Product, Services, & Brand Management

• Lecture 2 discusses Product, Services, & Brand Management
• Strategic Brand Management is divided into:
  • Identifying and developing brand plans (Brand positioning)
  • Designing and implementing brand marketing programs (Brand Marketing)
  • Measuring and interpreting brand performance (Brand Performance)
  • Growing and sustaining brand equity (Brand Value)
• Three models of brand management are
  • Brand Positioning Model
  • Brand Resonance Model
  • Brand Value Chain Model
• Two major questions in brand management are:
  • What do different brands mean to consumers?
  • How does the brand knowledge of consumers affect their response to marketing activity?

Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE)

• The power of a brand lies in what customers have learned, felt, seen, and heard about the brand over time.
• CBBE concept approaches brand equity from the consumer's perspective
• Understanding their needs and wants and devising products to satisfy them are key to marketing
• CBBE becomes the differential effect that brand knowledge has on customer response

Key Ingredients to CBBE

• Differential effect
• Brand knowledge
• Customer response to marketing

Benefits of Positive CBBE

• Customers are more accepting of new brand extensions
• Customers are less sensitive to price increases and withdrawal of advertising support
• Customers are more willing to seek a brand in a new distribution channel

Brand Knowledge

• Brand knowledge has two major components:
  • Brand awareness
  • Brand image

Brand Awareness

• Consists of:
  • Brand recognition
  • Brand recall
• Advantages of Brand Awareness
  • Learning advantages
  • Consideration advantages
  • Choice advantages
• Anything causing consumers to experience an element of a brand increases its familiarity and awareness
• Repetition increases recognizability
• Improving brand recall requires linkages in memory related to product categories, purchase, and uses

Brand Image

• Creating involves linking strong, favorable, and unique associations to the brand in memory
• Marketers should mind:
  • Strength
  • Favorability
  • Uniqueness
  • Of brand associations

Brand Positioning

• Designing the company's offer and image to occupy a distinct and valued place in the consumer's mind
• Marketers need to know:
  • Their target consumer
  • Direct and indirect competitors
  • Points-of-Parity (POPs)
  • Points-of-Difference (PODs)

Target Market

• Can be informed via behavioral, demographic, psychographic and geographic data.

Positioning Guidelines

• Involves identifying competitors in the market, and understanding where they lie in the market

Competitive Frame of Reference

• Can be defined and communicated by:
  • Communicating category benefits
  • Comparing to exemplars
  • Relying on a product descriptortext

Points-of-Difference (PODs)

• Chosen based on desirability, deliverability, and differentiability criteria

Points-of-Parity (POPs) Establishments

• Establishing these involves separating attributes, leveraging the equity of another entity, or redefining a relationship

Straddling Positions

• A company straddles two frames of reference with one set of POPs and PODs

Updating Positioning Over Time

• Should fundamentally changed very infrequently, and only when circumstances significantly reduce the effectiveness of existing POPs and PODs.
• Strategies may include
  • Laddering
  • Reacting
    • Options being; do nothing, go one the defensive, on the offensive

Developing a Good Position

• Requires:
  • A foot in the present and future
  • Careful identification of all relevant points-of-parity
  • Reflection of a consumer point of view in terms of benefits
  • Points-of-difference and points-of-parity that appeal to reason and emotion

Brand Building Steps

• Ensure identification: Who are you?
• Establish the brand meaning: What are you?
• Elicit proper customer responses: What do I think or feel about you?
• Create brand resonance: What about you and me?

Brand Resonance Pyramid stages

• Identity: Who are you?
• Meaning: What are you?
• Response: What about you?
• Relationships: What about you and me?

Brand Salience

• Depth and breadth awareness
  • Depth: brand recognition and recall
  • Breadth: the range of purchase and consumption situations

Brand Performance

• Consider the primary ingredients and supplementary features, product reliability and serviceability
• Also consider effectiveness, and empathy, style and design, and price

Brand Imagery

• Involves evoking purchase and usage imagery, brand history, and brand personality through: Excitement, Sincerity, Ruggedness, Competence, and Sophistication

Brand Judgements

• Based on perceived quality, credibility, consideration and superiority

Brand feelings

• Experiential and immediate.
• Private and enduring

Brand Resonance

• Behavioral loyalty
• Attitudinal attachment
• Sense of community
• Active engagement

The Brand Value Chain

• Structured approach assessing sources/outcomes of brand equity and how marketing creates brand value
• Factors include:
  • Marketing Program Investment, Customer Mind-Set, Market Performance, and Shareholder Value
  • Program Quality Multiplier, Marketplace Conditions Multiplier, Investor Sentiment Multiplier