The Big Book of Marketing
Edited by Anthony G. Bennett
Excerpt from The essentials of branding
(by Landor Associates
It is incredibly rare for a product or organization to be without a brand. There are museum brands (Guggenheim, Smithsonian), people brands (Martha Stewart, David Beckham), political brands (Obama versus McCain, Labour versus Conservatives), destination brands (Australia, Hong Kong), sport brands (Manchester United, New York Yankees, Super Bowl), nonprofit brands (Red Cross, Oxfam, RED), branded associations (YMCA, PGA, Association of Zoos and Aquariums), along with the product, service, and corporate brands with which we are all familiar. Many old marketing textbooks talk about brands versus commodities (no-name products), but in today’s world very few true commodities are left. Even basic foodstuffs have some sort of identifier on them, whether it is a private-label store brand such as Walmart’s Great Value salt or a major brand such as Morton Salt.
Brands help people make a choice, a choice among salts, financial institutions, political parties, and so on, and the choices are increasing. The number of brands on grocery store shelves, for example, tripled in the 1990s from 15,000 to 45,000.1 The purpose of branding is to ensure that your product or service is the preferred choice in the minds of your key audiences (whether customers, consumers, employees, prospective employees, fans, donors, or voters). The way in which the brand affects business performance is illustrated in figure 1.
Business performance is based on the behavior of customers, whether they choose to buy a particular product or service. And that behavior is based a great deal on the perception customers have of the brand: how relevant it is to them and how differentiated it is from the other brands in the same category. In turn, customers derive their perceptions of a brand from the interactions they have with it. Finally, that customer experience, ideally, is informed by a brand idea—what the brand stands for: the promise it is willing to make and keep in the marketplace. If the first part of this chain of cause and effect is indistinct or irrelevant to customers, there is little chance the rest of the chain will work, and the brand will not affect the business’ bottom line. Yet, despite the proliferation of brands and their inextricable link to business performance, it is not easy to de?ne what a brand is, along with how to create, manage, and value it.
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