Brand identity is the first impression that a customer or client has of a company. It is vital that brand identity is consistent across different platforms and mediums.
The Importance of Brand Identity
Businesses cannot neglect the importance of branding in today's competitive world.
Brand Identity, brand image, and brand equity are essential aspects of branding. The outward expression of the brand, including its name, logo, tone, tagline, symbols, and visual appearance, is a brand's identity. It should be meaningful, distinct, and flexible.
A brand image is how the consumers perceive the brand. The brand image is not created but is automatically formed. A strong brand image is a powerful asset and makes people confident that the organization is dependable. Brand equity is the value that the customer attaches to a particular brand. Brand equity can provide a platform for growth by brand extensions.
According to the American Marketing Association, "brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of these, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from competitors. Branding is the act of imprinting or engraving a brand name or symbol onto a product to provide a distinct individuality to the product.
Brand Identity
The outward expression of the brand, including its name, logo, tone, tagline, symbols, and visual appearance, is a brand's identity. It is the most fundamental means of consumer recognition and symbolizes the brand's differentiation from competitors. Thus, a company's brand identity is how that business wants to be perceived by consumers.
Brand Identity Perspectives
1. Brand as a product
The product-related attributes will have an essential influence on brand identity because they are linked to user requirements and product experience.
2. Brand as an organization
By looking at the brand as an organization, brand managers are forced to shift their perspective from product to organization attributes. These are less tangible and more subjective. However, attributes as CRM, innovation, perceived quality, visibility, and presence can contribute significantly towards value propositions and customer relationships.
3. Brand as a person
Brand as a person is a perspective as if the brand was a human being. Therefore, brand personality is a distinctive element and is extensively used in many brands equity models.
4. Brand as a symbol
Brand as a symbol can capture almost anything that represents the brand. Therefore, a strong symbol can fulfill an important and even a dominant role in brand strategy. Likewise, logos are powerful if they involve a recognizable, meaningful, and trustful metaphor.
Brand Identity Framework
· Brand as a product
· Product Scope
· Product Attributes
· Uses
· Users
· Country of Origin
Brand as an organization
· Organization Attributes (innovation, consumer concern, trustworthiness)
· Local vs. Global
Brand as a person
· Personality (genuine, energetic, rugged)
· Brand-customer relationships (friends, adviser)
Brand as a person
· Visual imagery and metaphors
· Brand Heritage
The balance of the four perspectives can vary by customer segmentation, competitor composition, and internal context. Consequently, the balance is interdependent with the strategic brand analyses.
The heart of this model contains the brand essence, core identity, and extended identity.
1. The brand essence
The brand essence captures the brand values and vision in an ambivalent timeless identity statement. Aaker sees this as the internal magnet that keeps the core identity element connected.
2. The core identity
The core identity represents the brand's essence and contains the most likely associations to remain constant over time. Ultimately, as a result, the core identity elements make the brand sustainable, unique, and valuable.
3. The extended brand identity
The extended brand identity fulfills a completeness and texture role to funnel the ambivalent core identity into a consistent direction of the brand. Where core elements are timeless, the extended identity contains elements that do not belong to the timeless foundation of the brand identity.
Sources of Brand Identity
· Symbols: Symbols help customers memorize an organization's products and services as they are visual images. These can include logos, people, geometric shapes, cartoon images, anything. For instance, Marlboro has its famous cowboy, Pillsbury has its Poppin' Fresh doughboy, Duracell has its bunny rabbit, Mc Donald has Ronald, Fed Ex has an arrow, and Nike's swoosh.
· Logos: A logo is a unique graphic or symbol representing a company, product, service, or other entity. Adidas's "Three Stripes" is a famous brand identified by its corporate logo. The elements of a logo are:
· Logotype - It can be a simple or expanded name. Examples of logotypes including only the name are Kellogg's, Hyatt, etc.
· Icon - It is a name or visual symbol that communicates a market position. For example-LIC' hands', UTI' Kalash's.
· Slogan - It is the best way of conveying the company's message to the consumers. For instance- Nike's slogan is "Just Do It." Apple's tagline is "Think different."
· Signature tune: It is a unique tone that reminds customers of a specific company's brand. For example – Britannia "ting-ting-ta-ding," Nokia, Windows also uses a signature tune.
Importance of Brand Identity
Today we live in a culture that is rich in knowledge yet deprived of time. Because of this, it is often the visual identity of a brand that catches the eyes of consumers. In many cases, people tend to form their opinions and perceptions about a brand before they even know who it is and what it is about. Therefore, visual presence is essential to differentiate the brand effectively from the competition and build trust with consumers.
Elements Important to Brand Identity
· Meaning: Great brands stand for something. A brand's identity must express the organization's unique mission, history, culture, values, and personality.
· Differentiation: Brands are constantly competing within their business category that wants consumers' attention. Because of all this competition, it is not enough to be different. Instead, brands need to demonstrate and communicate their difference, making it easy for customers to understand that difference.
· Durability & Flexibility: Brands need to commit to a central idea over time to transcend change and remain recognizable. An influential brand identity positions a company for change and growth in the future. It supports an evolving marketing strategy.
Brand Image
A brand image is how the consumers perceive the brand. It is a set of beliefs held about a specific brand. It signifies what the brand presently stands for. Consumers develop various associations with the brand. Based on these associations, they form a brand image. It is a unique bundle of associations within the minds of the target audience. E.g., Volvo is associated with safety, Toyota is associated with reliability.
Brand image is the perceptions about a brand as reflected by the brand associations held in consumers' memory. Thus, a brand image consists of various associations in consumers' minds, namely attributes, benefits, and attitudes.
· Attributes: Brand attributes are the functional and mental connections with the brand that the customers have. Attributes are descriptive features that characterized a product or service – what a consumer thought the product or service is or has and what is involved with its purchase or consumption. He classified attributes into product-related attributes and non-product-related attributes. Product-related attributes are the attributes that are the basis for the proper functioning of the products and services. Hence, they relate to a product's physical composition or a service's requirements. They determine the nature and level of product performance. Non-product-related attributes (i.e., price, packaging, or product appearance information, user imagery), i.e., what kind of person uses the product or service and usage imagery, i.e., in what situations the product or service is used) are the external attributes of products and services, which are purchase and consumption-related. They may affect the purchase or consumption processes but do not directly affect the product performance.
· Benefits: Benefits are the rationale for the purchase decision. Keller (1993) classified benefits into functional, experiential, and symbolic benefits. Functional benefits are related to the intrinsic advantages derived from products or services, usually because of the product-related attributes (example: hunger satisfaction from food). These benefits often are linked to basic motivations, such as physiological and safety needs. Experiential benefits answer what it feels like after using the product or service (happy, contented, excited, etc.). These benefits satisfy experiential requirements such as sensory pleasure. Finally, symbolic benefits are the extrinsic benefits derived from product or service use and are related to non-product attributes (example: satisfaction of social needs or self-esteem needs).
· Attitudes: Attitudes are consumers' overall assessment of a brand. Brand attitudes are necessary because they often form the basis for consumers' actions and behavior (e.g., brand choice). In addition, consumers' brand attitudes generally depend on specific considerations concerning the attributes and benefits of the brand.
Brand image is not created but is automatically formed. It is a function of expectations and experiences. When customer's experience is better than their expectations, they tend to develop a positive brand image. Conversely, when customers' expertise falls short of their expectations, they form a negative brand image.
Importance of Brand Image
Brand associations are significant to marketers and consumers. Marketers use brand associations to differentiate, position, and extend brands, to create positive attitudes and feelings toward brands, and to suggest attributes or benefits of purchasing or using a specific brand. Consumers use brand associations to help the process, organize, and retrieve information in memory and aid them in making purchase decisions. A brand image helps marketers identify the strengths and weaknesses of their brand and consumers' perceptions toward their product or services. A strong brand image is a powerful asset and makes people confident that the organization is dependable.
Brand Equity
In general terms, brand equity is the value that a customer attaches to a particular brand. It refers to the difference in the behavior of consumers towards a well-known brand and a generic brand. If a consumer behaves more favorably to a branded product than a generic product, then a brand has positive brand equity. If consumers react less favorably to a brand than a generic product, then a brand has negative brand equity. Brand equity represents the added value endowed to a product or a service due to past investments in the marketing for the brand. The additional money that consumers are willing to spend to buy Coca-Cola rather than the store brand of soda is an example of brand equity.
American Marketing Association defined brand equity from a consumer's viewpoint - "from a consumer perspective, brand equity is based on consumer attitudes about positive brand attributes and favorable consequences of brand use."
Brand equity is a set of assets and liabilities linked to a brand that adds to or subtracts from the value provided by a product or service to a firm or to that firm's customers". The intangible assets of brands create the basis of brand equity. Brand equity consists of five different asset dimensions. These assets include brand loyalty, brand awareness, perceived quality, brand associations, and other proprietary assets such as patents, trademarks, and channel relationships. If managed well, these assets add value to the product or service and create additional customer satisfaction, which, in turn, provide many benefits to the firm.
· Brand loyalty: The brand loyalty of the customer base is often the core of a brand's equity. It refers to the degree to which customers are loyal to a brand. It reflects how likely a customer will be ready to switch to another brand, especially when that brand makes a change, either in price or in product features. As brand loyalty increases, the vulnerability of the customer base to competitive action is reduced. Brand loyalty, on a continuum, ranges from the habitual buyer to the satisfied buyer to those who are committed. Brand loyalty results in a reduction in the marketing costs, trade leverage, stability in revenue, ease in attracting new customers, and lowers brand switching, which gives the company time to respond to the competitive threats. Positive word-of-mouth is likely to be very high.
· Brand awareness focuses on how a brand is known among the public, which can be ascertained through brand recognition and brand recall. A potential buyer can recognize or recall that a brand is a member of a specific product category. Brand recognition requires confirmation of the consumer's prior exposure to the brand when given as a cue. Brand recall is the next higher level of brand awareness where consumers can correctly retrieve the brand from memory when given any cue related to such a product category. Next, higher levels of brand awareness are top-of-the-mind (first mentioned brand), brand dominance (the only brand recalled), brand knowledge (when consumers know what the brand stands for), and brand opinion (when consumers have an idea about the brand). Brand awareness provides the anchor to which other associations can be linked. Recognition provides the brand with a sense of familiarity, and people like the familiar. When a consumer does not want to engage in attribute evaluation, familiarity may be enough. Finally, brand awareness can be a signal of substance. The first step in the buying process is to select a group of brands to consider. Brand awareness is crucial to choosing the brand as a part of evoked set.
· Perceived Quality: Perceived quality can be defined as the customer's perception of the overall quality or superiority of a product or service relative to alternatives. The quality offered by the brand provides a reason to buy, and it can be used as a strong positioning basis. In addition, it allows for charging premium prices as the price is taken as a quality indicator. Therefore, channel members are motivated to carry brands that are well regarded. Also, the perceived quality can be exploited by introducing brand extensions, using the brand name to enter new product categories.
· Brand associations: A brand association is any mental linkage to the brand. Different brand associations are classified into 1) attributes, 2) benefits and 3) attitudes. Attributes are descriptive features that characterized a product or service – what a consumer thought the product or service is or has and what is involved with its purchase or consumption. He classified attributes into product-related attributes and non-product-related attributes. Benefits are the personal value and meaning that consumers attach to the product or service. Benefits can be further distinguished into three categories: functional benefits, experiential benefits, and symbolic benefits. Brand attitudes are defined in terms of consumers' overall evaluations of a brand. Consumers believe the brand has attributes and benefits that satisfy their needs and wants so that a positive overall brand attitude is formed. Brand associations increase the likelihood that information will be accessible and the ease of recalling it, contributing to brand differentiation. It gives a reason to buy and thus, facilitates buying process, develops positive attitudes and feelings, and finally provides a basis for brand extensions.
· Other proprietary assets: Patents, intellectual property rights, relations with trade partners are examples of proprietary assets. Brands that accumulate more proprietary assets tend to have a tremendous competitive advantage relative to their competitors.
Importance of Brand Equity
The five asset dimensions (brand loyalty, brand awareness, perceived quality, brand associations, and other proprietary brand assets) that underlie brand equity are creating brand equity. In addition, the five assets model implicates that brand equity provides value to the customer and the firm. Thus, the resulting customer value becomes a basis for giving value to the firm.
Brand equity provides value to the customer in at least three ways:
· Brand equity assets can help customers interpret, process, store, and retrieve a massive quantity of information about products and brands.
· The assets can also affect the customer's confidence in the purchase decision. For example, a customer will usually be more comfortable with the brand they last used, is considered high quality, or is familiar with.
· The brand equity assets, particularly perceived quality, and brand associations, provide the customer with value is by increasing the customer's satisfaction when the individual uses the product.
Brand equity provides value to the firm in at least six ways:
· Brand equity can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing programs. A promotion, for example, that provides an incentive to try a new flavor or new use will be more effective if the brand is familiar and is perceived to be of higher quality.
· Brand awareness, perceived quality, and brand associations can strengthen brand loyalty by increasing customer satisfaction and providing reasons to buy the product.
· Brand equity will usually provide higher margins for products by permitting premium pricing and reducing reliance on promotions.
· Brand equity can provide a platform for growth by brand extensions.
· Brand equity can provide leverage in the distribution channel because channel members have less uncertainty dealing with a proven brand name that has already achieved recognition and has established strong associations.
· Brand equity assets provide a firm with a significant competitive advantage, a barrier that may prevent customers from switching to a competitor.
Substantial brand equity of long-standing may also result in that brand being used as the name of an entire category.
Leveraging Brand Equity
There are three ways to leverage brand equity: firstly, building it, secondly borrowing it, or thirdly buying it.
Building Brand Equity
The brand resonance pyramid model was developed to build substantial brand equity. The Brand Equity Model is also known as the Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) Model:
· Brand Identity (Who is the brand?): The first step is to create "brand salience," or awareness – in other words, a company needs to make sure that the brand stands out and that customers recognize it and are aware of it. It is concerned with; how often a customer acknowledges or recalls a brand and what cues are necessary to remind consumers about it. The basic idea is to create deep and broadened brand awareness, i.e., how easily a brand is recalled and to what range of consumption situations a brand is recalled.
· Brand Meaning (What the brand means?): Next step is to identify and communicate what the brand means and what it stands for. The two building blocks in this step are performance and imagery. Performance defines how well the product meets customers' basic needs and wants. According to the model, the performance consists of five categories: product characteristics and features; product reliability, durability, and serviceability; service effectiveness, efficiency, empathy; style and design; and price. Imagery refers to how well the brand meets customers' needs on a social and psychological level. Imagery has four categories: user profiles, i.e., demographic profiles like age, gender, income, etc. of the users of a brand; usage imagery, i.e., where or when can the brand be used; personality and values: people tend to purchase those brands that they feel match their personality; history, hierarchy, and experiences: brand associations with history, hierarchy and experiences help build brand image. Brand meaning should be such that it results in a strong, favorable, and unique brand association with the customers, which will help elicit responses from customers.
· Brand Response (How customers behave?): It focuses on how the customers respond to the brand's marketing activities and how they perceive the brand. The two building blocks are judgments and feelings. Customers constantly make judgments (rational response) about the brand based on: quality; credibility in terms of trustworthiness and likability; consideration in terms of how relevant product is to their unique needs; superiority, i.e., customers assess how superior brand is relative to its competitors' brands. According to the model, there are six positive brand feelings (emotional response) evoked in customers: warmth, fun, excitement, security, social approval, and self-respect. A company should try to derive favorable brand responses from customers as it helps develop strong customer relationships.
· Brand Resonance (The relationship between customer and brand?): Brand resonance is achieved when customers feel a deep, psychological bond. Resonance is broken down into four categories: behavioral loyalty; includes:
1. Repeat purchases - attitudinal attachment when customers love a brand or product and see it as a special purchase.
2. Sense of community - when customers can communicate effortlessly with people associated with the brand.
3. Active engagement is when customers actively engage with a brand. Even when they are not purchasing or consuming (including joining a club related to the brand, participating in online chats, etc.)
The strongest brands excel in all the brand-building blocks, and they are correctly synchronized with the needs and wants of customers.
Borrowing Brand Equity
Firms can borrow on the brand equity in their brand names by extending existing brand names to other products. The primary purpose of using the same brand name is to take advantage of the value and power that the brand commands, rather than building an entirely new brand, which would entail a vast expenditure and would take time. Two extensions can be distinguished: a line and a category extension (also called brand extension).
· Line Extension: A line extension occurs when a company introduces additional items in the same product category under the same brand name. It involves almost similar products in many attributes but different in size, color, flavor, ingredient, or other form or a separate application.
· Brand Extension: Brand extension is the use of an established brand name in new product categories. The category to which the brand extends can be related or unrelated to the existing product categories in terms of product attributes, benefits, values, lifestyle, etc.
Buying Brand Equity
A company can also enhance brand equity by buying it through acquisition, licensing, and co-branding.
· Acquisition: Acquisition of a firm, its brands, and products is one way of leveraging brand equity. Example: Google acquired Android, YouTube, etc.
· Licensing: Organizations can get a license from well-established brand names to market their products. A license can be for names, symbols, logos previously created by other manufacturers, names of well-known celebrities, characters from popular movies and books. The licensee pays royalty or license fee for using established brand name and leverages their product using brand equity of established name.
Example: Apparels and accessories sellers pay hefty royalties to adorn their products with the names of well-known fashion innovators like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Gucci, etc.
· Co-branding: Co-branding occurs when two established brand names of different companies are used on the same product. Example: Citi Bank and Jet Airways joined forces to create Jet Citi Travel Card.
CONCLUSIONS
It is often the visual identity of a brand that catches the eyes of consumers, so it is essential to focus on developing a unique and meaningful brand identity to differentiate the brand effectively amongst the competition and build trust with consumers. Consumers form various associations with the brand. Marketers use these brand associations to differentiate, position, and extend brands and create positive attitudes and feelings. Brand equity will usually provide higher margins for products by permitting premium pricing and reducing reliance on promotions. Brand equity assets provide a firm with a significant competitive advantage. Thus, a brand manager should put in a lot of effort to build brand equity by developing a meaningful brand identity and monitoring brand image.
Commentaires