BUSS454

Product and Brand Management

Chapter 4:
Choosing Brand Elements to Build Brand Equity

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Part 2: Designing and Implementing Brand
Marketing Programs

• Choosing Brand Elements to Build Brand Equity (Chapter 4)

• Designing Marketing Programs to Build Brand Equity
(Chapter 5)
• Integrating Marketing Communications to Build Brand
Equity (Chapter 6)
• Branding in the Digital Age (Chapter 7)
• Leveraging Secondary Brand Associations to Build Brand
Equity (Chapter 8)

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Choosing Brand Elements to Build Brand
Equity

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Learning Objectives

• Identify the different types of brand elements

• Criteria for Choosing Brand Elements
• Options and Tactics for Brand Elements
• Explain the rationale for “mixing and matching” brand elements
• Highlight some of the legal issues surrounding brand elements

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

What is a Brand?

“… a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a

combination of them, intended to identify the goods and
services of one seller or group of sellers and to
differentiate them from those of competition”
AMA
These different components of a brand that identify and
differentiate it are brand elements

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

 What is a brand?
• Many practicing managers refer to a brand as more than
that— as something that has actually created a certain
amount of awareness, reputation, prominence, and so on in
the marketplace.
• We can make a distinction between the AMA definition of a
“brand” with a small b and the industry’s concept of a
“Brand” with a capital b.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Building Customer-Based Brand Equity

• Brand knowledge structures depend on:

• The initial choices for the brand elements
• The supporting marketing program and the manner by which the
brand is integrated into it
• Other associations indirectly transferred to the brand by linking it
to some other entities

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Criteria for Choosing Brand Elements

• Memorability
Marketer’s offensive strategy
• Meaningfulness and build brand equity
• Likability
• Transferability
• Adaptability Defensive role for leveraging
and maintaining brand equity
• Protectability

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Memorability

• Brand elements should inherently be memorable and

attention-getting, and therefore facilitate recall or
recognition
• Need to have high level of brand awareness
• Easily recognized
• Easily recalled

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Meaningfulness

• Brand elements may take on all kinds of meaning, with

either descriptive or persuasive content.
• Two particularly important criteria
• General information about the nature of the product category
• Specific information about particular attributes and benefits of
the brand

• The first dimension is an important determinant of brand

awareness and salience; the second, of brand image and
positioning.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Likability

• Do customers find the brand element:

• fun and interesting?
• rich visual and verbal imagerg?
• aesthetically pleasing?
• Descriptive and persuasive elements reduce the burden
on marketing communications to build awareness.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Transferability

• How useful is the brand element for line or category

extensions?
• To what extent does the brand element add to brand
equity across geographic boundaries and market
segments?

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Adaptability

• The more adaptable and flexible the brand element, the

easier it is to update it to changes in consumer values and
opinions.
• For example, logos and characters can be given a new
look or a new design to make them appear more modern
and relevant.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

 Protectability

• Marketers should:
• Choose brand elements that can be legally protected
internationally.
• Formally register chosen brand elements with the appropriate
legal bodies.
• Vigorously defend trademarks from unauthorized competitive
infringement.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Tactics for Brand Elements

• A variety of brand elements can be chosen that

inherently enhance brand awareness or facilitate the
formation of strong, favorable, and unique brand
associations.
• Brand names
• URLs
• Logos and symbols
• Characters
• Slogans
• Packaging
BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett
Options and Tactics for Brand Names

• What would an ideal brand element be like?

• Easily remembered
• Highly suggestive of the product class and benefits
• Inherently fun or interesting
• Rich with creative potential
• Transferable to a wide variety of product and geographic settings
• Enduring in meaning and relevant over time
• Strongly protectable both legally and competitively

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Brand Names

• The brand name is fundamentally important:

• Often captures the central theme or key associations of a
product in a compact, economical fashion
• Most difficult element for marketers to change:
• Closely tied to the product in the minds of consumers
• Like any brand element, brand names must be chosen
with the six general criteria of memorability,
meaningfulness, likability, transferability, adaptability,
and protectability in mind.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Brand Naming Guidelines

• Brand awareness
• Simplicity and ease of pronunciation and spelling
• Ssangyong
• Samsung
• Fruzen Gladje
• Façonnable clothing
• Familiarity and meaningfulness
• E.g. Kia Sorrento; Hyundai Sonata; Ssangyong Chairman
• Differentiated, distinctive, and uniqueness

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Brand Naming Guidelines

• Brand associations
• The explicit and implicit meanings consumers extract from it are
important. In particular, the brand name can reinforce an important
attribute or benefit association that makes up its product positioning.
• Korean Airlines
• Asiana
• HiMart
• Homeplus
• I can’t believe that it is not butter
• Chicken Tonight

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Brand Naming Procedures

• Define objectives
• Generate names
• Screen initial candidates

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Screen initial candidates

• Names with unintentional double meanings

• Names that are unpronounceable
• Names that have obvious legal complications
• Name that represent an obvious contradiction of the
positioning

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

 Brand Names
in China – a
survey of 100
multinationals

Fetscherin, Alon, Littrell and Chan, HBR 2012

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett
 Brand Names
in China – a
survey of 100
multinationals

Fetscherin, Alon, Littrell and Chan, HBR 2012

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett
 Brand Names in
China – a
survey of 100
multinationals

Fetscherin, Alon, Littrell and Chan, HBR 2012

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett
 Brand Names
in China – a
survey of 100
multinationals

Fetscherin, Alon, Littrell and Chan, HBR 2012

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett
 Brand Names
in China – a
survey of 100
multinationals

Fetscherin, Alon, Littrell and Chan, HBR 2012

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett
Brand Naming Procedures

• Define objectives
• Generate names
• Screen initial candidates
• Study candidate names
• Research the final candidates
• Select the final name

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)

• Specify locations of pages on the Web

• Known as domain names
• Protect the brands from unauthorized use in other
domain names
• Cybersquatting- Registering, trafficking in, or using a
domain name with bad-faith to profit from:
• The goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

URLs
• A company needs to protect their brands from unauthorized use in
other domain names:
• Company can:
• Sue current owner of the URL for copyright infringement
• Buy the name from the current owner
• Register all conceivable variations of its brand as domain
names ahead of time
• Cybersquatting or domain squatting:
• Registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith
to profit from:
• The goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else
BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett
Logos and Symbols

• Play a critical role in building brand equity and especially

brand awareness
• Logos range from corporate names or trademarks (word
marks with text only) written in a distinctive form, to
entirely abstract designs that may be completely
unrelated to the word mark, corporate name, or
corporate activities

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Logos and Symbols

• Like names, abstract logos can be distinctive and

recognizable:
• Abstract logos may lack the inherent meaning present with a
more concrete logo
• One danger is that consumers may not understand what the logo
is intended to represent

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Characters

• Special type of brand symbol:

• One that takes on human or real-life characteristics
• Introduced through advertising:
• Can play a central role in ad campaigns and package designs

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Slogans

• Slogans are short phrases that communicate descriptive

or persuasive information about the brand.
• Function as useful “hooks” or “handles” to help
consumers grasp the meaning of a brand
• Indispensable means of summarizing and translating the
intent of a marketing program

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Slogans

• Designing slogans:
• Designed so they contribute to brand equity in multiple ways
• Can contain product-related messages and other meanings
• Updating slogans:
• Recognize how it contributes to brand equity:
• Through enhanced awareness or image
• Decide how much of this equity enhancement, if any, is still needed
• Retain needed or desired equities still residing in the slogan
• While providing whatever new twists of meaning are necessary to
contribute to equity in other ways

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Jingles

• Jingles are musical messages written around the brand.

Typically composed by professional songwriters, they
often have enough catchy hooks and choruses to become
almost permanently registered in the minds of listeners—
sometimes whether they want them to or not!
• Jingles are perhaps most valuable in enhancing brand
awareness.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Packaging

• Activity of designing and producing containers or

wrappers
• From the perspective of both the firm and consumers,
packaging must achieve a number of objectives:
• Identify the brand
• Convey descriptive and persuasive information
• Facilitate product transportation and protection
• Assist at-home storage
• Aid product consumption

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Packaging (2 of 4)

• Packaging at the point of purchase:

• The right packaging can create strong appeal:
• On the store shelf
• Help products stand out from the clutter
• Can provide at least a temporary edge on competition

• Packaging innovations:
• Can lower costs
• Can improve demand for a product

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Packaging

• Package design:
• Has become a more sophisticated process:
• Specialized package designers bring artistic techniques and scientific
skills
• Refers to “shelf impact” of a package

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Packaging

• Packaging changes:
• Can be expensive:
• But can be cost-effective compared with other marketing
communication costs:
• Signal a higher price, or to more effectively sell products
through new or shifting distribution channels
• When a significant product line expansion would benefit
from a common look
• To accompany a new product innovation to signal
changes to consumers
• When old package looks outdated
BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett
Packaging Can Influence Taste

• Our sense of taste and touch is very suggestible, and

what we see on a package can lead us to taste what we
think we are going to taste.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Packaging Can Influence Value

• Long after we have bought a product, a package can still

lead us to believe we bought it because it was a good
value.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Packaging Can Influence Consumption

• Studies of 48 different types of foods and personal care

products have shown that people pour and consume
between 18% and 32% more of a product as the size of
the container doubles.

Valerie Folkes, Ingrid Martin and Kamal Gupta,

“When to Say When: Effects of Supply on Usage,”
Journal of Consumer Research, 20 December 1993, 467-477.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Packaging Can Influence How a Person Uses
a Product

• One strategy to increase use of mature products has been

to encourage people to use the brand in new situations,
like soup for breakfast, or new uses, like baking soda as a
refrigerator deodorizer.
• An analysis of 26 products and 402 consumers showed
that twice as many people learned about the new use
from the package than from television ads.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

Putting It All Together

• The entire set of brand elements makes up the brand

identity, the contribution of all brand elements to
awareness and image.
• The cohesiveness of the brand identity depends on the
extent to which the brand elements are consistent.

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett

BUSS454 Spring 2021 Tony Garrett