Download PDF THE NEW STRATEGIC BRAND MANAGEMENT Creating and sustaining brand equity long term by J N KAPFERER

Sinopsis

It is surprising to see how brands continue to stimulate interest although so many prophets and experts have recently claimed they have no future. Today, all business managers are supposed to have attended conferences on CRM, ECR, customer equity, relationship marketing, customer database management, e-relationships and proximity marketing: all these new tools criticise the old brand concept and focus on the most efficient techniques to serve the most profitable customers. They claim that conquering new clients is of no value any more: profitability will come from mastering databases and loyalty programmes. Despite this, managers keep on attending conferences on brand management. Why haven’t they been convinced that brand management is an outdated tool? They have learnt that all these useful techniques soon lose their potential to create a lasting competitive advantage. The more they are diffused and shared, the more they become a standard, used by all competitors. What is customer equity without brand equity?
 

There are very few strategic assets available to a company that can provide a long-lasting competitive advantage, and even then the time span of the advantage is getting shorter. Brands are one of them, along with R&D, a real consumer orientation, an efficiency culture (cost cutting), employee involvement, and the capacity to change and react rapidly. This is the mantra of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Apple and Zara.
 

Managers have also rediscovered that the best kind of loyalty is brand loyalty, not price loyalty or bargain loyalty, even though as a first step it is useful to create behavioural barriers to exit. Finally, A Ehrenberg (1972) has shown through 40 years of panel data analysis that product penetration is correlated with purchase frequency. In other words, big brands have both a high penetration rate and a high purchase frequency per buyer. Growth will necessarily take these two routes, and not only be triggered by customer loyalty.

Content

1. Brand equity in question
2. Strategic implications of branding
3. Brand and business building
4. From private labels to store brands
5. Brand diversity: the types of brands
6. The new rules of brand management
7. Brand identity and positioning
8. Launching the brand
9. The challenge of growth in mature markets
10. Sustaining a brand long term
11. Adapting to the market: identity and change
12. Growth through brand extensions
13. Brand architecture
14. Multi-brand portfolios
15. Handling name changes and brand transfers
16. Brand turnaround and rejuvenation
17. Managing global brands
18. Financial valuation and accounting for brands

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