BRAND MANAGEMENT

BRAND MANAGEMENT

A brand is not a name. A brand is not a positioning statement. It is not a marketing message. It is a promise made by a company to its customers and supported by that company. If that promise is kept, it creates a consumer preference. A brand is more than just an icon, a logo, a mission statement, an advertisement.

Branding is a system of visuals and words that combine to represent a product, service, or organization in the mind of a consumer. A brand is something like a flag, you see the flag of a familiar nation and you immediately associate it with that nation. The same happens with brand markings; every time you see the familiar symbols and words that make up the brand identities of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Apple, Sony, IBM, etc., they trigger responses based on all the experiences you have had with the products and companies that display these marks.

A company may be armed with all the statistics and facts as to why their product or service is superior - but if it doesn’t have an image, a personality for the audience to connect with - their message falls flat. What you are selling is always more than the product/service. It's a personality, a face with which your target customers want to do business. Thus, the success of branding lies in truly understanding who you are and who your target audience is.

The word "brand", when used as a noun, can refer to a company name, a product name, or a unique identifier such as a logo or trademark. Brands are often expressed in the form of logos, graphic representations of the brand.

In computers, a recent example of widespread brand application was the "Intel Inside" label provided to manufacturers that use Intel's microchips.

Today's modern concept of branding grew out of the consumer packaged goods industry and the process of branding has come to include much, much more than just creating a way to identify a product or company. Branding today is used to create emotional attachment to products and companies. Branding efforts create a feeling of involvement, a sense of higher quality, and an aura of intangible qualities that surround the brand name, mark, or symbol.

“A brand is an identifiable entity that makes specific promises of value.”

“ A brand is a symbol, a word, an object, and a concept – all at one and the same time.” A brand is a symbol. What is a symbol? A symbol is a sign that stands for something in a prospects mind. It carries a meaning behind it. Symbols work by stimulating the cognitive process. The consumer’s perceptual process is nothing but making sense out of those symbols present all around. A brand’s figurative aspects like packaging, colours, logos; designs etc are signs that the marketers use to communicate their intensions to the customers. Symbolism is, infact, the practice of conveying notions, ideas and concepts with the help of symbols. Why do brands have different colour schemes? It’s because the marketers try to communicate different messages to their target customers.

The cigarette brand Charms’ pack has a unique indigo blue print, like faded jeans fabric. The package design was intended to strike a cord with young customers who identified with ‘freedom’, because jeans symbolized freedom. Marketers use “slender tall” bottles to communicate feminine qualities. What is an athletic shoe with a ‘swoosh’ logo on it? ‘Swoosh’ is a concept- it is all about winning and action.

Brands create a perception in the mind of the customer that there is no other product or service on the market that is quite like yours. A brand promises to deliver value upon which consumers and prospective purchasers can rely to be consistent over long periods of time.

Thus we can say that,

“A brand is a proprietary visual, emotional and cultural image surrounding a company or its products”.

Branding is a process of creating and spreading the brand name. It can be applied to the entire corporate identity as well as to individual product and services. Company’s brand awareness in public is often used in evaluating a company. Brands are usually protected by companies as their trademarks.

The name Coca-Cola is the main asset of the firm. They have built their brand on this name. Any product or service associated with this particular name has immediate recognition. It gives the people a sense of familiarity and trust.

A chocolate associated with the name Cadbury’s would gain much acceptance in the market alone because of its name. It has been a recognized and accepted brand for the chocolates. Often, when people ask for a chocolate, they don’t say “can I have a chocolate”, they say “can I have a Cadbury.” The same applies for Bisleri. How often do we actually ask for Bottled water?

McDonalds has a certain symbol associated with it. The golden arches are synonymous with the McDonalds outlet. The kids recognize McDonalds is a km away with one look at the arches. Even if it doesn’t have a McDonalds sign attached. Or for that matter Nike. It no longer needs to write Nike under the swoosh for people to realize it’s a Nike product. The logo is the brand.

Here are a few of the many definitions of the word “BRAND”:

David Ogilvy defines brands as “ the intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.”

Kotler defines brands as “ A brand is a 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 the competitor.”

The Dictionary of Business and Management defines a brand as:

“A name, sign or symbol used to identify items or services of the seller(s) and to differentiate them from goods of competitors.”

Jared Spool, an web site usability expert, says,

"Branding means creating an emotional association (such as the feeling of success, happiness, or relief) that customers form with the product, service, or company."

Walter Landor, one of the greats of the advertising industry, said:

“Simply put, a brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality.”

From the above definitions one can interpret that-

A brand is:

· The proprietary visual, emotional, and cultural images surrounding a company or its products.

· A promise of quality, making product selection worry free.

· Company’s one of the most important asset.

· A significant source of competitive advantage and future earnings.

· A space in consumer’s brain that reminds and persuades him to use the product of “XYZ” brand.

TYPES OF BRAND

• Functional dimension
• Symbolic dimension

The functional dimension is the product’s attributes and benefits or the tangible properties while the symbolic dimensions are the intangible aspects of the brand. A marketer can combine these two elements to create the ‘right’ appeal for customers. In consumer behavior the rational and emotional perspectives are two models that explain how consumers make purchase decisions. Successful branding, therefore, depends on combining the rational and emotional components of a brand in a manner that it becomes consistent with the consumer’s frame of mind.

Functional brand

Here, the functional dimension of the brand is far more visible and appealing than the emotional or symbolic dimension.

For instance, buying of a painkiller would be by and large a rational, left brain driven activity. What implications does one have for marketers of Aspirin, Aspro, Anacin? Here the brand should be functions driven. That is, the brand essence should revolve around ‘reasons’ demonstrating product superiority in terms of its ingredients and efficiency of its pain relieving process (e.g., the product “dissolves faster in water” and therefore, “relieves pain faster.”

Symbolic brand

Here, the symbolic or emotional dimension is more prevalent than the functional dimension. The decisions would be based on more of the emotional aspect than that of rational aspect.

In the circumstances where consumer buying is emotions driven, the brand must accordingly focus on symbolic or emotional aspects.

For.e.g. While buying greeting cards, chocolates, toys, apparels, etc. the brands competing in this category need to capture the heart of the customer. The brand must be emotions dominated in order to be consistent with the consumer’s state of mind.

WHY IS BRAND BUILDING DIFFICULT?

It is difficult to build a strong brand in today's environment. The brand builder can be inhibited by substantial pressures and barriers, both internal and external. There are 8 different factors that make it difficult to build brands:

1. Pressure to compete on price,
2. Proliferation of competitors,
3. Fragmenting markets and media,
4. Complex branding strategies and brand relationships,
5. The temptation to change identity/executions,
6. Organizational,
7. Pressure to invest elsewhere,
8. Pressures for short-term results.

One key to successful brand building is to understand how to develop brand identities, to know what the brand stands for, and how to most effectively express that identity.

BUILDING BRANDS

• Pressure to compete on price
• Short Term Pressures
• Pressure To Invest Elsewhere
• Bias Against Innovation
• Bias Towards Changing Strategies
• Complex Branding Strategies And Relationships
• Proliferation Of competitors
• Fragmentation Markets and Media

Lets look at each of these factors in detail:

1. Pressure to compete on price

There are enormous pressures on all firms to compete on price. Price competition is at center stage, driven by powers of strong retailers, value sensitive customers, reduced capacity growth and overcapacity. Retailers have become stronger and use their powers to put pressures on prices. Whereas a year ago information was largely controlled by the manufacturer retailers are now collecting vast amounts of information and developing models to use it. As a result there is an increasing focus on margins and efficient use of space.

Orange versus BPL mobile services

What these cellular service providers are doing is to compete with each other mainly on the basis of price. If Orange is cutting its deposit amount, or reducing the general rent or tariff or airtime charges, BPL has to follow the suit.

2. Proliferation of competitors

New, vigorous competitors come from a variety of sources. Additional competitors not only contribute to price pressures and brand complexity, but also make it harder to gain and hold a position. They leave fewer holes in the market to exploit and fewer implementation vehicles to own. Each brand tends to be positioned more narrowly, the target market becomes smaller and no target market becomes larger.

There are innumerous players in various product categories. One of these is toothpaste. With products ranging from gel, tooth powder, herbal pastes and striped paste – the market is quite clustered. The market is so much saturated with different players in these markets that they keep competing on the positioning of their brands, which has to be different from the rest and thus cater to a particular segment of the population. Like Close-up toothpaste which is positioned on the fact that it has mouthwash for fresh breath and Colgate which stresses on its calcium content for stronger teeth.

3. Fragmentation Markets and Media

At one time being consistent across media and markets was easy as there were a limited number of media options and only a few national media vehicles. However the bewildering array of media options today includes interactive television, advertising on the internet, direct marketing, event sponsorship and more are being invented daily. Coordinating messages across these media without weakening a brand is a major challenge. Coordination is all the more difficult because different brand support activities are often handled by different organizations and individuals with varying perspectives and goals. In addition companies are dividing the population into smaller and more refined target markets, often reaching them with specialized media and distribution channels. Although it is tempting to develop separate brand identity for each of these target segments it presents problems for both the brand and the customer. Since media audiences invariably overlap, customers are likely to be exposed to more than one identity relating to the same brand.

The Coca-Cola ad featuring Aamir Khan is targeted at the retailers and the rural market while the ad featuring Aishwarya Rai is targeted at the urban consumers. As both these ads are going on simultaneously the consumers tend to be exposed to both the rural as well as the urban face of the brand.

4. Complex Branding Strategies And Relationships

Different identities of brands and their extensions make both brand building and managing it difficult. In addition to knowing its identity each brand needs to understand its role in each context in which it is involved. There is a tendency to use established brands in different contexts and roles because establishing a totally new brand is very expensive. The resulting new levels of complexity often are not anticipated or even acknowledged until there is a substantial problem.

Henko Compact and Henko Stain Champion both belong to the German firm Henkal. Although this is a line extension finding difference between both these products is not easy. A number of questions like “Does the name ‘stain champion’ mean Henko Compact does not remove stains? Or does it mean that Stain Champion is a technologically inferior product?” often cross the consumers mind when they consider these brands for purchase. This is because the line extension and the relationship of one product with another in this strategy are not considered.

5. Bias Towards Changing Strategies

There are sometimes overwhelming internal pressures to change a brand identity and/or its execution while it is still effective or even before it achieves its potential. The resulting changes can undercut brand equity or prevent it from being established.

Promise toothpaste tried to change its well set positioning and went in to emphasize the freshness aspect of its paste rather than the well-established clove oil aspect. As a result its sales went down.

6. Bias Against Innovation

Companies managing a established brand can be so pleased with past and current success, and so preoccupied with day to day problems, that they become blind to competitive situations. By ignoring or minimizing fundamental changes in the competitive situation or potential breakthroughs, managers leave their brands vulnerable and risk missing opportunities. A new competitor is thus often the source and beneficiary of true innovation.

Iodex became blinded and redundant after achieving the position of market leader and preferred to rest on its laurels rather than go in for product innovations and line extensions. As a result its leadership position was lost to Moov, which positioned itself as a remedy for backache and converted all the weaknesses of Iodex into its strengths.

7. Pressure To Invest Elsewhere

When a brand is strong there is a temptation to reduce investment in the core business area in order to improve short-term performance or to fund new business diversifications. There is an often mistaken belief that the brand will not be damaged by sharp reductions in support and that the other investment opportunities are more attractive. Ironically the diversification that attracts these resources is often flawed because an acquired business was overvalued or because the organization’s ability to manage a different business area was overestimated.

8. Short-term pressures:

Pressures for short-term results generally undermine investments in brands. There are several reasons for this:

There is wide acceptance that maximization of stockholder value should be the overriding objective of the firm.

Management style itself is dominated by a short-term orientation. Annual budgeting systems usually emphasize short-term sales, costs and profits. As a result brand-building programs are often sacrificed in order to meet those targets.

Short-term focus is created by performance measures available. Measurements of intangible assets such as brand equity, information technology or people are elusive at best. Also long term value of activities that will enhance or erode brand equity is difficult to demonstrate whereas short-term performances like impact of promotions can be tabulated easily. This results in debilitating bias towards short-term results.

It is true that that building brands is difficult. But it is doable as is evident by those who have done so. The greatest examples of this are brands like TITAN, COCA COLA, CADBURY’S etc. We can thus see that it is possible to build strong brands by building, managing and maintaining the four assets that underlie brand equity-awareness, perceived quality, brand loyalty and brand association.

ELEMENTS OF A BRAND

1. Brand name:

Selecting A Brand Name

Certain factors to be considered before selecting a brand name:

· distinguish the product from competitive brands

· memorable and easy to pronounce

· easy to say, spell and pronounce

· it should allude to the product’s uses, benefits, or special characteristics in a positive way

· negative or offensive references should be avoided.

· evoke positive mental image

· evoke positive emotional reaction

· suggest product function or benefits

· simple

· sound appropriate

· be registrable (unique)

· possibly, translate well in other languages too.

2. Logo

The company logo is the cornerstone of the firm's branding elements. For many firms the logo is the visual reminder of everything that the firm stands for. While a great logo won't necessarily build the firm, it plays a vital role in representing it. Conversely, a weak or confusing logo can detract from the value that the firm brings.

Elements of a Good Logo

◊ It has a lasting value - trendy logos don't hold up over time.

◊ It is distinct - some amount of uniqueness, as long as it doesn't confuse, is valuable.

◊ Appeals to your target market - if your target market is partial to blue then it doesn't matter that you're not.

◊ Supports your USP - If you are trying to communicate your low low prices then your logo should support that image

◊ Legible - This seems pretty obvious but many people use typefaces and images that can't be printed or carried to a large sign. Your logo should clearly identify your company and it can't do that if people don't understand it.

3. Slogans, Jingles, Characters, and Packaging

• recognize the benefits of an effective jingle, slogan, character, and package design for a brand.
• Use a slogan or jingle that ie edible to the hear and one which is hummable. For example, Doodh Doodh Ad.
• examine a hypothetical brand character to determine its effectiveness in enhancing brand awareness.(celebrity)

THE PROCESS OF BUILDING A BRAND: (THE STARTING POINT)

Selecting a brand name involves a mix of business, legal and creative issues. The optimal brand creates a commercial impression in the marketplace, distinguishes you as the source of the product or service and does not infringe on another's rights.

Generic marks are not protectable. Ask yourself if the mark could be interpreted as immoral or scandalous. Does it contain a flag or national symbol? These types of marks can be problematic. Is a possible mark descriptive of a quality, characteristic or feature of the product or service? If so, protection might not be easily obtainable. Is it arbitrary or fanciful? Arbitrary or fanciful marks are more protectable than those which are suggestive, which in turn are more protectable than those which are descriptive.

The next question is whether any of the brands, or components, are similar in appearance, sound or meaning to those of another company. If no inherent problems pop up, come up with one or more possibilities for use as a brand. Combine prefixes and suffixes. Try different word combinations. Then give them the "see and hear" test. Do the marks convey the commercial impression, the "look and feel," that your company wants? When a few marks filter to the top, you are ready for a search.

A search can give you a better grasp on who is in the market with potentially conflicting marks which could affect the use and registrability of your brands. Before spending money and resources on a branding strategy, have as complete a picture as possible.

Before conducting a professional search, find out if anyone has already registered a same or similar name which is the same or similar to the marks you are considering. You might want to eliminate some of the brands being considered if you can't obtain a matching domain name. Check the search engines and other online databases to see what is picked up for the brands under consideration. If your proposed brand still looks viable, conduct a professional search to determine if another company might have conflicting rights and the scope of protection likely obtainable for the brand.

A search might pick up marks which could present problems, and it is best to know about any potential risks as early as possible. Ideally, conduct your search before promoting or building customer awareness of the mark, but be aware that searches do have limitations. Not all marks are registered on the federal or state level, and some that are might be missed.

Once the decision is made to use a particular brand, use it properly. A symbol should be used next to the mark: "TM" for unregistered trademarks, "SM" for unregistered service marks and an encircled "R" should be placed adjacent to a federally registered brand. The mark should be used in connection with a description of the goods or services to which it relates, such as a Xerox® copier. Your brand should identify you as the source of your goods or services. Your use of it, and all symbols in connection with it, should make clear you consider a particular mark to be your property.

Also after this process of selecting a brand name, its slogan and logo is done, this is not the end of the branding process. Branding is a long-term process. It goes on till the life cycle of the brand.

Once this stage is passed, it continues with the different aspects of managing a brand by way of having a brand identity, building a brand image, positioning the brand, also linking it to the exact target audience, having large awareness, etc. all of which forms the part of brand management.