Branding Overview - American Marketing Association

PLEASE NOTE: This is a preview.
For access to all Articles or Best Practices, complete FREE site registration

Branding Overview


	By Michael Dunn
	Michael Dunn is president and CEO of Prophet, a San Francisco-based brand consulting firm. Dunn led the development of William-Sonoma�s online strategy, as well as that of leading companies as Adidas, BMC Software, Wells Fargo, RedEnvelope, QuantumShift, and UBS.

	1. Introduction

At the peak of the dot.com feeding frenzy, many well-financed dot-com companies thought that mimicking the brand building formula of the packaged goods world would be enough to launch new e-commerce brands.

Companies like Pets.com and eToys.com spent millions of dollars in advertising and promotion hoping that the volume of their message was enough to create a brand overnight.

It wasn't.

They didn’t realize that the business of brand building is changing, and so too are the solutions. If you want to build a sustainable brand worthy of premium pricing, it’s time to change the way you look at how the underlying business strategy supports the brand.

Functionally, the brand acts as a sort of shorthand that consumers use to decide between competing products.

In the broadest sense, the brand is a combination of a product or service's public image. The concept includes function, target audience, prestige value, price point, and countless other marketing and business elements.

For example, three of General Motors' main divisions sell a minivan. Chevrolet sells the Venture. Pontiac sells the Montana. Oldsmobile sells the Silhouette. Basically, all three are the same minivan with different options packages.

For the average consumer, however, the Venture, Montana and Silhouette are different vehicles. The Venture is a more basic model, while the Silhouette is a luxury model – with better sound systems and interior packages. The Montana is somewhere in between.

The different consumer perceptions are the result of long-term branding efforts at General Motors. The company spent decades building a certain prestige into the Oldsmobile brand. For consumers, it is on par with such luxury brands as Cadillac and Buick.

Pontiac, on the other hand, has more of a sporty, youth-oriented image. The Montana, while still a minivan, has molding on the side to make it look more like an SUV than Mom's minivan. Commercials for the Montana incorporate cowboys jumping off of horses and trains – active, sporty, youth-oriented images.

The Chevrolet brand has a more working class image. The Chevrolet minivan is transportation for the young family – it's the van mom uses to go take the kids to soccer practice. Customers have to buy various options packages to include fancier interiors, sound systems and power side doors. Such luxuries are standard equipment on the minivans sold by Chevrolet's uptown cousins.

The branding for the Venture, Montana and Silhouette makes shopping easier for consumers. Each minivan inherits an image from its manufacturer. Consumers shop based on that image.

Conventional View of a Brand

Business leaders usually look to packaged goods as the model of valuable brands. The responsibility of brand building typically resides with a marketing manager who pulls advertising, consumer and sales promotion levers to convince customers that their product is better than the alternatives.

This approach is one-way – the marketing gurus come up with the vision for the brand based on static customer needs. The marketing manager then uses clever creative work to communicate product attributes.

The underlying assumption in this model is if you tell your customers often enough and loud enough about product attributes, then they will believe it. It assumes customers’ needs are relatively homogeneous and static. Changes to the branding strategy are therefore not dramatic. Marketers occasionally introduce a product extension -- Tide now comes with “deep clean formula” – to keep the product one step ahead of the competition.

Without viewing brand-building holistically, branding is destined to fail, as has been demonstrated by many dot-com failures. Marketing only controls a small piece of the business metrics. It puts the face on the brand but it does not train the billing department to take a customer focus, nor does it control the technology department that builds the Website.

Page 1 of 4	Next Page >> Last Page
2001 MarketingPower.com Inc. Contents used by permission of the author.

Table of Contents

1.	Introduction
2.	New Branding Approach
3.	Implementation
4.	Long-Term Branding