Brand Equity, Positioning, and Marketing Strategies

Brand and Product Strategies

Brand: Name, sign, symbol, logo, or anything that identifies and differentiates a product from competitors. Brand equity: Intangible assets and liabilities linked to the brand. //Kevin Lane Keller - CBBE: The differential effect that customer brand knowledge has on their response to market activities and programs for the brand.

Product Positioning Process

• Identify relevant competitive products
• Identify attributes that customers use to differentiate among options
• Collect customer ratings of each product attribute
• Determine own product's current position versus competing offerings and highlight competitive differences - points of parity (POP) vs points of difference (POD)
• Examine fit between preferences of market segments and current product position
• Select positioning or repositioning strategy

Characteristics of a Strong Brand

1. Price Premium
2. Positive brand associations
3. Consistency between:
   • B2B, consumer, and employer brand
   • Communication channels - including the customer/employee profile
   • Offline and online
   • Over time
4. Supply-demand mechanisms
5. All stakeholders
6. Makes recruitment easier

Business Marketers Segmentations

1. Macro: Geographic, customer type, customer size, product use
2. Micro: Purchasing criteria, purchasing strategy, importance, personal characteristics

Value in use: A product's economic value to the user relative to specific alternatives in a particular application.

Turnover: A key issue with significant costs:

• Cost to hire and train new people
• Cost of lost customers
• Cost of non-performance

Market Measures

1. Timely: measured in short time periods
2. Precise: in well-functioning capital markets
3. Objective: not manipulable by the managers whose performances are being evaluated
4. Congruent: the most direct manifestation, or closest proxy, of the theoretical notion of firm value
5. Cost-effective: do not require any company measurement expense
6. Understandable: in terms of what the measures represent

Relationship and Channel Strategies

Different Types of Relationships

1. Transactions
2. Repeated transactions
3. Long-term relationships
4. Buyer-seller partnerships
5. Strategic alliances
6. Network organization
7. Vertical integration

Channel Strategy

(Selection, distribution, integration, ownership); Manage the channel: Selection, Motivation, Training, Evaluation, Managing conflicts, Coordination; Channel design should be dynamic not static: channels can be modified or completely changed over time; Channel design is a proactive activity - not a passive one.

Marketing channel: A chain or network that creates value for the end consumer. Focus is on the delivery of products/services. A firm can have several different channels.

Customer Participation

Influences the perceived service quality (both B2C and B2B). 3 levels of participation:

• Low = Customer presence required during service delivery.
• Moderate = Customer inputs required for service creation.
• High = Customer co-creates the service product.

Service Market and Business Models

Focus on the Service Market

1. Industrial services are often more profitable than goods for many manufacturing firms.
2. Traditionally not prioritized: services are seen as a necessary evil for re-purchase.
3. Improvement potential.
4. Growth potential.
5. Products can have economic lifetimes of several decades.

Service-Based Business Model

a) Products are not enough to create sustainable competitive advantage. b) Company must know what facilitates a service orientation. c) Find new market opportunities. d) Create relationships. e) Services are traditionally underdeveloped, underfinanced, and underprioritized.

Key Aspects in the Transition Towards Service

1. Develop an ability to promote and explain complex service-intensive value propositions.
2. Relationship-building competencies must be developed in all parts.
3. Identify and develop value-adding relationships with partners.
4. The supplier must be conscious of the customer's entire process.
5. Creating a service delivery infrastructure is difficult but necessary.
6. Developing new revenue mechanisms based on customer operations and profitability to capture new revenue streams.
7. Create service roles and processes.
8. Scaling up.