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BRANDS

BRANDS

As the marketing expert Philip Kotler has said, 'The most distinctive skill of professional marketers is their ability to create, maintain, protect and enhance brands.' But, despite the best efforts of professional marketers, the list of top brands of today is not so different from that of 30 or 40 years ago: Coca-Cola, IBM, Ford and Hoover are all still there. Consumers tend to form emotional attachments to foods and household goods they grow up with. These brands gain mindshare in consumers at an early age and new brands find it hard to compete with the established brands.

One area where new brands can appear is in new categories. For example, the names Dell and Easyjet have emerged as extremely strong brands in built-to-order PCs and low-cost airlines respectively, industries that have not existed for very long.

We tend to think of brands in relation to consumer marketing and packaged goods, and consumer goods companies will often employ brand managers to develop their brands. But the use of brands and branding is also important in industrial or business-to-business marketing, where companies are selling to other companies, rather than to consumers. As Amitava Chattopadhyay says in this unit of the Course Book: 'A brand is a set of associations in the mind of the consumer'. In business-to-business marketing, substitute 'buyer' for 'consumer', and there will be similar issues of brand awareness, brand image and brand equity: the value to a company of the brands that it owns. In business-to-business, the company name itself is often its most important brand. A company's image and reputation will clearly be key to its success.