Marketing Basics: Branding and the Marketing Mix

• Brand: Core aspect of branding, including elements like names, logos, symbols, slogans, packaging, signage and characters.
• Marketing Mix: Product, place, price, and promotion.
• Price: Amount charged for satisfying a need.
• Product: Anything offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption to satisfy a need or want.
• Promotion: How organizations communicate their offerings to satisfy needs and reach customers through various media.
• Place: Distribution channels that meet specific criteria, such as a high-end image, adequate space, attractive location, and outstanding service.
• Marketing: The science and art of acquiring and retaining profitable customers.

Branding opportunities & challenges:

• Unparalleled access to information and new technologies is a branding opportunity.
• Downward pressure on prices poses a branding challenge.
• Ubiquitous connectivity and potential for consumer backlash is both an opportunity and a challenge.
• Ease of sharing information and goods affects branding.
• Unexpected competition sources emerge.
• Disintermediation and reintermediation impact traditional channels.
• Alternative information sources exist for product quality.
• Winner-takes-all market dynamics are intensifying
• There is media transformation.
• Customer centricity is a key focus.

Levels of Product Meaning:

• Core Benefit Level: Fundamental need/want consumers satisfy by consuming the product/service.
• Generic Product Level: Basic version with essential attributes, lacking distinguishing features.
• Expected Product Level: Attributes buyers expect when purchasing the product.
• Augmented Product Level: Additional attributes, benefits, or services that differentiate the product from competitors.
• Potential Product Level: All possible augmentations and transformations a product might undergo.
• Target Market: Specific consumer group for which a product/service is designed.
• House of Brands: A company owns multiple brands, each with unique identity and target markets. Example, P&G.
• Mixed Branding: A firm uses both its corporate name and individual names for different products, for example, The Gap.
• Corporate Branding: Strategy promoting the company as a whole, rather than individual products/services, for example, Apple and Nike.
• Commodity: A product that cannot be physically differentiated from competitors in the minds of consumers.
• Brand Equity: Added value a brand name brings to a product.
• Customer Based Brand Equity: What consumers have learned, felt, seen, and heard about the brand.
• Differential Response: How perceptions, preferences, and behavior are influenced by brand marketing.

Positioning:

• Designing the company's offer and image to occupy a distinct and valued place in the target customer's minds.
• Points of Parity: Attributes/benefits not necessarily unique to the brand, potentially shared with competitors.
• Points of Difference: Attributes/benefits consumers strongly associate with a brand, positively evaluate, and believe are not easily found with competitors.
• Brand Recall: Consumer's ability to retrieve the brand from memory when given a product-related cue.
• Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Combination of benefit, uniqueness, and compelling reason to buy.

Brand Knowledge Structures:

• Key ingredient(s) in customer-based brand equity.
• Associative Network Memory: Represents how brand knowledge is stored in consumer memory through nodes and links.
• Competitive Frame of Reference: (Robert Goizueta, former Coca-Cola CEO) Hierarchical Organization & POP/POD.
• Hierarchy of concepts/memories from general to specific details impacts retrieval efficiency.
• Laddering: Deepening the meaning of a brand by connecting the product to the consumer's higher-order goals.
• Brand Mantra: Short phrase capturing the brand's essence to guide employees and partners.
• Corporate Branding: Marketing strategy promoting a company's brand as a whole, for example, Starbucks.
• House of Brands: (store brand or private label): a brand that a retailer owns and sells, for example, simple truth by Kroger.
• Mixed Branding: Strategy using multiple brands to sell the same product/service to different audiences, for example, Apple and Beats.
• Brand Resonance Model: Building a brand through sequential steps, achieving objectives at each stage, for example, intense, active loyalty relationships.
• Customer Mindset (and the 5 As): Examines changes in customers due to marketing programs.
• Brand Awareness: Extent to which customers recognize and recall the brand.
• Brand Associations: Strength, favorability, and uniqueness of perceived attributes/benefits.
• Brand Attitudes: Overall brand evaluations in terms of quality and satisfaction.
• Brand Attachment: Degree of customer loyalty; strong attachment resists change and bad news.
• Brand Activity: Extent customers use the brand, talk about it, and seek information..
• Brand Elements: Brand names, URLs, logos, symbols, characters, and slogans.
• Brand Names (Portmanteaus): Capture the central theme or key associations of a product in a compact and economical fashion.
• URLs: Specific locations of pages on the Web
• Logos and Symbols: Indicate origin, ownership, or association.
• Symbols: Nonword mark logos
• Characters: Represent human or real-life characteristics, for example, Peter Pan peanut butter.
• Slogans/Taglines (Hippocampal Headlines): Short phrases that communication descriptive or persuasive information about the brand
• Jingles: Musical messages written around the brand.
• Packaging: Designing and producing containers or wrappers for a product.
• Criteria for Choosing Brand Elements: Memorability, meaningfulness, likability, transferability, adaptability, and protectability..
• Trademark: A legally registered symbol, word, or words representing a company or product.

Factors impacting Brand equity:

• Building the brands by increasing recognition and recall, favourable performance and imagery.
• Destroying the brand by reducing recognition and recall, unfavourable performance and imagery.
• Perceived Quality: Customer's perception of a product or service compared with alternatives.
• Aftermarketing: Marketing activities after customer purchase.
• Loyalty: Maintaining and increasing value from best customers through long-term relationships.
• Goals Oriented Hypothesis: explores goals impact a person's motivation and behavior.
• Pricing Activities: Sets and adjusts prices for appropriate market segments.
• Channel Activities: Maximize channel coverage while minimizing cost and conflict.
• Private Label (Store) Brands: Products manufactured or packaged under the retailer's name.
• Contact: Any experience a customer has with the brand.
• Cialdini's Science of Persuasion: Principles influencing others to say yes (reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, social validation, liking).