Much as I did with the cost-benefit analysis, I’d like to provide a comprehensive overview of the Brand. What follows is an attempt to evaluate the brand as we follow it’s history, benefits, elements, business utilization, and oversight as a marketing and relationship management tool.
Rather than needlessly paraphrasing, or simply reiterating, the experts that have devoted countless hours of research and analysis to the topic, this overview allows them to speak through their own words – only encumbered by careful editorial placement over the next few posts.
To that end, the next and last appearance of my own words will appear again only in the concluding section of the document.
“Today, a brand is usually defined as a name, logo, or symbol intended to distinguish a particular seller’s offerings from those of competitors. “
Nancy F. Koehn (2001)
Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust
From Wedgwood to Dell.
Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
“A brand is a collection of feelings toward an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the concrete symbols for those feelings, such as a name and design scheme. Feelings are created by the accumulation of experiences with the specific product or service, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary. A brand is a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service. A brand serves to create associations and expectations among products made by a producer. A brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols, which are developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality. “
Compiled from Wikipedia (2006)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand
“Put simply, a brand is the difference between a bottle of sugared, flavored, carbonated water and a bottle of Coca-Cola. It is the sum of the functional and emotional characteristics, both tangible and intangible, that a customer attributes to a product or service. These characteristics are embodied in a name, trademark, symbol, or design, or any combination of these.”
Paul Stobart (2002)
Creating Powerful Brands,
Business: The Ultimate Resource.
Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.
“Brands in the field of marketing originated in the 19th century with the advent of packaged goods. Industrialization moved the production of many household items, such as soap, from local communities to centralized factories. When shipping their items, the factories would literally brand their logo or insignia on the barrels used, which is where the term comes from.
These factories, generating mass-produced goods, needed to sell their products to a wider market, to a customer base familiar only with local goods. It quickly became apparent that a generic package of soap had difficulty competing with familiar, local products. The packaged goods manufacturers needed to convince the market that the public could place just as much trust in the non-local product. Campbell soup, Aunt Jemima, and Quaker Oats were among the first products to be ‘branded’, in an effort to increase the consumer’s familiarity with their products. Many brands of that era, such as Uncle Ben’s rice and Kellogg’s breakfast cereal furnish illustrations of the problem.
Around 1900, James Walter Thompson published a house ad explaining trademark advertising. This was an early commercial explanation of what we now know as branding. Companies soon adopted slogans, mascots, and jingles which began to appear on radio and early television. By the 1940s,[citation needed] manufacturers began to recognize the way in which consumers were developing relationships with their brands in a social/psychological/anthropological sense.
From there, manufacturers quickly learned to associate other kinds of brand values, such as youthfulness, fun or luxury, with their products. This began the practice we now know as branding, where it is felt that consumers buy the brand instead of the product. This trend continued to the 1980s, which have been described as “brand equity mania”. In 1988, Phillip Morris purchased Kraft for six times what the company was worth on paper; it was felt that what they really purchased was its brand.”
Compiled from Wikipedia (2006)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand
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1 The Brand’s Reason for Being (Part II) | Leading Entrepreneurship // Apr 17, 2009 at 8:01 am
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