of transforming conglomerate resources as they occur in nature into meaningful assortments in the hands of consumers. By considering branding

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as it is used throughout a product chain, a new insight into branding can be developed. If customers are branding in the value chain, it is an indicator that the channel may not be operating efciently and money is being left on the table. If a producer is selling a commodity product that is being differentiated by their customers, they might be able to charge a higher price or sell their product earlier, resulting in lower storage costs. Customer branding can and sometimes does occur in the middle of the value chain, where a middleman can take a prot without the producer being cut in on his or her share. In this case, the producer would be selling an undifferentiated commodity to the middleman and the middleman would be selling a customer-branded product. The producer may not be aware that customer branding is occurring later in the value chain. Understanding the conditions under which customer branding is likely to occur would enable a participant in the value chain to identify that customer branding is likely to be taking place, and to make money from the phenomenon. For example, a commodity producer, who knows little of the end customer, but knows that conditions for customer branding exist, might try and survey his or her end customers to see whether those customers were branding their product unbeknownst to the producer. If the customer was branding the product, the producer could nd out whether a middleman was taking a larger prot for sorting the product, and if so, nd a way to share the additional prot. If the middleman was not branding the product, there would be an opportunity for the producer and middleman to nd a way to work together to brand the product and share the prots. If one customer is differentiating the product, there may also be

additional customers who are interested in the same set of attributes, resulting in a niche market opportunity. Of course, the middleman has an incentive to try to provide the customer-branded product to the customer in a way that is opaque to the producers in order to capture the additional revenue for himself. The area of customer branding yields several questions for future research: do the proposed propositions hold up under empirical examination? When customer branding does not occur when the three proposed conditions are met, why not? Does customer branding make the channel more efcient? Why does customer branding not occur more often in commodity chains? What action does customer branding call for in others in the channel? Does disintermediation play a role in customers not branding? Customer branding currently exits in the value chain, and by understanding the phenomena, value chain participants can increase revenue and improve product movement. Customer branding is an area that needs further exploration within the eld of branding in order to fully understand the phenomenon.

References and Notes

(1) Levitt, T. (1980) Marketing success through differentiationof anything, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 8391 (Citation on p. 83). (2) Wilkins, M. (1994) When and why brand names in food and drink?, in Jones G. and Morgan N.J. (eds.) Adding Value: Brands and Marketing in Food and Drink, Routledge, London, pp. 1540. (3) Levitt, T. (1966) Branding on trial, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 2133. (4) Default branding was suggested by an anonymous reviewer. (5) Duguid, P. (2003) Developing the brand: The case of alcohol, 18001880, Enterprise & Society, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 405441, (Citation on pp. 435, 430). (6) Kotler, P. (2003) Marketing Management, Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ.

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