CHAPTER 4:

CHOOSING BRAND ELEMENTS TO BUILD BRAND

EQUITY

4.1
 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

4.2
Criteria  Memorability Marketer’s offensive strategy
and build brand equity
for  Meaningfulness
 Likability
Choosing  Transferability
Brand  Adaptability

Elements  Protectability Defensive role for leveraging

and maintaining brand equity

4.3
  Brand elements should inherently be memorable
and attention-getting, and therefore facilitate
recall or recognition.

Memorability

4.4
  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
Meaningfulness
 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.

4.5
  Do customers find the brand element aesthetically
appealing?
Likability  Descriptive and persuasive elements reduce the
burden on marketing communications to build
awareness.

4.6
  How useful is the brand element for line or
category extensions?
Transferabilit
 To what extent does the brand element add to
y brand equity across geographic boundaries and
market segments?

4.7
  The more adaptable and flexible the brand
element, the easier it is to update it to changes in
consumer values and opinions.
Adaptability  For example, logos and characters can be given a
new look or a new design to make them appear
more modern and relevant.

4.8
  Marketers should:
1. Choose brand elements that can be legally
protected internationally.
Protectability 2. Formally register chosen brand elements with
the appropriate legal bodies.
3. Vigorously defend trademarks from
unauthorized competitive infringement.

4.9
 KFC is the world’s most popular chicken restaurant
chain, and there is no doubt that KFC’s success can be partly attributed
to a powerful set of memorable, meaningful, and likable brand
elements. The brand name itself is indicative as to what the brand is
offering: Kentucky Fried Chicken. Originating in the 1950s, KFC’s
“finger lickin’ good” slogan has resonated with families worldwide for
over 50 years, along with its distinctive packaging, including the paper
bucket with red and white coloring. KFC’s pioneer, Colonel Harland
Sanders, remains a key character and symbol in KFC’s advertising,
packaging, and branding. “The Colonel” is one of the most recognized,
respected, and beloved brand icons to ever exist. Aside from slight
changes to his attire, he continues to remind customers of the tasty,
high-quality, fresh chicken with the 11 secret herbs and spices that he
began making more than 50 years ago. KFC’s official URL is kfc.com,
which includes more than 30 international Web sites covering the
4.10
Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia
  A variety of brand elements can be
chosen that inherently enhance brand
Tactics awareness or facilitate the formation of
strong, favorable, and unique brand
for Brand associations.
Elements 

Brand names
URLs
 Logos and symbols
 Characters
 Slogans
 Packaging

4.11
  Like any brand element, brand names must be

Brand chosen with the six general criteria of

memorability, meaningfulness, likability,
transferability, adaptability, and protectability in
Names mind.

4.12
  Brand awareness
 Simplicity and ease of pronunciation and spelling
 Familiarity and meaningfulness
 Differentiated, distinctive, and uniqueness
 Brand associations
 The explicit and implicit meanings consumers
extract from it are important. In particular, the
Brand brand name can reinforce an important attribute or
benefit association that makes up its product
positioning.
Naming
Guidelines  Define objectives

Brand  Generate names

 Screen initial candidates
Naming  Study candidate names
Procedures  Research the final candidates
 Select the final name

4.13
  Simplicity and Ease of Pronunciation and Spelling
 Simplicity reduces the effort consumers have to make to
comprehend and process the brand name. Short names often
facilitate recall because they are easy to encode and store in
memory—consider Aim toothpaste, Raid pest spray, Bold
laundry detergent, Suave shampoo, Off insect repellent, Jif
peanut butter, Ban deodorant, and Bic pens. Marketers can
shorten longer names to make them easier to recall. For
example, over the years Chevrolet cars have also become
known as “Chevy,” Budweiser beer has become “Bud,” and
Coca-Cola is also “Coke.”
Naming
Guidelines  Familiarity and Meaningfulness.
 The brand name should be familiar and meaningful so it can
tap into existing knowledge structures. It can be concrete or
abstract in meaning. Because the names of people, objects,
birds, animals, and inanimate objects already exist in
memory, consumers have to do less learning to understand
their meanings as brand names.12 Links form more easily,
increasing memorability.13 Thus, when a consumer sees an
ad for the first time for a car called “Fiesta,” the fact that the
consumer already has the word stored in memory should
make it easier to encode the product name and thus improve
its recallabilit

4.14
 Differentiated, Distinctive, and Unique.
Although choosing a simple, easy-to-pronounce, familiar,
and meaningful brand name can improve recallability, to
improve brand recognition, on the other hand, brand names
should be different, distinctive, and unusual. As Chapter 2
noted, recognition depends on consumers’ ability to
discriminate between brands, and more complex brand
names are more easily distinguished. Distinctive brand names
can also make it easier for consumers to learn intrinsic
Naming product information

Guidelines Brand Associations

Because the brand name is a compact form of
communication, the explicit and implicit meanings
consumers extract from it are important. In naming a
new peer-to-peer communication technology, the
founders landed on the descriptive “Sky peer-to-peer”
which they decided to shorten to Skyper. When the
corresponding Web address Skyper.com was not
available, they shortened it again to the much more
user-friendly Skype.
4.15
4.16
  URLs (uniform resource locators) specify locations
of pages on the web and are also commonly
referred to as domain names.
URLs  A company can either sue the current owner of the
URL for copyright infringement, buy the name
from the current owner, or register all conceivable
variations of its brand as domain names ahead of
time.

4.17
7 crucial
naming
mistakes

4.18
  Play a critical role in building brand equity and
Logos especially brand awareness
 Logos range from corporate names or trademarks
and (word marks with text only) written in a distinctive
form, to entirely abstract designs that may be
Symbols completely unrelated to the word mark, corporate
name, or corporate activities

4.19
  A special type of brand symbol—one
that takes on human or real-life
characteristics
 Some are animated like Pillsbury’s
Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy, Peter Pan
peanut butter’s character, and
numerous cereal characters such as
Character Tony the Tiger, Cap’n Crunch, and
Snap, Crackle & Pop.
s  Others are live-action figures like
Juan Valdez (Colombian coffee), the
Maytag repairman, and Ronald
McDonald. Notable newcomers
include the AOL running man, the
Budweiser frogs, and the AFLAC
duck.

4.20
  Slogans are short phrases that communicate
descriptive or persuasive information about the

Slogans
brand.
 Slogans are powerful branding devices because,
like brand names, they are an extremely efficient,
shorthand means to build brand equity

4.21
  “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands”
(M&M’s)
 “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you
Classic don’t” (Almond Joy/Mounds)

Slogans “Where’s the beef?” (Wendy’s)
 “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” (United
Negro College Fund)
 “Can you hear me now?” (Verizon)

4.22
  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
Jingles registered in the minds of listeners—sometimes
whether they want them to or not!
 Jingles are perhaps most valuable in enhancing
brand awareness.

4.23
  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
 Packaging Can Influence Taste - Our sense of taste
Packaging 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.
 Long after we have bought a product, a package
can still lead us to believe we bought it because it
was a good value.
 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 4.24
package than from television ads.
Updating
Betty
Crocker

4.25