Brand Management

Brand Management

SKUS

Session 1 : The strategic value of a brand/ Identify - Positioning

What is a brand?

The brand is a name, a term, a sign, a drawing or any combination of these elements which identify the goods or the services of a company and differenciate them from the competition.

Differentiation brand assets, strength, and value:

From Awareness to Financial Value:

• Brand assets: awareness, reputation, perceived personality, brand values, customer imagery, brand preference, patents
• Brand value: net cash flow attributable to the brand after paying the cost of capital invested to produce and run the business and the cost of marketing
• Brand strength: market share, penetration, growth, loyalty rates, premiumness, power towards distribution

Brand Versus product:

A good product is nothing without a strong brand (bio → activia)

A strong brand is nothing without a good product (bic perfume)

Brand vs corporate brand:

• Make company actions, values and missions more salient and diffuse specific added values
• Defend the company’s global reputation:

• Emotional appeal (trust, admiration, respect): MacDonald
• Product and services (quality, innovation): Philips
• Vision and leadership:  DANONE
• Workplace quality (well managed, employee talent)
• Financial performance: VW
• Social responsibility

The brand, a symbol for the consumers:

• A guarantee function → Nestlé

• Reduces the risk
• Quality signal

• Social function → Apple

• Create symbolic associations
• Identification
• Social representation

•  Affective function → Nivea

• Creates an intense and emotional relationship

• Reference function → Adidas

• Identification of the product
• New consumers easier to find

Brand name:

Brand awareness:

• Top of mind: quoted in the first one
• Spontaneous: in mid
• Global: recognized

Consumer pathway:

• Awareness: What does it do for me?

• Drive awareness of basic benefit of brand/product. A solution to a need, want or problem

• Involvement: Is it for me?

• Descriptive info to drive association and show relevance to consumer’s values

• Active consideration: Which one?

• Provide discriminating information to help consumer choose between alternatives

• Purchase intention: This one

• Ensure that once consumer has chosen that the products are not switched

• Consumption: This is just what I wanted

• Ensure that consumer expectation is met. Help consumer maximize experience

• Relationship Building: They care about me

• Demonstrate understanding of emotional contract with consumer. Over deliver

• Advocacy: These are great you should get one

• Provide information and excuses for consumer to advocate brand

To measure brand equity:

• Brand awareness
• Brand personality, concept, positioning, precise and distinct image
• Signs of recognition by the consumer
• Brand authority, esteem, perceived status, consumer loyalty

The 3 strategies of Porter:

• Differentiation: Specify and value added + Total market
• Strategy cost/ volume: Cost and quality + Total Market
• Specialization: Specific segment

Strategies:

• Withdrawal strategy (or back to the original category)  
• Upholding strategy (weak adaptation)  
• Conquest strategy (new segments)  
• Extensive strategy (target development)  
• Sophistication strategy (upper range)  
• Imitation strategy (me too product), or differentiation  
• Innovation strategy (invention)  
• Distribution strategy (selective, exclusive)  
• Challenger strategy, follower, leader  

Brand Identity, the source of brand positing:[pic 1]

• Brand identity: the vision, the key beliefs, and its core values

• Relationship between brand identity and corporate identity
• Corporate’s identity transmits its values to the brand
• The value and the culture make the brand identity
• The identity prism of a brand:

• Brand positioning: the main difference creating preference in a specific market for a chosen target, at a specific time for its products. The thing which makes what to whom with what
• Brand image: A synthesis and perception made by the public of all the brand messages

• Spontaneous image, latent images, from products and ad
• Mental representation / Personal and subjective/ Selective and simplifying/ Stable

The central kernel of the brand:

The kernel includes fundamental associations which constitute the identity of the brand. What must remain identical through countries, time and products/services .

The peripheric system involves other associations which are less important