CHAPTER 2 : BRANDING
Branding is important, because a lot of marketing communications is aimed at marketing branding.
Brands are powerful instruments of strategic marketing and important vehicles on the road to long-term
profitability.
Chapter objectives
- Understand the various aspects of branding
- Learn about the characteristics of successful brands
- Make the distinction between major types of brand strategies and their advantages and disadvantages
- Form an idea of the composition of a brand portfolio
- Understand the concept of brand value or brand equity and its major components
- Assess the benefits of branding for the consumer and the manufacturer
- Get an overview of how marketing communications contribute to brand strength
Brands
- Name, term, sign, symbol, design.
It are words, a logo, a bottle... It can be anything that identifies the goods of products from one group to a
group of sellers and distinguishes it from other brands.
The marketing meaning of a brand is to be a web of associations in the mind of customers. If customers think
of your brand or when they are confronted with your brand, they should think about all sorts of things : tastes,
believes, moments, situations, feelings, friendships, quality... The more associations you have with a brand,
the stronger the brand, since a lot of things make you think about the brand.
- Identify goods or services of one or a group of sellers.
- Differentiate goods or services from competition
- Rational and tangible dimensions.
It has to do with very functional characteristics : e.g. the table is made of wood, you can place things
on it... A BMW is a high technological fast car. You can touch the buttons of your phone. ...
- Symbolic, emotional and intangible dimensions.
These are often more important compared with the rational dimensions. E.g. ‘Nike, just do it’ is not
tangible, but it is empowering, it is an emotional proposition. McDonalds ‘I’m loving it’, it is an
emotional characteristic. Parfum brands are associated with certain beautiful people, you often pay
not for the tangible thing, but for the brand, the idea. People want to buy an Apple, because it is not
necessarily better, but it is a status, it is an idea that it sophisticated, that you are a smart person.
- Set of visual and/or verbal cues. -> part of a product’s tangible features
It is a logo, a bottle, a brand name...
- Brand name: part of the brand that can be spoken.
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,- Brand mark: symbol, design, packaging... -> cannot be spoken.
- Trademark : the legal designation indicating that the owner has exclusive use of the brand.
- Brand from the customer’s point of view : a brand is a web of meaningful and valuable cognitive and affective
associations. A brand is an identifier that adds either rational and tangible dimensions (related to product
performance) or symbolic, emotional and intangible dimensions (related to what the brand represents) that
differentiate it from other products designed to fulfil the same need.
- Brand associations are
- Intrinsic = brand skills : shape, performance, price, taste...
- Extrinsic = brand charisma : imagery, lifestyle, symbolism, personality... -> brands are often used by
consumers as a means of self-expression, to express their actual, desired or ideal self. There is often
a relationship with the brand, which is an essential element of branding and brand value.
Singapore Girl
She is a flight attendance at the Singapore
Airlines. They are famous for their perfect
service, the food is good, the flight
attendances are like the girl. They are
branding themselves as excellent service.
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, Good brands
- Memorable: easy to say, spell and recall, and distinctive.
This is regarding the brand name, logo... They should be able to remember it and they should be able to
express it.
- Examples: Coca-Cola, Guinness, Shell, Absolut Vodka
- Meaningful: reinforce an attribute or benefit.
This is a brand that illustrates or reinforces an attribute or benefit.
- Attribute = a characteristic. Like sweet, yellow, a lot of sugar...
- A benefit = what it can provide as a benefit from you. In a sport car you can drive fast, which is a
benefit maybe from you. A yoghurt without sugar has the benefit of being healthy.
It can be meaningful in one language but not in the other. Also you could be meaningful at a certain time, but
now not anymore : like Mercedes was the name of the daughter of Mr. Benz. It was meaningful at the time.
You do not have to be meaningful to be successful! Kodak was successful, but not meaningful.
- Examples: Pampers, Whiskas, Toilet Duck, Microsoft
- Pampers = to pamper : to take care of. So the brand signals that it helps you in pampering
babies.
- Whiskas : the way you pronounce it is meaningful, you say the whiskers of the cat.
- Toilet duck : the bottle has the form of a duck neck.
- Microsoft : it is meaningful since it was originally software that was made for small
computers, which were called microcomputers. So Microsoft made software for
microcomputers.
- Coca-Cola : in the old days it contained cocaine.
- Likeable: aesthetic appeal. -> visual and/or verbal likeability.
Beautiful, intriguing, creative.
- Adaptable : over time brand elements may lose their appeal, calling for an update.
E.g. Texaco, Nike, Michelin... updated their logo over time.
- Transferable across product categories and cultures.
This way you can extent your brand.
- Across product categories: Difficult for very ‘meaningful’ brands such as Toilet Duck, Pampers.
Toilet Duck you can only use for products for the toilet, but not for other categories, such as food.
The meaning is so narrow that it is not transferable.
- Across languages : to build a successful brand, the brand name should be easy to pronounce in
different languages.
E.g. Mountain Dew is not easy to pronounce in non-English-speaking countries...
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