To manage your brand as an asset, full of value and power, you must understand a few fundamentals that form the basis of brand asset management. Armed with that understanding, you, as brand managers, will do your job right only if you understand brands correctly.
The following four fundamentals will allow you to develop with ease and consistency the ability to build different strategic steps involved in creating a brand or refreshing an existing one.
Commitment Foreword to Brand Dimensions
For comprehension of a brand’s dimensions, three models are fundamental to any discussion about the subject. That is the first and the foremost thing you have to keep in your mind. Those are:
Brand identity: Brand identity is what a company transmits about the brand to the market place. Identity has many components - the name, the packaging, the colors, the typestyle, the logo, and a host of other factors that comprise its personality. The personality of a brand should be created for it to get expressed in terms of well-defined characteristics. For example, reliable, friendly, durable, and serious etc.
What is most important here is that the company must be able to express the real essence of the product to the target market. Any product, however high on the quality and reliability grid, may not exploit its full potential if it is not expressed right by way of creation of the right compatible personality.
If a brand is to be registered in the minds of consumers as “durable”, then the whole identity has to revolve around the aspects of durability. You must not develop a package and related components that convey a sense of “fashionableness”. That will be contrary to the personality/identity of the brand.
Brand image: Brand image is a term used very loosely by people outside the sphere of marketing. Changing the image is a favorite topic while discussing brands under distress. But image is not something that can be changed or transformed with the speed we change a color on the drawing board.
Brand image follows identity. It is a reflection of what we projected to send to the public. Managers must be clear about what they want to send and how they want it received. Brand image, then, is something that builds into the minds of the consumers.
To what extent that image is in line with the identity created by the company is the greatest challenge for brand managers! The more the managers can have the market imagine their brand’s identity the way it is intended to be imagined, the more successful they are in their effort. If there is a gap between the identity and the image, then there is a need for corrective action.
Companies’ efforts to build the right image span so many different means of communication of which brand’s own appearance is a part. Brand image, therefore, is the totality of information, advertising, promotions, and other brand manifestations that the consumer has seen and received about the brand over a period of time. It is, in other words, his experience with the brand modified by certain perceptions, previous beliefs, biases, social norms, and a level of forgetfulness.
Due to a finite level of information retention in human mind coupled with the fact that other variables mentioned above modify perceptions, the image on the consumer’s side may not be 100% identical with the identity. The reasons can be clarified with the help of the following explanations:
Communication: The vehicle that transmits brand’s identity to the target market for creation of the right image is communication. To ensure that image remains as close to identity as possible, companies get into communications of different kinds. This is where brand communication takes an important stage. Correct communication goes a long way in creating and building brand identity.
In the words of Philip Kotler, “communication is an interactive dialogue between the company and its customers that takes place at the pre-selling, selling, consuming, and post-consuming stages”2 This implies that communication is a recurring process that starts before you buy (advertising, promotions, and other), remains in force while you buy (the brand itself communicates), and does not end even after you have consumed the brand (brand’s ability to satisfy you keeps reminding you of being loyal to it). It goes on and on.
It further means that communication is not restricted to the traditional communication platform, which is advertising, promotions, public relations, personal selling, and also some technologically advanced ways of reaching the consumers through e-mail and internet- based direct marketing. The working of three models can be graphically illustrated as follows:
All components of brand’s personality discussed earlier also form brand contact points that strengthen or weaken customers’ view of the brand, and, hence, work as brand communicators. We, as brand managers, have to assess which impressions can influence the customer’s buying process more so that we can direct our communication toward that point.
Brand Dimensions
Having understood the three models, namely, brand identity, brand image and communication, we can go ahead with our discussion of the dimensions of brands, which is graphically represented here under:
The following four fundamentals will allow you to develop with ease and consistency the ability to build different strategic steps involved in creating a brand or refreshing an existing one.
Commitment Foreword to Brand Dimensions
For comprehension of a brand’s dimensions, three models are fundamental to any discussion about the subject. That is the first and the foremost thing you have to keep in your mind. Those are:
- Brand identity
- Brand image
- Communication
Brand identity: Brand identity is what a company transmits about the brand to the market place. Identity has many components - the name, the packaging, the colors, the typestyle, the logo, and a host of other factors that comprise its personality. The personality of a brand should be created for it to get expressed in terms of well-defined characteristics. For example, reliable, friendly, durable, and serious etc.
What is most important here is that the company must be able to express the real essence of the product to the target market. Any product, however high on the quality and reliability grid, may not exploit its full potential if it is not expressed right by way of creation of the right compatible personality.
If a brand is to be registered in the minds of consumers as “durable”, then the whole identity has to revolve around the aspects of durability. You must not develop a package and related components that convey a sense of “fashionableness”. That will be contrary to the personality/identity of the brand.
Brand image: Brand image is a term used very loosely by people outside the sphere of marketing. Changing the image is a favorite topic while discussing brands under distress. But image is not something that can be changed or transformed with the speed we change a color on the drawing board.
Brand image follows identity. It is a reflection of what we projected to send to the public. Managers must be clear about what they want to send and how they want it received. Brand image, then, is something that builds into the minds of the consumers.
To what extent that image is in line with the identity created by the company is the greatest challenge for brand managers! The more the managers can have the market imagine their brand’s identity the way it is intended to be imagined, the more successful they are in their effort. If there is a gap between the identity and the image, then there is a need for corrective action.
Due to a finite level of information retention in human mind coupled with the fact that other variables mentioned above modify perceptions, the image on the consumer’s side may not be 100% identical with the identity. The reasons can be clarified with the help of the following explanations:
- Your inability to continuously advertise may become one factor putting your brand out of the mind of the consumer.
- Your bias about the origin (from a certain geographic area) of the product may change the product’s image in your mind.
- Your beliefs about the way a product should or should not be used may affect product’s image.
Communication: The vehicle that transmits brand’s identity to the target market for creation of the right image is communication. To ensure that image remains as close to identity as possible, companies get into communications of different kinds. This is where brand communication takes an important stage. Correct communication goes a long way in creating and building brand identity.
In the words of Philip Kotler, “communication is an interactive dialogue between the company and its customers that takes place at the pre-selling, selling, consuming, and post-consuming stages”2 This implies that communication is a recurring process that starts before you buy (advertising, promotions, and other), remains in force while you buy (the brand itself communicates), and does not end even after you have consumed the brand (brand’s ability to satisfy you keeps reminding you of being loyal to it). It goes on and on.
All components of brand’s personality discussed earlier also form brand contact points that strengthen or weaken customers’ view of the brand, and, hence, work as brand communicators. We, as brand managers, have to assess which impressions can influence the customer’s buying process more so that we can direct our communication toward that point.
Brand Dimensions
Having understood the three models, namely, brand identity, brand image and communication, we can go ahead with our discussion of the dimensions of brands, which is graphically represented here under:
Functions: Every brand has a reason for being. If managers have correctly created a brand that fulfills a particular “need” in a convincing way, then their understanding of the brand is clear about what function the brand is going to fulfill.
Functions, therefore, stand for the central purpose of a brand. Why it exists? What need(s) it fulfills? Whose need (target market) it fulfills? Starting point in the process of brand development, the functions are carefully studied before making the decision for brand’s introduction. Management must be clear about the value the brand is going to offer its customers and the value it will generate for the company.
Differentiation: In order to fulfill a certain need, a brand has to have a certain level of differentiation, which refers to different and extra features. It is these extra features that attract your target and offer them value.
In the age of fierce competition, the comparison is not between products that are perceived as “passed products” and “failed products”. The competition is among excellent products. According to Kapferer, some brands (products) are “more excellent” than others. Differentiation can take so many shapes and forms. Apart from extra physical attributes of a brand, differentiation may also take place in terms of creative distribution channels and promotions.
The source: The source company is important in terms of its reputation. Consumers as well as trade members who play an important role in promoting brands to consumers gauge commitment of producers that they may have with their brands in light of their reputation, history, and image in the market place.
Two brands of equally good quality by two different companies may not enjoy the same level of following and loyalty. The one offered by a company with strong reputation in all probability will have a better chance of gaining a wider customer base. Businesses must carefully consider this source dimension to continually improve their reputation and leverage their brand(s).
Personality/Image: Personality and image have been discussed in detail as part of identity and image models and offer themselves as very important dimensions of any brand management effort.
The reason for a separate discussion on identity and image models ahead of discussion on dimensions stems from the fact that they are always at the center of any overall dimensional model that may be described differently from the one above. Actually, different authors have explained the dimensional model in different ways with terminologies different from the four dimensions explained above. To understand any models, an understanding of identity and image must take precedence over anything else.
What is of significance is that all the dimensions around the essence have to be consistent and they must complement each other. The more consistent they are the stronger is the essence and the brand identity.
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