Building Brands for Impact – Samenvatting
---------------------------------------Lecture 1: What is a brand, and why does it matter?
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Chapter 1 Strategic Brand Management: Brands and Brand Management
What is a brand:
“Name, term, sign, symbol, or design, 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.”
- Brand elements: Anything that a consumer thinks, feels, sees when the consumer thinks about our brand (logo,
slogan, people, packaging etc etc.). Marketers have many choices about the number and nature of the brand
elements they use to identify their products.
Brands vs Products:
Product: anything we can offer to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that might satisfy a need or
want. We can define five levels of meaning for a product:
1. The core benefit level is the fundamental need or want that consumers satisfy by consuming the product or
service.
2. The generic product level is a basic version of the product containing only those attributes or characteristics
absolutely necessary for its functioning but with no distinguishing features. This is basically a stripped-down, no-
frills version of the product that adequately performs the product function.
3. The expected product level is a set of attributes or characteristics that buyers normally expect and agree to when
they purchase a product.
4. The augmented product level includes additional product attributes, benefits, or related services that distinguish
the product from competitors.
5. The potential product level includes all the augmentations and transformations that a product might ultimately
undergo in the future.
A brand is therefore more than a product because it can have dimensions that differentiate it in some way from other
products designed to satisfy the same need. These differences may be rational and tangible—related to product
performance of the brand—or more symbolic, emotional, and intangible—related to what the brand represents.
Why do brands matter?
Consumers:
- Identification of source of product and Assignment of responsibility to product maker. Consumers know the brand
and know which brands satisfy their needs.
- Risk reducer : brands can reduce the risks:
o Functional risk: The product does not perform up to expectations.
o Physical risk: The product poses a threat to the physical well-being or health of the user or others.
o Financial risk: The product is not worth the price paid.
o Social risk: The product results in embarrassment from others.
o Psychological risk: The product affects the mental well-being of the user.
o Time risk: The failure of the product results in an opportunity cost of finding another satisfactory product.
- Search cost reducer: when people recognise a brand and know that this brands satisfy their needs, they do not need
to search thoroughly. costs for how much they need to think and need to look around are lower.
- Promise, bond, or pact with maker of product: consumers offer their trust and hope that the brand will behave in
certain ways in exchange.
- Symbolic device: Brand can allow consumers to project their self-image. Certain brands are associated with
certain types of people and thus reflect different values or traits. By consuming these products, they show to others
what type of person they are or want to be.
- Signal of quality
Manufacturers:
- Means of identification to simplify handling or tracing, through easy identification of the brand.
- Means of legally protecting unique features of the brand or product.
- Signal of quality level to satisfied customers, so that they will buy the product again.
- Means of endowing products with unique associations
- Source of competitive advantage: you know a brand for a long time, gives advantage.
- Source of financial returns.
How can a product be branded?
- You need to teach consumers who the brand is by name, brand elements etc. Label the product and provide
meaning for the brand.
- Brands create mental structures: The key to branding is that consumers perceive differences among brands in a
product category. (attributes or benefits of the product or service itself, intangible image considerations).
- Brands are important when there is a choice situations.
Branding physical goods:
,- B2B products: Branding creates a positive image and reputation for the company, leading to profitable selling
opportunities competitive advantage.
- High-tech products: Many technology companies have struggled with branding. In many of their markets,
however, financial success is no longer driven by product innovation alone, but also by marketing.
Branding services:
- Branding is important to address intangibility and variability problems (quality can differ between people
providing the service). Brands can help identify and provide meaning to the different services provided by a firm.
- Branding is important for professional services (consultancy, accounting). Long term relationships are important,
and variability is more an issue. The people play an important role, so it is important to let them show the brand to
others.
Branding retailers and distributors:
- Brands can generate consumer interest, patronage, and loyalty in a store, as consumers learn to expect certain
brands and products. Brands can help retailers create an image and establish positioning.
- Retailers do often introduce new brands within their store (private label).
Branding online products and services:
- It is critical to create unique aspects of the brand on some dimension that is important to consumers, such as
convenience, price, or variety. At the same time, the brand needs to perform satisfactorily in other areas, such as
customer service, credibility, and personality.
- By offering unique features and services to consumers, the best online brands are able to avoid extensive
advertising or lavish marketing campaigns, relying more on word-of-mouth and publicity.
- Importance of offline activities to draw people to their website. URLs. Target specific groups.
Branding people and organizations:
- These often have well-defined images that are easily understood and liked (or disliked) by others, for example
public figures.
- Organizations often take on meanings through their programs, activities, and products.
Branding Sports, Arts, and Entertainment
- Sports: many sports teams are marketing themselves through a creative combination of advertising, promotions,
sponsorship, direct mail, digital, and other forms of communication. By building awareness, image, and loyalty,
these sports franchises are able to meet ticket sales targets regardless of what their team’s actual performance
might turn out to be.
- Arts & entertainment: prospective buyers cannot judge quality by inspection and must use cues such as the
particular people involved, the concept or rationale behind the project, and word-of-mouth and critical reviews.
Name of a popular person can generate interest.
What are the strongest brands?
Tellis and Golder identify the following five factors and rationale as the keys to enduring brand leadership:
- Vision of the Mass Market: Companies with a keen eye for mass market tastes are more likely to build a broad and
sustainable customer base.
- Managerial Persistence: The “breakthrough” technology that can drive market leadership often requires the
commitment of company resources over long periods of time.
- Financial Commitment: The cost of maintaining leadership is high because of the demands for research and
development and marketing. Companies that aim for short-term profitability rather than long-term leadership, are
unlikely to enjoy enduring leadership.
- Relentless Innovation: Due to changes in consumer tastes and competition from other firms, companies that wish
to maintain leadership positions must continually innovate.
- Asset Leverage: Companies can become leaders in some categories if they hold a leadership position in a related
category.
Branding challenges and opportunities:
- Savy customers: consumers and businesses have been more experienced with marketing and more demanding.
Consumers have access to a lot of sources of information. Therefore, it is harder to persuade consumers.
- Economic downturns: As the economy appeared to move out of the recession, the question was whether attitudes
and behaviours that did change would revert back to their pre-recession norms.
- Brand proliferation: a brand name could link to many different products (Example: Dove), this complicates
marketing decisions.
- Media transformation: marketing is harder with new types of media.
- Increased competition: there is a lot of new competition due to: globalization, low-priced competitors, brand
extensions, deregulation.
- Increased costs
- Greater accountability: marketers often find themselves responsible for meeting ambitious short-term profit targets
because of financial market pressures and senior management imperatives.
Brand equity:
,The power of your brand, customer based. Impactfull brands that positively impact consumers. Brand equity explains
why different outcomes result from the marketing of a branded product or service than if it were not branded. Basic
principles:
- Differences in outcomes arise from the “added value” endowed to a product as a result of past marketing activity
for the brand.
- This value can be created for a brand in many different ways.
- Brand equity provides a common denominator for interpreting marketing strategies and assessing the value of a
brand.
- There are many different ways in which the value of a brand can be manifested or exploited to benefit the firm (in
terms of greater proceeds or lower costs or both)
Strategic brand management process:
Involves the design and implementation of marketing programs and activities to build, measure, and manage brand
equity. 4 steps:
1. Identifying and developing brand plans
What does the brand represent and how should it be positioned compared to competitors. Models:
- The brand positioning model describes how to guide integrated marketing to maximize competitive advantages.
- The brand resonance model describes how to create intense, activity loyalty relationships with customers.
- The brand value chain is a means to trace the value creation process for brands, to better understand the financial
impact of brand marketing expenditures and investments.
2. Designing and implementing brand marketing programs
Properly positioning the brand in the minds of customers and achieving as much brand resonance as possible.
Knowledge-building depends on three factors:
- The initial choices of the brand elements making up the brand and how they are mixed and matched. Choosing
URLs, logos, slogans etc.
- The marketing activities and supporting marketing programs and the way the brand is integrated into them.
- Other associations indirectly transferred to or leveraged by the brand as a result of linking it to some other entity
(such as the company, country of origin, channel of distribution, or another brand).
3. Measuring and interpreting brand performance
A brand equity measurement system is a set of research procedures designed to provide timely, accurate, and
actionable information for marketers so that they can make the best possible tactical decisions in the short run and the
best strategic decisions in the long run.
- Brand audits: comprehensive examination of a brand to assess its health, uncover its sources of equity, and suggest
ways to improve and leverage that equity.
- Brand tracking: collect information from consumers on a routine basis over time, typically through quantitative
measures of brand performance on a number of key dimensions marketers can identify in the brand audit or other
means.
- Brand equity management system: set of organizational processes designed to improve the understanding and use
of the brand equity concept within a firm.
4. Growing and sustaining brand equity
Maintaining and expanding brand equity.
- Defining brand architecture: general guidelines about its branding strategy and which brand elements to apply
across all the different products sold by the firm.
o Brand portfolio: e set of different brands that a particular firm offers for sale to buyers in a particular
category.
o Brand hierarchy displays the number and nature of common and distinctive brand components across the
firm’s set of brands.
- Managing brand equity over time: long term view.
- Managing Brand Equity over Geographic Boundaries, Cultures, and Market Segments.
Chapter 2 Strategic Brand Management: Customer-Based Brand Equity and Brand Positioning
Customer-Based Brand Equity:
Brand equity from the perspective of the customer: what have customers learned, felt, seen, heard of the brand as the
result of their experiences. the power of a brand lies in what resides in the minds and hearts of customers.
Consumer knowledge drives the differences that manifest themselves in terms of brand equity.
- Differential effect that brand knowledge has on consumer response to the marketing of that brand. A brand has
positive customer-based brand equity when consumers react more favourably to a product and the way it is
marketed when the brand is identified than when it is not (say, when the product is attributed to a fictitious name
or is unnamed).
o Brand equity arises from differences in consumer response. If no differences occur, then the brand-name
product can essentially be classified as a commodity or a generic version of the product.
, o These differences in response are based on customer knowledge of a brand that they have learned.
o Customers’ differential responses, which make up brand equity, are reflected in perceptions, preferences, and
behavior related to all aspects of brand marketing, for example, including choice of a brand, recall of copy
points from an ad, response to a sales promotion, and evaluations of a proposed brand extension.
- Consumers’ perception of product performance is highly dependent on their impressions of the brand that goes
along with it.
Brand equity as a bridge:
- Brands as a reflection of the past: all the money spend on marketing products are investments in consumer
knowledge about the brand. The quality of the investment in brand building is the most critical factor, not the
quantity beyond some minimal threshold amount.
- Brands as a direction for the future: The brand knowledge that marketers create over time dictates appropriate and
inappropriate future directions for the brand.
Making a brand strong: brand knowledge
Marketeers need an insightful way to represent how brand knowledge exists in consumer memory.
Associative network memory model: memory is a network of nodes and connecting links. Any type of information—
whether it’s verbal, abstract, or contextual—can be stored in the memory network.
o Nodes represent stored information or concepts.
o Links represent the strength of association between the nodes.
- Brand knowledge is a brand node with variety of associations linked to it. Brand knowledge has two components:
o Brand awareness: Strength of the brand node or trace in memory. Measure: the consumer’s ability to identify
the brand under different conditions.
o Brand image: consumers’ perceptions about a brand, as reflected by the brand associations held in consumer
memory. Some brands have strong associations with certain things.
Sources of brand equity
Customer-based brand equity occurs when the consumer has a high level of awareness and familiarity with the brand
and holds some strong, favourable, and unique brand associations in memory. Marketeers must convince consumers
that there are meaningful differences among brands.
Brand awareness:
- Brand recognition: is consumers’ ability to confirm prior exposure to the brand when given the brand as a cue.
When they go to a store, will they recognize the brand as one to which they have already been exposed.
important for purchases where the decisions are made at the point of purchase, so where brand name, packaging
logo play a part (in store).
- Brand recall: is consumers’ ability to retrieve the brand from memory when given the product category, the needs
fulfilled by the category, or a purchase or usage situation as a cue. Recall Kellogg’s corn flakes when they think of
what they should eat for breakfast. important for purchases where choices are made in settings away from the
point of purchase (service and online brands)
Advantages of brand awareness:
- Learning: Brand awareness influences the formation and strength of the associations that make up the brand
image. The first step in building brand equity is to register the brand in the mind of customers, creating a brand
node.
- Consideration: Consumers must consider the brand whenever they are making a purchase for which it could be
acceptable or fulfilling a need it could satisfy. Raising brand awareness increases the likelihood that the brand will
be a member of the consideration set, the handful of brands that receive serious consideration for purchase.
- Choice: Brand awareness can influence the choices mong brands in the consideration set. Example: consumers
seem to have adopted a decision rule in some cases to buy only more familiar brands.
Elaboration likelihood model:
Consumers may make choices based on brand awareness considerations when they have low involvement. Low
involvement results when consumers lack either.
- purchase motivation (they don’t care about the product or service).
- purchase ability (they don’t know anything else about the brands in a category).
Establishing brand awareness:
- Increasing familiarity of the brand through repeated exposure, the more people see it, the more they will recognise
it. The more consumers experience brand elements, the more familiar a brand becomes.
- Repetition increases recognizability, but improving brand recall also requires linkages in memory to appropriate
product categories or other purchase or consumption cues. Their needs to be a link made between the product
category and the brand.
Brand image:
If a sufficient level of brand awareness is created, marketers can put more emphasis on crafting a brand image: link
strong, favourable, and unique associations to the brand in memory (that are different from competitors).
- Brand attributes: descriptive features that characterize a product or service.
