Marketing Information Products & Services

Chapter 9

Brands

Brand Awareness / Recognition - awareness, loyalty, quality, emotion “customers remember the brand” - your product is the first that comes to mind in a certain product category eg.  ice tea - Snapple  jeans - Levi’s,  walkman - SONY SUV - Jeep !

Brand Association - the link to favourable images, celebrities, geographic regions ie. Red Strip  - Jamaica, VW - Germany, Screech - NFLD Bailey’s - Eire

Brand Preference /  Loyalty - the degree to which customers are committed to further purchases eg. “choose the brand over other brands”
Brand Insistence - “willing to search for it..”, andif they do not find the brand they want, WILL NOT but a substitute 
Brand Equity - “… the value of a brand’s overall strength in the market …”
- from slide # 59-63 www.witiger.com/powerpoints/MRK106/  "chp9~MKTG106.ppt"

Sommers in his 10th ed p. 254
"... brand equity, one of the hottest topics in marketing in recent years"

p. 255 says
"Brand Equity is also the value a brand adds to a product from the perspective of the customer"

As for Marketing Information Products & Services, Sommers explains on page 255
"Consumers said they would pay $295 and $232 more for the IBM and Compaq brands..."

"Today, creating brand equity is about more than positioning, packaging and imagery. It involves developing a relationship with customers. Customers want brands they can trust and be happy to tell other about"
 

Online Communities

By George Weiss, Gartner analyst November 19, 2001 IBM is increasing its lead in the server market. The company has been reinventing its server business, and the results are quite positive.

Weiss explains " In late 2000, IBM consolidated its server brands into a single eServer brand. That move represented a marketing response to a marketing problem. IBM is the revenue leader in the combined RISC-Intel server market, but it ranks third in Unix and Intel servers--the two primary growth categories.

IBM comes up short in terms of brand equity compared to RISC competitors (Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard) and Intel competitors (Compaq Computer and Dell Computer). The eServer program is intended to fix that problem by shifting emphasis from independent server brands toward a stronger overall IBM brand.

The company has reorganized across server lines. Individual organizations no longer report to product-oriented executives. Rather, server development reports to a single executive, and server marketing reports to a single executive. "

Snapple can also use the online site to gather specific name and address information of loyal customers which they will use in "direct mail" campaigns

At the I AM website, people can get an email address such as joe@iam.ca or joe@onlycanadian.com or joe@canadianrocks.com 

The questionnaire which you fill out to get the free email includes the statement
"we are always trying to learn more about you and your interests in order to provide the best and relevant community for Canadian beer drinkers..."

Such customer profiling techniques were done by the American cigarette companies in the 1980's in order to develop long-term brand insistence - however it was expensive to do that then due to the amount of free merchandize you had to give away - "kewl" web sites allow this customer profiling to be less costly and you can create communities of customers that in turn create a dynamic that can be very exciting. 

. Global Millennia Marketing is a division of Internet  Merchandising Systems Inc

www.globalmilleniamarketing.com has a site on which there is a very good article by John Shenton about branding and internet products - this discussed the role that price plays in making a decision.

 "The Internet and its promise of instant profitability is potentially the biggest problem in the coming years for many businesses in the retail and  hospitality industries.

Revenue managers want to use the Internet as a distribution channel to sell more product or in the case of hotels, put more heads in beds,  yet at the same time an over reliance on the Internet could actually have the opposite affect, eroding already faltering profits. The fact is that by aggressively competing on features and price, it’s difficult for your business to create meaningful and lasting differences from your competitors. 

Your customers benefit from price wars by saving money, but also get confused when choice is confined to price. In many instances the customer is in effect buying a commodity and has no sense of brand loyalty because little is known about the company making the product or  about service after the sale.

As such, branding has never become more important, and its time your Internet pricing models need to be addressed. There is a danger of your product or hotel being perceived as a commodity. In the Internet world, if you can make your product different from a commodity you can get the pricing differentiation.

Branding should therefore be a key aspect of every business Web site, but remember your brand is not just your logo, tagline, packaging or the "look and feel" of your ads and your website. These are all graphical parts of your brand identity and are often narrowly, and incorrectly,  referred to as "branding”.  Your brand resides within the hearts and minds of your customers and prospects. It is the sum total of their  experiences and perceptions of your product, company and service, some of which you can influence, and some you cannot. "
John Shenton - November, 2002
 www.globalmilleniamarketing.com/../article_branding_on_the_internet.htm

read also  http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/%3E/articleshow/408473.cms 
interview with  Rishad Tobaccowala, President, Starcom MediaVest Group IP. He was picked by Time magazine as one of the world’s top five marketing innovators.

Part of the interview
"How different is today’s marketing communication on the Internet from the time of the dotcom boom?

There are three big differences this time. 

Firstly, this time round it’s starting off with an adult mindset where people are looking at the Internet and digital media as part of marketing; rather than hoping for it to take over all and eliminate all other forms of marketing.

Second, it’s starting off with a much larger base than five years ago. As per US statistics, 60 per cent of all households have access to the Internet, close to half of those have access to broadband Internet, and therefore, they also tend to use Internet 12-14 hours a week. 

The third difference is that people are beginning to realise that the future is going to be impacted by digital marketing. So for instance, there’s a lot of interest in personal video recorders (PVRs) like Tivo and Replay which are currently present in around 2.5 million homes in the US. But it’s all about how consumers control their television. So marketers are saying, if you want to learn how consumers are controlling media, then we should pay a lot of attention to the Internet, because that’s where they control media!"

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/%3E/articleshow/408473.cms 
interview with  Rishad Tobaccowala, President, Starcom MediaVest Group IP. He was picked by Time magazine as one of the world’s top five marketing innovators.

Part of the interview

" In which markets is the most innovative digital marketing happening?

"The most sophisticated market when it comes to broadband and Internet penetration is South Korea. If you talk about digital gaming, ie households that have a Sony Playstation or Microsoft Xbox, then those tend to be in Japan and the US. When it comes down to telephone-based digital marketing, then it’s Scandinavian countries, some parts of Europe and Japan. When it come to digital music, then it’s the US and what we anticipate is that with digital TV, it will again be the US and the UK. We expect that with everything that’s built around broadband or the internet, India will catch up very fast. Even when it comes to digital music, India will catch up fast because it’s computer-based and connected to the internet, and digital video recorders will come in here in a big way. "

"A trademark is a word, combination of words, design, logo, or symbol that identifies to  consumers the source of goods. That is, tangible goods or things that you can touch. 

 A service mark is essentially the same thing as a trademark, but it identifies non-tangible services, for example, legal, accounting, and design. 

A trade name is the actual name of the provider of the goods and/or services. 

A mark is the word we lawyers use, mostly because we usually do not need to distinguish between trademarks and service marks. 

 (R) is the symbol for a registered trademark or service mark. Under US  and Canadian law, you may  only use this symbol if you have a  registration for the mark. 

TM is a symbol that is frequently used with marks to indicate that the owner believes  the word, symbol, or phrase is a trademark. There is really no legal import to this  symbol, but it is a useful deterrent. 

SM is same as TM, but it is used with service marks. Few mark owners make this distinction because relatively few people know what these terms mean. "
 

• Informing 
• Persuading 
"words tell, pictures sell" page 286 on the Sommers text
- moving downloadable colour pictures, sell a lot
                                                                       WTGR
• Reminding 

• Mass Selling
• Advertising [paid promotional activities]
• Publicity [non-paid promotional activities]
• Personal Selling
• Sales account executives selling products/services to business
• direct contact with the customer
• Sales Promotion
• brand managers working with retailers to merchandise the product
• contests, coupons, reward programs

"To be successful in attracting traffic, using a good domain name and brand building, you need to be more effective at hearing what the customer wants."

WTGR

These techniques seek to obtain your mailing address and email address to send advertising material directly to you - however, as we discussed in class, there are problems with this that have to do with violations of privacy - of which we talk further about in the next section.

• Mass Selling (Advertising & Publicity)
• Personal Selling
• Sales Promotion