Managing Successful Brands: An Empirical Study which Compares the Corporate Cultures of Companies Managing the World's Top 100 Brands with Those Managing Outsider Brands.

Corporate culture can be a significant, strategic factor in the successful management of brands. Through a comparative research survey into the World's Top 100 brand companies and those outside this category (Outsider brand companies), this article explores whether the corporate cultures of the Top 100 brand companies are different from those of Outsider brand companies.

Most of the significant differences were found in the consumer goods sector, traditionally associated with strong brands. Top 100 managers were found to be more at ease with themselves and their companies than managers of Outsider brands. They were also better able to handle conflict through corporate cultures which emphasised open discussion, (even argument). Significantly, the research found that the corporate cultures of Top 100 brand companies were perceived as 'stronger' than those of Outsider brands, and, though not necessarily a success factor in itself, when linked to values, beliefs and behaviours such as those identified in this paper, were associated with successful brands.     

Brand Management Through Narrowing the Gap Between Brand Identity and Brand Reputation

Classical models of brand management pay insufficient attention to staff as brand builders, placing more emphasis on external issues such as image. This paper explores the significant contribution from employees and considers the need to align their values and behaviours with the brand's desired values. It clarifies the importance of culture in brand building and discusses how an adaptive, strategically appropriate culture, consistently apparent throughout an organisation is likely to be associated with healthy brand performance. A model is proposed, suggesting that stronger brands result from a homogeneous brand identity, with congruent identity components. It argues that reputation is a more appropriate external assessment of a brand than image. By auditing the gaps between brand identity and brand reputation, managers can identify strategies to minimize incongruency and develop more powerful brands. It is concluded that brand reality is an important aspect of branding.     

How focused identities can help brands navigate a changing media landscape

In today's rapidly changing and fast-paced media landscape, consumer attention is a rare and fractured commodity. Within this environment, marketing and branding must serve customers who are attending to multiple media simultaneously, while brand placement moves brands outside of advertisements and into incidental exposure. Some brands offer a strong, consistent, and focused brand identity on all consumer-facing fronts, from advertising to event promotion and retail environments. These brands can retain their effectiveness in this new media reality, as mere exposure is all that's required to activate their rich brand identity. At the same time, brand exposure effects illuminate the vast role of nonconscious attention and processing in consumer cognition and behavior. New research shows that even incidental exposure to a brand can alter consumer behavior in manners consistent with brand identity, producing effects which may persist outside of marketing contexts and occur even when the product is not purchased or consumed. These findings suggest that strong brand identities can retain effectiveness in the modern media environment, but further work is needed to explore their multi-dimensional effects on consumer life.     

Brand Management Paradigms

The present article is concerned with the identification and analysis of current approaches toward brand management. Four paradigms are introduced that cluster disparate assumptions and processes of conceptualising and managing brands. An organization's dominant paradigm determines its understanding of brands, the process and content of brand strategy and, consequently, their potential contribution to competitive advantage. The increasing recognition, by both managers and academics, of the significance of brands as sources of sustained competitive advantage accentuates the importance of validating and refining the premises and models underlying organizations' brand strategies.     

Message on a bottle: packaging the Great Russian past

This paper employs a visual research method to examine how companies in post-socialist Russia use packaging to construct their brand identity. We analyse the packaging of two product categories in particular, namely chocolate and vodka, and show how packaging is exploited to generate certain types of myths, both about the brand itself and – crucially – about Russia and Russianness. As we show, a large number of brands in Russia build their identity around images associated in one way or another with the country's past. They do so primarily via packaging design. The paper's main contribution lies in the fact that it extends the pioneering work on packaging by Kniazeva and Belk into historical, visual and non-Western areas. In the light of our findings, greater attention needs to be paid both to the role packaging plays in branding and to the socio-historical context in which that branding is itself conducted.     

Tweet this,not that: A comparison between brand promotions in microblogging environments using celebrity and company-generated tweets

Despite the popularity of social media in general and Twitter specifically, little empirical research exists to assist marketers in how to successfully connect with consumers in these environments. The purpose of this study was to identify the ways in which brands can connect with consumers through Twitter and to examine how the category of Tweet impacts brand engagement. Findings reveal that whereas celebrity Tweets may be successful at capturing attention and disseminating brand information, they have minimal impact on changing brand opinions. What influence celebrities do have may be best served with unfamiliar brands rather than familiar ones – results suggest that not unlike in traditional offline media, in social media celebrities may be influential in drawing attention to unfamiliar brands. Our results also suggest that companies with established familiar brands should be cautious about paying to seed their own Tweets using Twitter's ‘Promoted by’ option, particularly if the brand is one that consumers have a neutral opinion of, as this can lower consumers' opinion of the brand. Instead, these companies should encourage consumers to follow them on Twitter as this will enable the brand to interact directly with consumers.     

About the authors

This paper has the implicit theme that there are changes afoot in both the marketing and accounting professions. Explicitly, how changes in the accounting area may affect marketing people is explored. The particular focus is brands, especially their capitalization in the balance sheet of some companies. The controversy around this practice is discussed, and suggestions for the possible impact on marketing outlined. Many companies are already reviewing the way that they manage their brands, and some are. restructuring accordingly. This may be the beginning of many such changes.

The brand valuation and capitalization debate is reviewed from the late 1980s to date. The Accounting Standards Board (ASB) has now released Financial Reporting Standards that relate to the discussion, but do not, as one might hope, conclude it. The standards deal with intangible assets generally, rather than brands specifically. Hence the treatment of brands remains ambiguous and open to interpretation.

Financial reporting systems, which still seem to focus brands as short‐term propositions, are far removed from the way that many marketers and some accountants believe brands should be managed. Therefore, it is concluded to be unlikely that these ASB pronouncements will have created a new order.     

Bridging the online offline gap: Assessing the impact of brands’ social network content quality on brand awareness and purchase intention

Social media is shaping the way companies and brands engage and interact with consumers, particularly Millennials. In light of this growing trend, this study aims to understand the influence of content quality and brand interactivity within social media on consumers' brand awareness and purchase intentions by proposing an empirical model which is tested using structural equation modeling. The study also explores whether the relation between social media stimuli and offline purchase intention is mediated by hedonic motivation, consumer engagement and brand awareness. Results reveal that the quality of content provided by brands on social media and company-users' interactivity are of major importance to Millennials. They increase the hedonic motive derived by these users from social media, strengthen their online engagement and intensify their brand awareness. This heightened online consumer engagement coupled with an increased online consumer brand awareness leads to an increase in the purchase intention of these brands offline. Consequently, companies are encouraged to invest in producing high-quality content on their social media pages, deploy all possible strategies to enhance brand users’ interactivity given the important role these variables play in entertaining, engaging users online, building brand awareness and influencing their offline purchase intentions.     

Conceptualizing the Roles of Founder Personality Traits in Startups' Construction of Brand Identity

Founder personality traits (FPT's in short) play unique roles in a start-up organization's brand identity construction (BIC in short) and hence merit more research attention (Miller 2015). Here, startup FPT's are theorized to play three different roles that give rise to three different startup brand identities because of start-ups' BIC.

The first role played by startup FPT's is an indirect one that gives rise to a startup brand identity called a sticky identity. In order to build the sticky identity, we propose that startups focus on innovative product features regardless of FPT. The second role played by startup FPT's is a long-term-oriented direct one that gives rise to a startup identity called a static identity. In order to build the static identity we propose that startups with joiner-cultured FPT's focus on long-term gains such as loyalty. The third role played by startup FPT's is a short-term-oriented direct one that gives rise to a startup identity called a fluid identity. In order to build the fluid identity we propose that startups with non-joiner cultured FPT's focus on short-term gains such as transient, sporadic, but profitable transactions.     

Going to great lengths in the pursuit of luxury: How longer brand names can enhance the luxury perception of a brand

Brand names are a crucial part of the brand equity and marketing strategy of any company. Research suggests that companies spend considerable time and money to create suitable names for their brands and products. This paper uses the Zipf's law (or Principle of Least Effort) to analyze the perceived luxuriousness of brand names. One of the most robust laws in linguistics, Zipf's law describes the inverse relationship between a word's length and its frequency i.e., the more frequently a word is used in language, the shorter it tends to be. Zipf's law has been applied to many fields of science and in this paper, we provide evidence for the idea that because polysyllabic words (and brand names) are rare in everyday conversation, they are considered as more complex, distant, and abstract and that the use of longer brand names can enhance the perception of how luxurious a brand is (compared with shorter brand names, which are considered to be close, frequent, and concrete to consumers). Our results suggest that shorter names (mono‐syllabic) are better suited to basic brands whereas longer names (tri‐syllabic or more) are more appropriate for luxury brands.     

Built-In Branding: How to Engineer a Leadership Brand

Everyone has experienced some sort of brand disappointment: the 'I didn't expect that from X' feeling. This failure of branding is a thorn in the flesh of marketing departments; often the problem is beyond their control and often it causes one of the most memorable - and most negative - experiences people have of their brand. In this article we will discuss the ways in which companies can engineer the delivery of their brands so as to reduce this risk and create enduring value.

This paper is concerned with the how: the way in which leadership brands bring their uniqueness to life to remain coherent and distinctive in all that they do. In order to grow leadership brands, we must understand how they are built into the organisation.     

A brand preference and repurchase intention model: the role of consumer experience

Consumer brand preference is an essential step towards understanding consumer choice behaviour, and has therefore always received great attention from marketers. However, the study of brand preference has been limited to traditional marketing focusing on functional attributes to maximise utility. But now the shift to experiential marketing broadens the role of the brand from a bundle of attributes to experiences. Technological advancements have helped to increase the similarities between brand attributes and product commoditisation. Consequently, consumers cannot shape their preferences among brands using rational attributes only. They seek out brands that create experiences; that intrigue them in a sensorial, emotional and creative way. This study seeks to develop a model that provides an understanding of how brand knowledge and brand experience determine brand preference and to investigate its impact on brand repurchase intention. Accordingly, exploratory focus group discussions are employed followed by a survey of mobile phone users in Egypt. The findings provide insights into the relative importance of consumer perceptions on different brand knowledge factors in shaping brand preferences. It also demonstrates the significance of consumers’ experiential responses towards brands in developing their brand preferences that in turn influence brand repurchase intention. The model therefore offers managers a new perspective for building strong brands able to gain consumer preferences.     

Value-oriented brand positioning

The objective of brand positioning is to place a brand that is clearly distinguishable from competitors' brands on the market. The principal aim is to ensure that the brand occupies a unique position on the market and that it is endowed with a precisely defined profile with clear-cut contours. The basic idea underlying this analysis is that consumers' perceptions of the various brands can be conceived as a multidimensional space in which individual brands are positioned. A product's positioning is determined from its position on the relevant dimensions of the perceptual space, its position on the various product attribute vectors and its position with respect to other brands. This paper uses correspondence analysis to reconstruct a space, in order to connect the relevant brand attributes with the drivers of behaviour, such as utility components and individual values. An empirical investigation shows the usefulness of this approach for product and advertising policy.     

The process of de-iconisation of an iconic brand: a genealogical approach

Brand iconisation refers to the way a brand comes to symbolise the values, needs, and aspirations of the members of a particular cultural group. More than a decade of research has emphasised the many benefits that iconic brands bring to companies and has identified how brands become icons through a process of matching with cultural opportunities emerging in society. However, the way an iconic brand comes to be de-iconicised and how managers can shield brands from this risk is still under-researched. The aim of this paper is to contribute to knowledge regarding iconic brands by following the life of one iconic brand at national level, examining its history and its impact from the point of view of cultural performance.

Our research contributes to the field of cultural branding through a genealogical study of how a brand becomes a national icon before becoming de-iconicised as circumstances change. Our research identifies five types of brand episode that can lead to de-iconisation. Our research therefore adds new developments to iconic brand theory. It also contributes to discussing the concept of iconic brand resilience, mainly through the role of cultural intermediaries, such as filmmakers.     

Enhancing brand coolness through perceived luxury values: Insight from luxury fashion brands

Consumers of luxury brands have been described as seekers of products that can offer a signaling value to present to others but also a value for their self-concepts in an existentialist spirit potentially linked to being “cool or not.” Prior studies have conceptualized brand coolness and evaluated its impact on consumer responses to brands. However, few studies have contextualized the construct of brand coolness concerning luxury brand realism. We assessed the semiotic tension that luxury brand consumers feel between self-concept and self-presentation to others via a theoretical consideration of four antecedents of brand coolness: individual, social, financial, and functional luxury values; and one intentional outcome such as consumers' passionate desire to use luxury fashion brands. Our findings indicated that luxury values positively influence brand coolness, and brand coolness positively influences passionate desire. We further confirmed that brand coolness plays a complementary mediating role between luxury values and passionate desire. A final contribution is to invite brand managers to consider how luxury values and brand coolness might be used proactively to drive consumers' passionate desires in the relationships with luxury fashion brands.     

Commentary on learning to talk like an (urban) woodsman: an artistic intervention

Rebekah Modrak's Learning to Talk like an (Urban) Woodsman: An Artistic Intervention project presents an artistic critique of the Best Made Co. lifestyle “axe” brand. The article and the Re Made Co. “plunger” art piece it describes engage directly with issues discussed by brand researchers and other scholars, such as the strategic use of appealing design and product aesthetics, the sign value of brands, and the creation of brand identity and cultural codes based upon the performance of an idealized, historicized and gendered mythology. The artwork itself, the reactions to the Re Made Co. project and the artist's reflections, all add to the interdisciplinary exploration of brands, brand culture and meaning.     

Political branding: sense of identity or identity crisis? An investigation of the transfer potential of the brand identity prism to the UK Conservative Party

Abstract

Brands are strategic assets and key to achieving a competitive advantage. Brands can be seen as a heuristic device, encapsulating a series of values that enable the consumer to make quick and efficient choices. More recently, the notion of a political brand and the rhetoric of branding have been widely adopted by many political parties as they seek to differentiate themselves, and this has led to an emerging interest in the idea of the political brand. Therefore, this paper examines the UK Conservative Party brand under David Cameron’s leadership and examines the applicability of Kapferer’s brand identity prism to political branding. This paper extends and operationalises the brand identity prism into a ‘political brand identity network’ which identifies the inter-relatedness of the components of the corporate political brand and the candidate political brand. Crucial for practitioners, this model can demonstrate how the brand is presented and communicated to the electorate and serves as a useful mechanism to identify consistency within the corporate and candidate political brands.     

Follow my leader? Lookalike retailer brands in non-manufacturer-dominated product markets in the UK

Retailer brands are a common feature of most retail sectors today, and have made an important contribution to the financial performance of Britain's retailers. Over the past two decades, as retailers have adopted the marketing approach in their business activities, the nature and role of retailer brands in marketing strategies has changed. This paper reviews the development of retailer brands in the grocery market, from their original position as product alternatives to leading manufacturer brands, to brand alternatives in their own right. Part of this transformation has involved a revision of the packaging and presentation of these product ranges and this has led to accusations of copy-catting and theft of brand identity. The paper then explores the lookalike debate and reports on an exploratory study of retail brand recognition and the lookalike situation in those product markets which are not dominated by established manufacturer brands.     

Branding and design management: a brand design management model

As brands have become one of firms' most valuable assets, the search for new ways to build brands that achieve a differentiated status in the minds of customers has become of central importance for companies. If design is guided by the brand, it can serve as the cohesive factor for all elements that configure a brand experience and represent an unequivocal source of differentiation. 37 owners and/or top managers of 28 Spanish companies acclaimed for their design were interviewed in order to build a model that integrates branding and design management. The resulting model integrates the innovation process with different kinds of design, in order to build consistent brand experiences.