Branding

Branding, like marketing, is as old as the concepts of ownership and selling. In former times, people branded an item simply to show who the owner was. Nowadays brands are powerful instruments of strategic marketing and long-term profitability.

Вrand is defined as ‘a name, sign, symbol or design intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers, and to differentiate them from those of a competitor’. A brand name is that part of a brand that can be spoken, including letters, words and numbers, like BMW, Danone or Citibank. A brand mark is the element of a brand that cannot be spoken, often a symbol, design or specific packaging, like the Mercedes logo or the Absolut Vodka bottle. A trademark is the legal designation indicating that the owner has exclusive use of the brand.

Brand names, as well as other brand elements such as logos, symbols, characters, spokespeople, packages should be memorable, meaningful, likable and protectable. A good brand name is easy for customers to say, spell and recall. Excellent examples are Dell, Nokia and Ford. Besides being memorable, it is an advantage that brand elements are meaningful: for example, Mr Clean (cleaning product), Vanish (stain remover), Head & Shoulders (shampoo) and Newsweek (magazine).

To build a successful global brand, the brand name should be easy to pronounce in different languages. Global brand names also have to be culture- or language-neutral in the sense that they do not evoke strange or undesirable connotations in foreign languages. Kodak, Mars and IBM are good examples of this linguistic neutrality.

Three categories of brands can be distinguished:

Manufacturer brands are developed by producers, e.g. Levi’s, Danone and BMW. Own-label brands (also called private labels, store brands) are developed and owned by wholesalers or retailers. There is no link between the manufacturer and the brand. St Michael (Marks & Spencer) and Derby (Delhaize, Belgium) are examples of store brands. Generic brands (видова марка товару) indicate the product category. Generics are in fact brandless products. They are usually sold at the lowest prices. Did you know that aspirin and linoleum were once brand names? So were nylon, escalator, kerosene and zipper. All of those names became so popular, so identified with the product, that they lost their brand status and became generic (the name of the product class). The producers then had to come up with new names. The original Aspirin, for example, became Bayer aspirin. Some companies are working hard to protect their brand names today, e.g. Xerox (don’t say ‘Xerox it’, say ‘Copy it’).

Exercise 7 Answer the following questions:

1. Why did people brand an item in former times? 2. What do brands signal in the 21^st century? 3. How is brand defined? 4. Give the definitions of a brand name, a brand mark and a trademark. 5. What brand elements do you know? 6. What is the difference between a logo, a brand, and a trademark? Think of examples of each. 7. What are the main characteristics of successful brand names? 8. Name and characterize brand categories.

Exercise 8 How many expressions with brand do you know? Match the terms in the box with their definitions.

brand awareness • brand extension • off-brand • brand identity • brand name derived brand • brand image • brand loyalty

1. What a brand is called. 2. How much people are aware of a brand. 3. What a company wants people to think about a brand. 4. What people actually think about a brand 5. When a product doesn’t fit the company’s brand. 6. When people like a brand and buy it again and again. 7. When an existing brand is used to support a new range of products. 8. When a component of a product becomes a brand in its own right (e.g. Intel in PCs).

Exercise 9 a) Read the text about counterfeiting and fake goods. Discuss these questions before reading.

1. How often do you see pirated imitations of well-known brands for sale in your country? 2. Have you ever bought something that you knew was an illegal copy?