Branding and communication

Essay by tsar1111University, Master's March 2004

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BRANDING:

Brands are part of a product's tangible features, the verbal and physical cues that help customers identify the products they want and influence their choices when they are unsure.

Coca-cola is an example of a company for whom branding play an important role in marketing strategy. A good brand is distinct and memorable.

Professor John Philip of Syracuse University wrote: "A brand is a product that provides functional benefits plus added value that some customers value enough to buy".

Strong brands, like Coca-cola, evoke a more extensive, richer set of associations.

Visual images and words or phrases linked with strong brands are likely to be more easily retrieved from memory.

A brand may provide confidence to the consumer about the quality of the product and gratification of image of self. Based on this conception, brand equity can be defined as "everything the consumer walks into the store with" (Farquhar, 1989).

One of the most important aspects of this definition is the fact that brand equity lies the minds of the consumers, who carry fairly complicated sets of assumptions and beliefs about their roles" (Holbrook, 1987).

Aaker (1991) defined brand equity as:

"...assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and symbol, that add to or subtract from the value provided by a product or service to a firm or to that firm's customer"

Companies like Coca-cola have a significant brand equity value; their corporate logos earn worldwide recognition.

So, brand equity is focused on the customer's point of view, it assesses the marketing effects uniquely attributable to a brand; for example when specific outcomes result from promoting a product or service because of its brand name that would not have occurred if the same product or service did not have that name. Keller (1993) gave an...