Brands and Branding

Question 1

What is a Brand

Answer 1

Legal: registered with the intellectual property office, can brand names, signs, symbols, smells, shapes and sounds

Dictionary: impress indelibly

Academic: a label that carries meanings and associations, the promise of an experience, unexplained emotional connection

Differentiation

Symbolic: can define taste or social status

Valuable: financial benefit to businesses as they add value to a product (blind testing)

Question 2

Key Parts of Brands

Answer 2

Name
Logo
Sensory
Slogan
Packaging
Product
Personality
Stories

Question 3

Living Brands

Answer 3

Names humanise them
Faces bring them alive
Can have a voice
Have brand relationships
Brands can fight battles
Have offspring
Behave badly
Have a personality

Question 4

Why consumers Buy

Answer 4

Reciprosity: We feel obligated to return favours to brands who have given us something for nothing

Scarcity

Authority: believe in experts

Consistency: what we have done in the past

Sharing: Follow the crowd

Likeability: yes to ppl with charisma

Question 5

How brands grow

Answer 5

New users
- Physical and mental availability
- Even though brands differentiate themselves, consumers still buy within a repertoire (as if there were no differences). Being distinctive is more important.
- Advertising works by refreshing the memory

B2B:
95% of buyers are not in the market for your product (e.g. banking, telecoms, legal advice, software) at any given moment
Important to use advertising to build brand awareness and memories, not think that it drives short term sales – companies rarely buy from companies they’ve never heard of or know much about
Businesses grow by acquiring new customers, not by trying to get existing customers to buy more

Question 6

Diffusion of Innovation

Answer 6

The adoption of a new product, service or idea is not instant, nor does it happen simultaneously across all people

Consumers who adopt an innovation earlier demonstrate different characteristics than those who adopt an innovation later. Note that this varies by category (a drinks innovator may not be a tech innovator).

Therefore, for marketers, understanding the characteristics of each segment that will either help or hinder the adoption of an innovation is important.

There are five adopter categories: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards

Many new ideas have to be “seeded” with early adopters – and take time to become known and adopted

Often they come from small agile entrepreneurial companies that lack big budgets for marketing support or access to mass distribution channels

In practice, many big companies don’t have the patience (or need?) to do this – and can end up buying up these smaller companies whose new brands/ideas have become established in the marketplace