Keller Branding

Branding

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x MM

September/October 2005

BY KEVIN LANE KELLER

Choosing the right brand elements

and leveraging secondary associations

will help marketers build brand equity.

T

oday’s challenging and unforgiving marketplace makes

brand building difficult. Fickle consumers, intense

competition, demanding retailers, constrained

resources, and impatient investors put unparalleled

pressure on marketers to skillfully design and execute their programs. As a result, marketers welcome any means toward helping

them build brand equity and value.

Marketers build strong brands by creating the right brand knowledge structures with target consumers. This ensures that consumers

are sufficiently aware of the brand and that they have strong, favorable, and unique associations with it. There are many associations

that marketers may link to the brand, such as thoughts, feelings,

perceptions, beliefs, images, attitudes, experiences, and behaviors.

And the right brand knowledge structures can result in an array of

benefits, including generous price premiums, intense and active

customer loyalty, significant cost savings, and numerous brand

extension and licensing opportunities.

This knowledge-structure building process depends on all brand

related contacts, whether marketer initiated or not. From a marketing management perspective, however, there are three main sets

of brand equity drivers.

MM September/October 2005

x 19

EXECUTIVE

Marketers must employ every possible tool to quickly and inexpensively create brand equity. They

briefing

should skillfully choose brand elements (names, Web URLs, logos, symbols, characters, slogans,

jingles, packaging, and signage) and leverage secondary associations, which link the brand to

people, places, or things with their own associations. This article outlines how these shortcut approaches work, as well as

some important considerations.

• The choices for the brand elements or identities. This

includes names, Web URLs, logos,...