Branding
Summary of all articles
Grade: 8,5
March 2019
University of Amsterdam
,Week 1 – Brand Equity 3
Article 1.1 – Keller, K. L. (2016). Reflections on customer-based brand equity: perspectives, progress, and priorities.
AMS review. 3
Article 1.2 Swaminathan, V. (2016). Branding in the digital era: new directions for research on customer-based
brand equity. AMS review. 9
Article 1.3 Batra, R., Ahuvia, A., & Bagozzi, R. P. (2012). Brand love. Journal of marketing. 11
Week 2 – Brand Positioning 13
Article 2.1 Maehle, Otnes & Supphellen (2011) – Consumers’ perceptions of the dimensions of brand personality 13
Article 2.2 Keller, Sternthal & Tybout (2002) – Three questions you need to ask your brand 18
Article 2.3 Romaniuk, Sharp & Ehrenberg (2007) – Evidence concerning the importance of perceived brand
differentiation 22
Week 3 – Brand Building 26
Article 3.1: Keller (2005) – Branding Shortcuts: Choosing the right brand elements and leveraging secondary
associations will help marketers build brand equity. Marketing Management. 26
Article 3.2: Walsh, Winterich & Mittal (2010) – Do logo redesigns help or hurt your brand? The role of brand
commitment. 28
Article 3.3: Keller (2003) – Brand synthesis: the multidimensionality of brand knowledge. 32
Article 3.4: Magnusson, Westjohn, Zdravkovic (2011) – “What? I thought Samsung was Japanese”: accurate or not,
perceived country of origin matters. 34
Week 4 (Digital) Marketing Communication 36
Article 4.1: Keller, K (2016) – Unlocking the power of integrated marketing communications: how integrated is your
IMC program? Journal of Advertising. 36
Article 4.2: Rotfeld, H.J. (2002) – Misplaced marketing: the real reason for the real bad advertising. Journal of
Consumer Marketing. 42
Article 4.3: Holt, D. (2016) – Branding in the age of social media. Harvard Business Review. 44
Article 4.4: Kohli, C., Suri, R., & Kapoor, A. (2015) – Will social media kill branding? Business Horizons. 46
Week 5: Brand Equity Leverage 50
5.1: Aaker, D. (1990). Brand extensions: The good, the bad, and the ugly. 50
5.2: Dwivedi, A., Merrilees, B., & Sweeney, A. (2010). Brand extension feedback effects: A holistic framework.
Journal of Brand Management. 54
5.3: Monga, A., & John, D. (2010). What Makes Brands Elastic? The Influence of Brand Concept and Styles of
Thinking on Brand Extension Evaluation. Journal of Marketing. 56
Week 6: Brand Architecture 60
6.1: Keller, K.L. (2014). Designing and implementing brand architecture strategies. 60
6.2: Aaker, D.A., & Joachimsthaler, E. (2000). The Brand Relationship Spectrum: The Key to the Brand Architecture
Challenge. 64
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,Week 1 – Brand Equity
Article 1.1 – Keller, K. L. (2016). Reflections on customer-based brand equity: perspectives, progress, and
priorities. AMS review.
This article reflects on the article ‘’Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity’’ written
by Keller in 1993.
à In this article, special emphasis is put on digital developments à ‘updated CBBE article’.
The branding area was just emerging as more broadly important, and there was increased interest in the topic by both
academics and practitioners.
Keller became fascinated by the notion that brand names and packages are often insufficient cues to advertising at the
point-of-purchase and more explicit cues may be necessary.
Customer- based brand equity: “the differential effect that brand knowledge has on customer response to brand
marketing activity”.
- Characterized by three dimensions
- 1. Differential effects created by a brand
- 2. Brand knowledge (defined very broadly as any type of mental brand association-as the source of the
differential effects)
- 3. Response to a wide variety of different marketing and other variables for the brand as a basis or outcomes
of those differential effects.
à building, measuring and managing customer-based brand equity (CBBE)
- Building customer-based brand equity
o Defined in term of 3 activities:
§ Choosing brand identities or elements
§ Designing and implementing marketing activities themselves
§ Leveraging secondary associations by linking the brand to some other entity – a person,
place or thing.
- Measuring customer-based brand equity
o Two approaches:
§ An indirect approach which focused on potential sources of brand equity by measuring brand
knowledge
§ A direct approach that attempted to actually measure the differential effect created by that
brand knowledge on consumer response to different aspects of the brand’s marketing
program.
- Managing customer-based brand equity
o Six guidelines
§ Emphasizing the importance of taking a broad and long-term view of marketing a brand
§ Specifying the desired consumer knowledge structures and core benefits for a brand;
§ Considering a wide range of traditional and nontraditional advertising, promotion, and other
marketing options;
§ Coordinating the marketing options that were chosen;
§ Conducting tracking studies and controlled experiments;
§ Evaluating potential extension candidates.
Two main research streams: Brand knowledge and Brand extensions
Brand Knowledge
- Is at the very core of customer-based brand equity.
à Brand knowledge viewed from the perspective of an Associative Network Memory Model: very robust, and useful
to explain and interpret all kinds of marketing and consumer behavior phenomena. Particularly applicable to brands
and branding.
The CBBE article offered a very simple taxonomy of brand knowledge that broke the concept down into two key
components:
1) Brand Awareness à Consisting of brand recall and recognition
2) Brand Image à Characterized by the strength, favorability and uniqueness of different kinds of attribute and
benefit associations for the brand.
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, Dimensions of brand knowledge in terms of:
Awareness, attributes, benefits, images, thoughs, feelings, attitudes and experiences.
JCR article keller 2003 central: broader perspecitves towards brand knowledge given that:
1. Marketing activity creates or affects multiple dimesnsions of brand knowledge
2. Multiple dimensions of brand knowledge, in turn, influence consumer response to marketing activity.
Any other entity can be characterized by those same dimensions of brand knowledge. à Three factor model
maintaining the extent of equity transfer that could potentially occur from linking a brand to another entity. Dependent
on:
1. Consumer knowledge of the other entity
2. Meaningfulness of knowledge of entity to the brand
3. Transferability of the knowledge of the entity to the brand.
The Brand Resonance Model
Outlines a series of branding stages and building blocks to profile how consumers form relationships with brands.
Fundamental activities and mindsets à emotional activities and feelings à relationships which are much more action
oriented and behavioural.
We also connect these to objectives.
1 Brand Salience
salient point = a good/relevant point
The breadth and depth of brand awareness.
This is the base level of the model. Brand salience depends on the extent to which the brand is thought of easily and
often – at all the right times, in all the right places, and in all the right ways. Even by just acknowledging the importance
of brand awareness at both purchase and consumption, this was a much richer view of brand awareness than the
straight-forward brand recognition and top- of-mind awareness measures often employed in the industry.
2 & 3 Brand imagery and Brand Performance
performance: it needs to perform
imagery: develop and deliver a certain type of image of the brand to the customer
Distinction in terms of tangible and intangible associations, related to performance and imagery. Going up the left-hand
side of the model of the pyramid => a more rational route to brand building. Going up the right-hand side can be seen
more as the emotional route. The model acknowledges that strong brands go up both sides of the pyramid, while also
recognizing the importance of cross-over effects, such that performance association affects feelings and imagery
associations affects judgments.
PODs: points-of-difference;
POPs: points-of-parity → Brands need to both have advantages (PODs) in some areas and break even in other areas
(POPs) with respect to a well-defined set of competitors.
The POD and POP model provides a much more competitively-realistic and consumer-grounded approach to
positioning vs. the classic approaches to positioning espoused by marketing pundits such as Ries and trout or found
in traditional positioning statement templates.
judgment how does it perform what do I think. feelings: developing feelings around that
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