Brand image - case study - Marlboro

1.1. Contemporary branding

Why branding is important today

A survey in 1998 by the Henley Centre revealed that the public rust brand names such as Kellogg's, Heinz and Marks & Spencer more than Parliament, the police and the legal system. This research highlights the importance of the relationship between consumers and key brands; and shows that it has strengthened to such an extent that it is now healthier than the relationship with our social structures. This is evidence of the power of consumer culture and he liberal free market economics of the westernized world. Three rends support this belief:

Individualism: westernized societies recognize the fragmenta¬tion of our personal and social identities and this encourages self-identity construction through the consumption of material goods and services: you are what you buy.

Globalization: individual consumers are becoming a smaller part of a much larger world and need to find easy and quick ways to guide them through that world.

Symbolic experiences are increasingly in demand. Consumers are buying experiences rather than commodities whose con¬tents are largely image driven, intangible and symbolic.

The combination of these three trends has led to a shift away from producer or sales led marketing towards customer focused and cus¬tomer driven business models. This means that understanding what motivates and satisfies the customer is the key to successful modern business practices. The brand acts as the logical and primary connection and mode of communication between the pro¬ducer and the consumer. For brand managers, this prioritizes the modeling of a brand personality along the format of human rela¬tionships since customers already have the skills and experience of how to relate to other people.

Since the earliest times producers of goods have used their brands or marks to distinguish their products. Pride in their products has no doubt played a part in this. More particularly, by identifying their products they have provided purchasers with a means of recognizing and specifying them should they wish to repurchase or recommend the products to others.

The use of brands by producers has developed considerably over the centuries and especially in the last century. But the function of a brand as distinguishing the goods of one producer from those of another and of thus allowing consumers freedom of choice has remained unaltered.

The ways in which brands have developed over the years are essentially threefold. First, legal systems have recognized the value of brands to both producers and consumers. Most countries in the world now recognize that intellectual property-trademarks, patents, designs, copyright-is property in a very real sense and therefore confer rights on the owners of such property. Secondly, the concept of branded goads has been extended successfully to embrace services. Thus the providers of financial, retail or other services can now generally treat them as branded products, provided they are distingui¬shed from those of competitors. Thus service brands now generally enjoy the same statutory rights as product brands. Thirdly, and perhaps most importan¬tly, the ways in which branded products or services are distinguished from one another have increasingly come to embrace non-tangible factors, as well as such real factors as size, shape, make-up and price. The brand qualities which consumers rely upon in making a choice between brands have become increasingly subtle and, at times, fickle. Cigarette A may be virtually indistinguishable from Cigarette B yet outsell it ten to one; a fragrance costing $5 a bottle may be outsold by another fragrance with very similar physical characteristics but which sells at $50 a bottle.

Thus modern, sophisticated branding is now concerned increasingly with a brand's `gestalt', with assembling together and maintaining a mix of values, both tangible and intangible, which are relevant to consumers and which meaningfully and appropriately distinguish one supplier's brand from that of another.

Intangible factors are, however, very difficult to estimate even individually. When a number of such elements are blended together to form that unique creation, a branded product, evaluation of these separate but interrelated constituents is far from easy. Prior to a brand's launch, measuring its likely success is notoriously difficult. Even after launch it may not be possible to ascertain with any certainty the reasons for the success or failure of a brand.