see also  www.witiger.com/ecommerce/OnlineBranding.htm

Something used to show customers that one product is different than the products of another manufacturer. 

Originally branding helped trace the source of the guild producer
- In modern era, makes it easier to identify all the products from a particular company
- Makes shopping easier
- helps the companies launching new products

TERMS

Brand Awareness / Recognition - awareness, loyalty, quality, emotion “customers remember the brand”
- your product is the first that comes to mind in a certain product category eg. 

• ice tea - Snapple 
• jeans - Levi’s, 
• walkman - SONY
• cellphone - Nokia
• SUV - Jeep !

 

Brand Preference /  Loyalty - the degree to which customers are committed to further purchases eg. “choose the brand over other brands”

Brand Insistence - “willing to search for it..”, and if they do not find the brand they want, WILL NOT but a substitute 

Brand Ambassador - a person who not only insists on wearing or using a brand, to the exclusion of all others, but tries to convince their friends and associates to also use the brand - in effect "representing" the brand to others. Compaines love these type of people since it is free advertising. Many companies facilitate this by making their brand logo easily available on clothiing and other products to extend awareness of the brand

Extension

In late October 2007 General Motors announced the launch of the H3T which is a H3 built like a mid-size pick-up truck identified as a concept vehicle back in Jan 2004, it has taken a while for GM executives to decide if this would be a good addition to the Hummer lineup see  hummer.com

"General Motors Corp. is adding a pickup version of its Hummer H3 sport-utility vehicle at a Louisiana assembly plant as the struggling automaker tries to stem the brand's declining sales."

The Star reported "Smaller Hummer models are part of chief executive officer Rick Wagoner's strategy to change the brand's reputation for excess as gasoline prices have risen. GM eliminated the largest Hummer, the five-tonne H1, last year."

GM bought the licence for the Hummer brand from AM General in 1999 and started selling the H1
2002 - added the H2
2005 - added the H3

almost eveyone in the world knows the Nike logo, which makes this joke universally funny

Sommers in his 10th ed p. 254
"... brand equity, one of the hottest topics in marketing in recent years"

p. 255 says
"Brand Equity is also the value a brand adds to a product from the perspective of the customer"

As for Marketing Information Products & Services, Sommers explains on page 255
"Consumers said they would pay $295 and $232 more for the IBM and Compaq brands..."

"Today, creating brand equity is about more than positioning, packaging and imagery. It involves developing a relationship with customers. Customers want brands they can trust and be happy to tell other about"
 

Online Communities

By George Weiss, Gartner analyst November 19, 2001 IBM is increasing its lead in the server market. The company has been reinventing its server business, and the results are quite positive.

Weiss explains " In late 2000, IBM consolidated its server brands into a single eServer brand. That move represented a marketing response to a marketing problem. IBM is the revenue leader in the combined RISC-Intel server market, but it ranks third in Unix and Intel servers--the two primary growth categories.

IBM comes up short in terms of brand equity compared to RISC competitors (Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard) and Intel competitors (Compaq Computer and Dell Computer). The eServer program is intended to fix that problem by shifting emphasis from independent server brands toward a stronger overall IBM brand.

The company has reorganized across server lines. Individual organizations no longer report to product-oriented executives. Rather, server development reports to a single executive, and server marketing reports to a single executive. "

government
services

Yahoo news carried a story written by Mark Mazzetti in August 2005  news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/20050822/ts_latimes/armyfightstosellitselftotheparentsofamerica

Mazzetti explains "Success in advertising usually means getting people to part with their hard-earned cash. Ray DeThorne's success is measured by how many people he can get to let go of their sons and daughters. As brand manager for the Army's advertising account at Leo Burnett Inc., a Chicago ad agency, DeThorne's job is to sell the Army. And these days, it's a difficult product to sell. In marketing terms, the Army is a troubled brand. The daily images of violence from
Iraq are scaring away potential recruits for the service that has shouldered the largest burden there. The Army does not expect to meet any of its 2005 recruiting goals for the active, Reserve and National Guard ranks, and Army officials have said that next year the gap is likely to be greater."

Mazzetti quotes Seth Godin, an author of books on marketing

"Godin said the military had strayed from the marketing formula that had worked for decades: telling individual stories of battlefield heroism.

"Most important, Godin said, the Army brand is hurt by a lack of effort in Washington to sell Americans on the value of military service. It is the White House, not an advertising agency, that needs to make the Army's case to the nation during wartime, he said. "In the end, it will not be Leo Burnett that sells the Army," Godin said. "The most important people in charge of marketing for the Army are the president and the secretary of Defense."

"Even the gush of patriotism that followed the Sept. 11 attacks did not translate into a flood of young people signing up at Army recruiting stations, DeThorne said. "There was a surge of people buying American flags after 9/11," he said. "But there was no surge in people rushing in saying that they wanted to join the Army." 

Permission to use the Yahoo! logo and quote from Yahoo! given by Debbie MacLeod, Yahoo! Marketing Manager in email Jan 2005. Copy in the permissions binder.

Snapple can also use the online site to gather specific name and address information of loyal customers which they will use in "direct mail" campaigns

At the I AM website, people used to be able to get an email address such as joe@iam.ca or joe@onlycanadian.com or joe@canadianrocks.com 

The questionnaire which you fill out to get the free email includes the statement
"we are always trying to learn more about you and your interests in order to provide the best and relevant community for Canadian beer drinkers..."

Such customer profiling techniques were done by the American cigarette companies in the 1980's in order to develop long-term brand insistence - however it was expensive to do that then due to the amount of free merchandize you had to give away - "kewl" web sites allow this customer profiling to be less costly and you can create communities of customers that in turn create a dynamic that can be very exciting. 

UTM student Vicky Ly in CCT322 in January 2006 found this article about branding and offered her useful comments below. Vicky emailed Prof. Richardson and she said "I picked this piece of news up from the "Bulletin" today: http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin6/051214-1916.asp

It is about a new research study that suggests that sometimes consumers unconsciously tend to treat brands as if they are their close friends and family members (communal relationship) instead of just a product for gain (exchange relationship).   Although I don't think the idea is totally innovative, they do suggest a deeper underlying consciousness that consumers sometimes buy a product just because it seems like the "right" thing to do in his/her social circle than for any real economic value.

The story found by Vicky on the UofT news site at  http://www.news.utoronto.ca
and referred to research that had been done by Professor Pankaj Aggarwal and Professor Sharmistha Law of the Division of Management at the University of Toronto at Scarborough

read also  http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/%3E/articleshow/408473.cms
interview with  Rishad Tobaccowala, President, Starcom MediaVest Group IP. He was picked by Time magazine as one of the world’s top five marketing innovators.

Part of the interview
"How is today’s marketing communication on the Internet different from the time of the dotcom boom?

There are three big differences this time. 

Firstly, this time round it’s starting off with an adult mindset where people are looking at the Internet and digital media as part of marketing; rather than hoping for it to take over all and eliminate all other forms of marketing.

Second, it’s starting off with a much larger base than five years ago. As per US statistics, 60 per cent of all households have access to the Internet, close to half of those have access to broadband Internet, and therefore, they also tend to use Internet 12-14 hours a week. 

The third difference is that people are beginning to realise that the future is going to be impacted by digital marketing. So for instance, there’s a lot of interest in personal video recorders (PVRs) like Tivo and Replay which are currently present in around 2.5 million homes in the US. But it’s all about how consumers control their television. So marketers are saying, if you want to learn how consumers are controlling media, then we should pay a lot of attention to the Internet, because that’s where they control media!"

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/%3E/articleshow/408473.cms
interview with  Rishad Tobaccowala, President, Starcom MediaVest Group IP. He was picked by Time magazine as one of the world’s top five marketing innovators.

Part of the interview

" In which markets is the most innovative digital marketing happening?

"The most sophisticated market when it comes to broadband and Internet penetration is South Korea. If you talk about digital gaming, ie households that have a Sony Playstation or Microsoft Xbox, then those tend to be in Japan and the US. When it comes down to telephone-based digital marketing, then it’s Scandinavian countries, some parts of Europe and Japan. When it come to digital music, then it’s the US and what we anticipate is that with digital TV, it will again be the US and the UK. We expect that with everything that’s built around broadband or the internet, India will catch up very fast. Even when it comes to digital music, India will catch up fast because it’s computer-based and connected to the internet, and digital video recorders will come in here in a big way. "

Risky
Business

In the 3rd week of September, 2005, Queen's University was embarrased in the national news. Millionaire businessman David Radler (part of Conrad Black's inner circle), pleaded guilty to fraud in the Hollinger International newspaper scandal. Some time ago, Radler (Queen's MBA '67) had donated a million dollars to Queen's so the university named one of the wings in its business school the Radler Wing.

There used to be a practice at Queen's of only naming campus buildings after people who had died - this way you could make sure it was impossible for them to do anything stupid in the future and embarass the school !
see  www.queensjournal.ca/articlephp/point-vol133/issue4/news/lead3

"A trademark is a word, combination of words, design, logo, or symbol that identifies to  consumers the source of goods. That is, tangible goods or things that you can touch. 

 A service mark is essentially the same thing as a trademark, but it identifies non-tangible services, for example, legal, accounting, and design. 

A trade name is the actual name of the provider of the goods and/or services. 

A mark is the word we lawyers use, mostly because we usually do not need to distinguish between trademarks and service marks. 

 (R) is the symbol for a registered trademark or service mark. Under US  and Canadian law, you may  only use this symbol if you have a  registration for the mark. 

TM is a symbol that is frequently used with marks to indicate that the owner believes  the word, symbol, or phrase is a trademark. There is really no legal import to this  symbol, but it is a useful deterrent. 

SM is same as TM, but it is used with service marks. Few mark owners make this distinction because relatively few people know what these terms mean. "