7.4 Branding Strategy: Building Strong Brands Flashcards
(38 cards)
What are Brands?
Brands are more than just names and symbols. They are a key element in the company’s relationships with consumers.
Brands represent consumers’ perceptions and feelings about a product and its performance—everything that the product or the service means to consumers.
In the final analysis, brands exist in the heads of consumers. As one well-respected marketer once said, “Products are created in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.
Definition of Brand equity
Brand equity:
The differential effect that knowing the brand name has on customer response to the product or its marketing.
When does a brand have positive/negative brand equity?
A brand has positive brand equity when consumers react more favourably to it than to a generic or unbranded version of the same product.
It has negative brand equity if consumers react less favourably than to an unbranded version.
Ad agency Young & Rubicam’s BrandAsset Valuator measures brand strength along four consumer perception dimensions.
Differentiation (what makes the brand stand out)
Relevance (how consumers feel it meets their needs)
Knowledge (how much consumers know about the brand)
Esteem (how highly consumers regard and respect the brand).
What is positive brand equity derived from?
Positive brand equity derives from consumer feelings about and connections with a brand.
Definition of Brand value.
Brand value:
The total financial value of a brand.
High brand equity provides a company with many competitive advantages. What are they?
A powerful brand enjoys a high level of consumer brand awareness and loyalty.
Because consumers expect stores to carry the particular brand, the company has more leverage in bargaining with resellers.
Because a brand name carries high credibility, the company can more easily launch line and brand extensions.
A powerful brand also offers the company some defence against fierce price competition and other competitor marketing actions.
- Above all, however, a powerful brand forms the basis for building strong and profitable customer engagement and relationships. *
What is the fundamental asset underlying brand equity?
The fundamental asset underlying brand equity is customer equity—the value of customer relationships that the brand creates.
A powerful brand is important, but what it really represents is a profitable set of loyal customers.
The proper focus of marketing is building customer equity, with brand management serving as a major marketing tool.
Companies need to think of themselves not as portfolios of brands but as portfolios of customers.
The major brand strategy decisions involve
Brand positioning
Brand name selection
Brand sponsorship
Brand development
Figure 7.5 Major Brand Strategy Decisions
What are the three levels of Brand positioning?
Attribues
Benifits
Beliefs and values
What is the product attribute of Brand positioning?
At the lowest level, they can position the brand on product attributes.
For example, Whirlpool can position its major home appliance products on attributes such as quality, selection, style, and innovative features. In general, however, attributes are the least desirable level for brand positioning.
Competitors can easily copy attributes. More important, customers are not interested in attributes as such—they are interested in what the attributes will do for them.
What is the benifit aspect of Brand positioning?
A brand can be better positioned by associating its name with a desirable benefit.
Thus, Whirlpool can go beyond technical product attributes and talk about benefits such as taking the hassle out of cooking and cleaning, better energy savings, or more stylish kitchens.
For example, for years, Whirlpool positioned its washing machines as having “the power to get more done.”
Some successful brands positioned on benefits are FedEx (guaranteed on-time delivery), Walmart (save money), and Instagram (capturing and sharing moments).
What is the Beliefs and values aspect of Brand positioning?
he strongest brands go beyond attribute or benefit positioning. They are positioned on strong beliefs and values, engaging customers on a deep, emotional level.
For example, Whirlpool’s research showed that home appliances are more than just “cold metal” to customers.
They have a deeper meaning connected with the value that they play in customers’ lives and relationships.
So Whirlpool launched a major positioning campaign—called “Every Day, Care”—based on the warm emotions of taking care of the people you love with Whirlpool appliances.
What must a marketer keep in mind when positioning a brand?
When positioning a brand, the marketer should establish a mission for the brand and a vision of what the brand must be and do.
A brand is the company’s promise to deliver a specific set of features, benefits, services, and experiences consistently to buyers.
The brand promise must be clear, simple, and honest.
What does deciding on a brand name begin with?
It begins with a careful review of the product and its benefits, the target market, and proposed marketing strategies. After that, naming a brand becomes part science, part art, and a measure of instinct.
Desirable qualities for a brand name include the following:
(1) It should suggest something about the product’s benefits and qualities: Beautyrest, Slimfast, Facebook, Airbnb.
(2) It should be easy to pronounce, recognize, and remember: iPad, Tide, Jelly Belly, Twitter, JetBlue.
(3) The brand name should be distinctive: Panera, Swiffer, Zappos, Nest.
(4) It should be extendable—Amazon.com began as an online bookseller but chose a name that would allow expansion into other categories.
(5) The name should translate easily into foreign languages: Coca-Cola translates in Chinese to “Ke Kou Ke Le,” which means “tasty fun.”
(6) It should be capable of registration and legal protection. A brand name cannot be registered if it infringes on existing brand names.
Once a name is chosen for a brand, what must happen?
Once chosen, the brand name must be protected. Many firms try to build a brand name that will eventually become identified with the product category.
What must a brand do to protect their brands?
To protect their brands, marketers present them carefully using the word brand and the registered trademark symbol
What are the four different kinds of Brand sponsorship?
The product may be launched as a national brand (or manufacturer’s brand), as when Samsung and Kellogg sell their output under their own brand names (the Samsung Galaxy tablet or Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes).
Or the manufacturer may sell to resellers who give the product a** private** brand (also called a store brand).
Although most manufacturers create their own brand names, others market licensed brands.
Finally, two companies can join forces and co-brand a product.
Definition of a Store brand (private brand)
Store brand (private brand):
A brand created and owned by a reseller of a product or service.
Once known as “generic” or “no-name” brands, today’s store brands have shed their image as cheap knockoffs of national brands. Store brands now offer much greater selection, and they are rapidly achieving name-brand quality. In fact, many retailers are out-innovating many of their national-brand competitors.
In the so-called battle of the brands between national and private brands, retailers have many advantages.
What are they?
They control what products they stock, where they go on the shelf, what prices they charge, and which ones they will feature in local promotions.
Retailers often price their store brands lower than comparable national brands and feature the price differences in side-by-side comparisons on store shelves.
Although store brands can be hard to establish and costly to stock and promote, they also yield higher profit margins for the reseller.
And they give resellers exclusive products that cannot be bought from competitors, resulting in greater store traffic and loyalty.
How to National brands compete with store brands?
To compete with store brands, national brands must sharpen their value propositions, especially when appealing to today’s more frugal consumers.
Many national brands are fighting back by rolling out more discounts and coupons to defend their market share.
In the long run, however, leading brand marketers must compete by investing in new brands, new features, and quality improvements that set them apart.
They must design strong advertising programs to maintain high awareness and preference. And they must find ways to partner with major distributors to find distribution economies and improve joint performance.
A company has four choices when it comes to developing brands. What are they?
It can introduce:
Line extensions,
Brand extensions
Multibrands
New brands
