Text 10: branding

A brand is a name, symbol, or design (or a combination of them) that identifies the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and distinguishes them from those of competitors. The term brand is sufficiently comprehensive to include practically all means of identification of a product except perhaps the package and its shape. A brand name is that part of the brand consisting оf a word, letter, or group of words or letters comprising a name that differentiates the goods or services of a seller from those оf competitors. Brand names you may be familiar with include Sony, Del Monte and so on. Such brand names give products a distinction that tends to make them attractive to consumers.

A trademark is a brand that has been given legal protection. It includes the brand name and pictorial design.

To measure the importance of brand in our society, you might try the following experiment. Find a group of beer drinkers who say they greatly prefer one brand of beer and dislike another brand. Pour the brand they do not like into an empty bottle of the favoured brand and serve it to them. Ask them how they like it. Most will say it tastes great, because the name the bottle has a direct effect on the perceived taste. If they believe they are drinking their favourite beer, other brands will probably taste good to them. People's perceptions of a product's taste, value, and attractiveness are determined by preconceived notions that are partially maintained by branding. That is, if people expect something to be good, it usually is perceived as good. And if they expect something to be bad, it usually is perceived to be bad.

People are often impressed by certain brand names, even though they say they know there is no difference between brands in a given product category.

Text 11: brand categories

Several categories of brands are familiar to you. National brand names are the brand names of national manufacturers. They include well-known names such as Xerox, Polaroid, Kodak, Sony, and Chevrolet.

Private brands are names given to products by distributors or retailers. Well-known names include Kenmore and Dichard (Sears). These brands are also known as "house" brands or "distributor brands.

What many manufactures fear is having their brand names become generic names. A generic name is the name for a product category. 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 that are working hard to protect their brand names today include Xerox (don't say "Xerox it", say "Copy it") and Styrofoam.

Some products are popular today because they don't have brand names. They are called generic products because they are called by the name of the product class. There are generic tissues, generic cigarettes, generic peaches, and so forth. All it says on the label of the can is "Peaches", no brand name. These products sell for less because they do not have to support heavy advertising and promotion budgets. Do you buy generic toothpaste? Generic mouthwash? Why or why not?