BRAND EQUITY

Brand equity building strategies



Brand equity building strategies

Introduction

Branding involves decisions that establish an identity for a product with the goal of distinguishing it from competitors' assistance. Creating an identity for a product through branding is essential in today's competitively fierce market where a consumer can select a product from many competitive organisations.

Branding is achieved through the use of brand names and brand marks. The brand name is what a consumer will instantly recognise and for some products it also suggests what the product does. The brand mark is the design element of the product such as a symbol, character or even a sound. Ultimately a brand mark provides a visual correspondence to the product. For example apple computers are recognised through out the world by the apple logo (Srinivasan, 2005, 1433).

Branding can carry numerous benefits to all parties which are involved in the exchange process as well as in theory branding making it easier to buy and to sell a product (Brassington & Pettit, 2003). It is therefore important to look at the benefits of branding to consumers, producers and retailers.

Making Beer in one of the heaviest consuming country can sometimes be more difficult than it seems. Crown Lager Beer is an old middle-sized brewery of the Centre-East region of the United States that produces a very well known beer, the Crown Lager. Appreciated for its bitterness and its strong taste, it appears that the famous beverage cannot help the company to face a downward shift in revenue: 2 % less for the new exercise, and a decrease of the consumption of Popular Beer when the Light Beer consumption is massively increasing. Something has to be done to keep the company alive and sustainable, but finding a solution is not always as easy as it seems: could the company afford a new line of product? Could it use the strong image of the Crown Lager Beer to launch a Light Beer?

Branding Strategies

Brand strategies concern how brand elements such as the brand name are employed across the products of a firm. LaForet & Saunders (1994, 33) conducted a content analysis of the branding strategies adopted by 20 key brands sold by each of 20 of the biggest suppliers of stores, Britain's two leading grocery chains, and found that a variety of different branding approaches had been adopted. Essentially, these different approaches involved using common and/or distinct brands in various ways across the products sold by the firms.

One frequently employed branding strategy; a sub-brand strategy - whereby an existing name is combined with a new name to brand new products - has received some research attention. Prior research has shown that a sub-branding strategy can enhance extension evaluations, especially if the extension is more removed from the product category and less similar in fit.

Moreover, it has also been shown that a sub-brand can also protect the parent brand from any unwanted negative feedback, but only if the sub-brand consists of a meaningful individual brand that precedes the family ...