Brands and Brand Management

Chapter - 2
 What is a brand?
• According to the American Marketing Association
(AMA), a brand is a “name, term, sign, symbol, or a
combination of them, intended to identify the goods and
services of one seller or group of sellers and to
differentiate them from those of competition.”
• These different components of a brand that identify and
differentiate it are brand elements.
 What is a brand?
• Many practicing managers refer to a brand as more than
that— as something that has actually created a certain
amount of awareness, reputation, prominence, and so on in
the marketplace.
• We can make a distinction between the AMA definition
of a “brand” with a small b and the industry’s concept of
a “Brand” with a capital b.
 Brands vs. Products
• A product is anything we can offer to a market
for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption
that might satisfy a need or want.
• A product may be a physical good, a service, a
retail outlet, a person, an organization, a place,
or even an idea.
• A brand is therefore more than a product,
as it can have dimensions that
differentiate it in some way from other
products designed to satisfy the same
need.
• Some brands create competitive
advantages with product performance;
other brands create competitive
advantages through non-product-related
means.
 Criteria for Choosing Brand Elements

• Memorability
Marketer’s offensive strategy
• Meaningfulness and build brand equity
• Likability
• Transferability
• Adaptability Defensive role for leveraging
and maintaining brand equity
• Protectability
 Tactics for Brand Elements
• A variety of brand elements can be chosen that
inherently enhance brand awareness or facilitate
the formation of strong, favorable, and unique
brand associations.
– Brand names
– URLs
– Logos or symbols or signs
– Characters
– Slogans
– Packaging
 Brand Names
• Like any brand element, brand names
must be chosen with the six general
criteria of memorability, meaningfulness,
likeability, transferability, adaptability,
and protectability in mind.
 Brand Naming Guidelines
• Brand awareness
– Simplicity and ease of pronunciation and spelling
– Familiarity and meaningfulness
– Differentiated, distinctive, and uniqueness
• Brand associations
– The explicit and implicit meanings consumers extract
from it are important. In particular, the brand name
can reinforce an important attribute or benefit
association that makes up its product positioning.
 Brand Naming Procedures
• Define objectives
• Generate names
• Screen initial candidates
• Study candidate names
• Research the final candidates
• Select the final name
 URLs
• URLs (uniform resource locators) specify locations of
pages on the web and are also commonly referred to as
domain names.
• A company can either sue the current owner of the URL
for copyright infringement, buy the name from the
current owner, or register all conceivable variations of its
brand as domain names ahead of time.
 Logos and Symbols
• Play a critical role in building brand equity and
especially brand awareness
• Logos range from corporate names or trademarks (word
marks with text in general) written in a distinctive form,
to entirely abstract designs that may be completely
unrelated to the word mark, corporate name, or
corporate activities A word, symbol, or phrase used to
identify a particular company's
product and differentiate it from other
companies' products. Indicated by the
symbol ™, when registered with a
government authority it is sometimes
indicated by the symbol ®; To register
something as a trademark; To so label
a product.
 Characters
• A special type of brand symbol—one that takes on
human or real-life characteristics
• Some are animated like Pillsbury’s Poppin’ Fresh
Doughboy, Peter Pan peanut butter’s character, and
numerous other characters such as Tony the Tiger, The
AMUL girl.
• Others are figures like Juan Valdez (Colombian coffee),
and Ronald McDonald. Notable newcomers include the
AOL running man, the Budweiser frogs, and the AFLAC
duck.
 Slogans
• Slogans are short phrases that communicate
descriptive or persuasive information about the
brand.
• Slogans are powerful branding devices because,
like brand names, they are an extremely efficient,
shorthand means to build brand equity
 Classic Slogans
• “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands” (M&M’s)
• “Where’s the beef?” (Wendy’s)
• “Can you hear me now?” (Verizon)
 Jingles
• Jingles are musical messages written around the brand.
Typically composed by professional songwriters, they
often have enough catchy hooks and choruses to become
almost permanently registered in the minds of
listeners—sometimes whether they want them to or not!
• Jingles are perhaps most valuable in enhancing brand
awareness.
 Packaging
• From the perspective of both the firm and consumers,
packaging must achieve a number of objectives:
– Identify the brand
– Convey descriptive and persuasive information
– Facilitate product transportation and protection
– Assist at-home storage
– Aid product consumption
 Packaging Can Influence Taste
• Our sense of taste and touch is very
suggestible, and what we see on a package
can lead us to taste what we think we are
going to taste.
Packaging Can Influence Value
• Long after we have bought a product, a
package can still lead us to believe we
bought it because it was a good value.
 Packaging Can Influence
Consumption
• Studies of 48 different types of foods and
personal care products have shown that people
pour and consume between 18% and 32% more
of a product as the size of the container doubles.

Valerie Folkes, Ingrid Martin and Kamal Gupta,

“When to Say When: Effects of Supply on Usage,”
Journal of Consumer Research, 20 December 1993, 467-477.
 Packaging Can Influence How a
Person Uses a Product
• One strategy to increase use of mature products has been
to encourage people to use the brand in new situations,
like soup for breakfast, or new uses, like baking soda as
a refrigerator deodorizer.
• An analysis of 26 products and 402 consumers showed
that twice as many people learned about the new use
from the package than from television ads.
 Putting It All Together
• The entire set of brand elements makes up the brand
identity, the contribution of all brand elements to
awareness and image.
• The cohesiveness of the brand identity depends on the
extent to which the brand elements are consistent.
 Why do brands matter?
• What functions do brands perform that
make them so valuable to marketers?
Importance of Brands to Consumers
• Identification of the source of the product
• Assignment of responsibility to product
maker
• Risk reducer
• Search & cost reducer
• Promise, bond, or pact with product
maker
• Symbolic device
• Signal of quality
 Reducing the Risks in Product
Decisions
• Consumers may perceive many different types of risks
in buying and consuming a product:
• Functional risk—The product does not perform up to
expectations.
• Physical risk—The product poses a threat to the
physical well-being or health of the user or others.
• Financial risk—The product is not worth the price paid.
• Social risk—The product results in embarrassment from
others.
• Psychological risk—The product affects the mental well-
being of the user.
• Time risk—The failure of the product results in an
opportunity cost of finding another satisfactory product.
 Importance of Brands to Firms
• To firms, brands represent enormously
valuable pieces of legal property, capable
of influencing consumer behavior, being
bought and sold, and providing the
security of sustained future revenues.
 Importance of Brands to Firms
• Identification to simplify handling or
tracing
• Legally protecting unique features
• Signal of quality level
• Endowing products with unique
associations
• Source of competitive advantage
• Source of financial returns
 Can everything be branded?
• Ultimately a brand is something that
resides in the minds of consumers.
• The key to branding is that consumers
perceive differences among brands in a
product category.
• Even commodities can be branded:
– Coffee (Barista), bath soap (Lux, Dove), flour
(Pillsbury, Ashirvad), beer (Budweiser), salt
(Tata), oatmeal (Quaker), pickles (Mother
Dairy,Nilons), Chickens (Perdue), pineapples
(Del Monte), and even water (Bisleri, Qua)
An Example of Branding a Commodity

• De Beers Group added the phrase “A

Diamond Is Forever”
 What can be branded?
• Physical goods
• Services
• Retailers and distributors
• Online products and services
• People and organizations (Politicians,
entertainers etc.)
• Sports, arts, and entertainment
• Geographic locations
• Ideas and causes
 Source of Brands Strength
• “The real causes of enduring market leadership are
vision and will. Enduring market leaders have a
revolutionary and inspiring vision of the mass market,
and they exhibit an indomitable will to realize that
vision. They persist under adversity, innovate
relentlessly, commit financial resources, and leverage
assets to realize their vision.”
Gerald J. Tellis and Peter N. Golder, “First to Market, First to Fail? Real
Causes of Enduring Market Leadership,” MIT Sloan Management
Review, 1 January 1996
Importance of Brand Management
• The bottom line is that any brand—no
matter how strong at one point in time—is
vulnerable, and susceptible to poor brand
management.
What are the strongest brands?
 Branding Challenges and
Opportunities
• Savvy customers
• Brand proliferation
• Media fragmentation
• Increased competition
• Increased costs
• Greater accountability
 The Brand Equity Concept
• No common viewpoint on how it should
be conceptualized and measured
• It stresses the importance of brand role in
marketing strategies.
• Brand equity is defined in terms of the
marketing effects uniquely attributable to
the brand.
– Brand equity relates to the fact that different outcomes
result in the marketing of a product or service because
of its brand name, as compared to if the same product
or service did not have that name.
 Strategic Brand Management
• It involves the design and implementation
of marketing programs and activities to
build, measure, and manage brand equity.
• The Strategic Brand Management Process is
defined as involving four main steps:
1. Identifying and establishing brand positioning and
values
2. Planning and implementing brand marketing programs
3. Measuring and interpreting brand performance
4. Growing and sustaining brand equity
Strategic Brand Management Process

Steps Key Concepts

Identify and establish
brand positioning and values
Mental maps
Competitive frame of reference
Points-of-parity and points-of-difference
Core brand values
Brand mantra

Plan and implement Mixing and matching of brand elements

brand marketing programs Integrating brand marketing activities
Leveraging of secondary associations

Brand value chain

Measure and interpret Brand audits
brand performance Brand tracking
Brand equity management system

Brand-product matrix
Grow and sustain Brand portfolios and hierarchies
brand equity Brand expansion strategies
Brand reinforcement and revitalization