Brands, brand names

Brands are names, terms, designs, signs, symbols or some combination that identify a firm’s PRODUCTs. Brands facilitate easy recognition of a company’s products and increase consumer loyalty through repeat purchase. According to MARKET RESEARCH, consumers’ brand loyalty goes through three stages: recognition, preference, and insistence.

A marketer’s first objective is to gain brand recogni­tion—that is, consumer knowledge of a company’s brand. In ADVERTISING, marketers typically have three objectives: to inform, persuade, and remind consumers about the company’s products. Brand recognition is consistent with informing customers about a brand. Gaining brand recog­nition in a national market like the United States is expen­sive. With a large geographic area, over 280 million people, and tremendous COMPETITION from other firms, marketers have to work hard to gain brand recognition. One option used by several small firms is advertising dur­ing the Super Bowl, the most widely watched television event in the United States. Super Bowl advertising is very expensive, but several small firms have successfully used it as a way to gain national brand recognition.

Brand preference is the stage where consumers select a particular brand over competing offerings. Typically brand preference is based on past experiences with a firm’s prod­ucts. In many categories of consumer products, customers tend to be very brand-loyal. Often brand loyalty is based on what peoples’ parents purchased. For decades Sears’s strongest MARKETING STRATEGY was brand preference and insistence based on consumers’ past experiences with their tools and appliances.

Brand insistence is brand loyalty to the point where consumers refuse alternatives and seek out brands they most desire. Airlines and, more recently, hotel chains have successfully built brand loyalty through frequent-flyer/stay programs.

There are four types of brands: manufacturers, private, family, and individual. Manufacturers’ brands, also called national brands, are those owned by the manufacturer. General Motors, Kodak, and Coca-Cola are all examples of national brands. Manufacturers protect and support their brands, often using price competition with private brands and cooperative advertising and promotion with retailers to maintain and expand brand loyalty. Private brands are brand names created and marketed by WHOLESALERs and retailers. For example, Sears owns the Kenmore, Craftsman, and DieHard brand names. Sears contracts with manufacturers to make products to be sold under these private names. Traditionally manufacturers dominated brand marketing, but since World War II, retailers have greatly increased their control of DISTRIBU­TION CHANNELs and have used this market power to expand their use of private brands.

A family brand is a single brand name used to identify a group of related products. For example, Johnson & John­son offers a variety of product lines all under one brand name. Many companies market a variety of individual brands. Proctor and Gamble’s Tide is one of the longest-lasting individual brand names in cleaning products, and Crest Toothpaste is a leading brand in health products.

As previously noted, the goal of brands and brand names is to increase consumer loyalty. Marketers refer to this as gaining brand equity, which means DEMAND for a firm’s product is less elastic. Loyal consumers are more likely to continue to purchase a product even when the price is raised. Brand equity makes it infinitely easier for a firm to introduce new products, since most consumers who have had a positive experience with a company’s products are more likely to try new product offerings from that firm.

Marketers know developing effective brand equity is difficult and usually expensive. New brand names gener­ally should be easy to pronounce, recognize, and remem­ber. A brand name should also be consistent with the image a company wants to convey: status, safety, or confi­dence. TRADEMARKs are brands and brand names owned by a company.