Unit 1 BRANDS

1. What is branding and why do we need brands?

The word “branding” is one of the most frequent in speech of the leaders of marketing. A brand is a product with unique, consistent and easily recognizable character. For example, we all recognize the Coca-Cola brand, not only by its logo but by the shape of its bottles, the colour of its cans, the taste of the product and other features. The uniqueness of a brand comes from its physical characteristics (e.g. the taste and unique ingredients of Coca-Cola), plus its image (i.e. its logo, advertising, etc.) – which are usually created by the manufacturer through advertising and packaging.

A brand takes the form of a symbolic construct created by a marketer to represent a collection of information about a product or group of products. This symbolic construct typically consists of a name, identifying mark, logo, visual images or symbols, or mental concepts, which distinguishes the product or service. A brand often carries connotations of a product's "promise", the product or service’s point of difference among its competitors which makes it special and unique.

2. Types of brands. What for do we need new brands?

Brand is a trademark, which volumes of sales constantly increase during some years, when consumer is ready to pay additional money, being sure of exclusive quality of the goods. More than ninety percent of domestic producers releasing a new trademark in the market hope that it will certainly become Brand. However trademark becomes brand after several years of successful stay in the market. The short ways of creating a brand are absent. Making the trademark begins, as a rule, with marketing studies, which is recognized to realize, if the goods are in great demand in the market and what their real prospects are. It is difficult to be sure that the trademark will become the brand if the producer does not present the real position of the deals in the market. One can become the owner of the trademark following two ways: to create it or buy it that sometimes means “to swallow up” the company – the owner of the mark.

3. What do you know about the history of brands?

Brands originated with the 19th-century advent of packaged goods. Industrialization moved the production of many household items, such as soap, from local communities to centralized factories. These factories, cursed with mass-produced goods, needed to sell their products in a wider market, to a customer base familiar only with local goods. It quickly became apparent that a generic package of soap had difficulty competing with familiar, local products. The packaged goods manufacturers needed to convince the market that the public could place just as much trust in the non-local product.

Many brands of that era, such as Uncle Ben's rice and Kellogg's breakfast cereal furnish illustrations of the problem. The manufacturers wanted their products to appear and feel as familiar as the local farmers' produce. From there, with the help of advertising, manufacturers quickly learned to associate other kinds of brand values, such as youthfulness, fun or luxury, with their products. This kick-start of the practice we now know as "branding".