Brands-building a brand

What factors are important in building brand value?

Professor David Jobber identifies seven main factors in building successful brands, as illustrated
in the diagram below:

Quality

Quality is a vital ingredient of a good brand. Remember the “core benefits” – the things
consumers expect. These must be delivered well, consistently. The branded washing machine
that leaks, or the training shoe that often falls apart when wet will never develop brand equity.

Research confirms that, statistically, higher quality brands achieve a higher market share and
higher profitability that their inferior competitors.

Positioning

Positioning is about the position a brand occupies in a market in the minds of consumers. Strong
brands have a clear, often unique position in the target market.
Positioning can be achieved through several means, including brand name, image, service
standards, product guarantees, packaging and the way in which it is delivered. In fact, successful
positioning usually requires a combination of these things.

Repositioning

Repositioning occurs when a brand tries to change its market position to reflect a change in
consumer’s tastes. This is often required when a brand has become tired, perhaps because its
original market has matured or has gone into decline.

The repositioning of the Lucozade brand from a sweet drink for children to a leading sports drink
is one example. Another would be the changing styles of entertainers with above-average
longevity such as Kylie Minogue and Cliff Richard.

Communications

Communications also play a key role in building a successful brand. We suggested that brand
positioning is essentially about customer perceptions – with the objective to build a clearly
defined position in the minds of the target audience.

All elements of the promotional mix need to be used to develop and sustain customer
perceptions. Initially, the challenge is to build awareness, then to develop the brand personality
and reinforce the perception.

First-mover advantage

Business strategists often talk about first-mover advantage. In terms of brand development, by
“first-mover” they mean that it is possible for the first successful brand in a market to create a
clear positioning in the minds of target customers before the competition enters the market.
There is plenty of evidence to support this.

Think of some leading consumer product brands like Gillette, Coca Cola and Sellotape that, in
many ways, defined the markets they operate in and continue to lead. However, being first into a
market does not necessarily guarantee long-term success. Competitors – drawn to the high
growth and profit potential demonstrated by the “market-mover” – will enter the market and
copy the best elements of the leader’s brand (a good example is the way that Body Shop
developed the “ethical” personal care market but were soon facing stiff competition from the
major high street cosmetics retailers.

Long-term perspective

This leads onto another important factor in brand-building: the need to invest in the brand over
the long-term. Building customer awareness, communicating the brand’s message and creating
customer loyalty takes time. This means that management must “invest” in a brand, perhaps at
the expense of short-term profitability.
Internal marketing

Finally, management should ensure that the brand is marketed “internally” as well as externally.
By this we mean that the whole business should understand the brand values and positioning.
This is particularly important in service businesses where a critical part of the brand value is the
type and quality of service that a customer receives.

Think of the brands that you value in the restaurant, hotel and retail sectors. It is likely that your
favourite brands invest heavily in staff training so that the face-to-face contact that you have with
the brand helps secure your loyalty.

Nokia - Building A Powerful Technology Brand

The world of parity has hit the mobile phone market just as it has many other technology product
categories. The products range from the simple to the complex, but every manufacturer offers, of
course, the latest features. Leapfrogging in sales between brands frequently occurs based on
design. But overall the market is predictable, with Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson fighting it out
at the top and several less successful brands like Samsung, Philips, Siemensand Panasonic trying
hard to make inroads into their top competitors' market share. So what makes the difference
between the most successful and less successful brands? It certainly is not what product features
are offered. How, then, do consumers choose? The answer seems to be what the brand names
mean to them.

Nokia Group the Finland-based manufacturer of mobile phones, has been steadily working on its
corporate brand name and the management of consumer perceptions over the last few years. Its
efforts have paid off, because it is now the number one brand in many markets around the world,
effectively dislodging Motorola from that position. The brand has been built using the principles
described above, and has been consistently well managed across all markets. Nokia has
succeeded in lending personality to its products, without even giving them names. In other
words, it has not created any sub-brands but has concentrated on the corporate brand, giving
individual products a generic brand personality. Only numeric descriptors are used for the
products, which do not even appear on the product themselves. Such is the strength of the
corporate brand.

Nokia has suceeded where other big brand names have so far failed, chiefly by putting across the
human face technology-taking and dominating the emotional high ground. It has done so in the
following way.

Nokia Brand Personality

Nokia has detailed many personality characteristics for its brand, but employees do not have to
remember every characteristic. They do, however, have to remember the overall impression of
the list of attributes, as you would when thinking about someone you have met. As the focus is
on customer relationships, the Nokia personality is like a trusted friend. Building friendship and
trust is at the heart of the Nokia brand. And the human dimension created by the brand
personality carries over into the positioning strategy for the brand.

Nokia Positioning

When Nokia positions its brand in the crowded mobile phone marketplace, its message must
clearly bring together the technology and human side of its offer in a powerful way. The specific
message that is conveyed to consumers in every advertisement and market communication
(though not necessarily in these words) is "Only Nokia Human Technolgy enables you to get
more out of life"

In many cases, this is represented by the tag line, "We call this human technology". This gives
consumers a sense of trust and consideration by the company, as though to say that Nokia
understand what they want in life, and how it can help. And it knows that technology is really
only an enabler so that you-the customer-can enjoy a better life. Nokia thus uses a combination
of aspirational, benefit-based, emotional features, and competition-driven positioning strategies.
It owns the "human" dimension of mobile communications, leaving its competitors wondering
what to own (or how to position themselves), having taken the best position for itself.

Nokia Product Design

Nokia is a great brand because it knows that the essence of the brand needs to be reflected in
everything the company does, especially those that impact the consumer. Product design is
clearly critical to the success of the brand, but how does Nokia manage to inject personality into
product design? The answer is that it gives a great deal of thought to how the user of its phones
will experience the brand, and how it can make that experience reflect its brand character. The
large display screen, for example, is the "face" of the phone. Nokia designers describe it as the
"eye into the soul of the product". The shape of phones is curvy and easy to hold. The faceplates
and their different colors can be changed to fit the personality, lifestyle, and mood of the user.
The soft key touch pads also add to the feeling of friendliness, expressing the brand personality.
Product design focuses on the consumer and his needs, and is summed up in the slogan, "human
technology."

Nokia now accounts for over half of the value of the Finland stock market, and has taken huge
market share from its competitiors. According to one brand valuation study carried out in mid-
1999, it ranked 11th on the world's most valuable brand list, making it the highest-ranking non-
U.S. brand. As has been pointed out, it has unseated Motorola. Nokia achieved its brilliant feat
through consistent branding, backed by first-class logistics and manufacturing, all of which
revolve around what consumers what.