Brand Management Essentials: Building & Sustaining Equity

Posted on Sep 19, 2025 in Marketing

Brand Fundamentals

AMA Brand Definition

A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competition.

Alina Wheeler’s Brand Definition

A brand is the promise, the big idea, and the expectations that reside in each customer’s mind about a product, service, or company.

Key Brand Elements

Different components that identify and differentiate a brand. Elements include:

  • Name
  • Logo
  • Symbol
  • Package design

These can be based on people, places, things, or abstract images.

Understanding Products

A product is anything we can offer to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that might satisfy a need or want.

Five Product Meaning Levels

  1. Core Benefit Level: The fundamental need or want that consumers satisfy by consuming the product or service.
  2. Generic Product Level: The basic version of the product containing only those attributes or characteristics absolutely necessary for its functioning, but with no distinguishing features.
  3. Expected Product Level: The set of attributes or characteristics that buyers normally expect and agree to when purchasing a product.
  4. Augmented Product Level: Includes additional product attributes, benefits, or related services that distinguish the product from competitors.
  5. Potential Product Level: All the augmentations and transformations a product might ultimately undergo in the future.

Brand Equity Explained

Brand equity is the tool to interpret the potential effects of various brand strategies, used to measure the value of brands.

Strategic Brand Management

It involves the design and implementation of marketing programs and activities to build, measure, and manage brand equity.

1. Brand Planning & Development

What the brand is to represent and how it should be positioned with respect to competitors.

Brand Positioning Model

Describes how to guide integrated marketing to maximize competitive advantages.

Brand Resonance Model

Describes how to create intense, active loyalty relationships with customers.

Brand Value Chain

A means to trace the value creation process for brands, to better understand the financial impact of brand marketing expenditures and investments.

2. Marketing Program Implementation

Positioning the brand in the minds of customers and achieving as much brand resonance as possible. It depends on three factors:

  1. Initial choices of the brand elements making up the brands and how they are mixed and matched.
  2. The marketing activities and supporting marketing programs, and the way marketing is integrated into them.
  3. Other associations indirectly transferred to or leveraged by the brand as a result of linking it to some other entity (such as the company, country of origin, channel of distribution, or another brand).

3. Measuring Brand Performance

Brand Audit

An examination of a brand to assess its health, uncover its sources of equity, and suggest ways to improve and leverage that equity.

Brand Tracking

Collects information from consumers on a routine basis over time, on a number of key dimensions marketers can identify in the brand audit or through other means.

Brand Equity Management System

A set of organizational processes designed to improve the understanding and use of the brand equity concept within a firm.

4. Sustaining Brand Equity

Brand Architecture

Provides general guidelines about its branding strategy and which brand elements to apply across all the different products sold by the firm.

Brand Portfolio

A set of different brands that a particular firm offers for sale to buyers in a particular category.

Brand Expansions

Strategies for extending a brand’s reach.

Brand Value Chain Stages

Stage 1 – Marketing Program Investments

Any marketing program investment that can contribute to brand value development:

  • Product research and development
  • Trade support
  • Marketing communications
  • Employee training

Program Quality Multiplier (DRIVE)

Key considerations for affecting consumers’ mindset:

  • Distinctiveness
  • Relevance
  • Integrated
  • Value
  • Excellence

Stage 2 – Customer Mindset

In what ways have customers been changed as a result of the marketing program? How have those changes manifested themselves in the customer mindset?

  • Brand awareness
  • Brand associations
  • Brand attitudes
  • Brand attachments
  • Brand activity

Marketplace Conditions Multiplier

The extent to which value created in the minds of customers affects market performance depends on factors beyond the individual customer:

  • Competitive reactions: How effective are the marketing investments of competing brands?
  • Channel support: How much brand reinforcement and selling effort is being put forth by various marketing partners?
  • Customer size and profile: How many and what types of customers are attracted to the brand?

Stage 3 – Market Performance

Customer mindset affects customer reaction in the marketplace in terms of:

  • Price premiums
  • Price elasticities
  • Market share
  • Success of brand expansions
  • Reducing cost structure

These five outcomes lead to brand profitability.

Investor Sentiment Multiplier

Investors consider a host of factors for their brand valuations and investment decisions:

  • Market dynamics
  • Growth potential
  • Risk profile
  • Brand contribution

Stage 4 – Shareholder Value

The financial marketplace formulates assessments, based on all available current and forecasted information, that have a very direct financial implication for the brand value:

  • Stock price
  • Overall market capitalization

Strong brands deliver greater returns for stockholders.

Brand Value Chain Implications

Stages will be of greater interest to different members of the organization:

  • Brand Marketing Managers (BMM) focus on Customer Mindset.
  • Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) focus on Market Performance.
  • Chief Executive Officers (CEO) focus on Shareholder Value.

Sources of Brand Equity

1. Brand Awareness

Brand Recognition

The ability to recognize prior exposure to the brand when given the brand as a cue and the ability to recognize the brand in the store.

Brand Recall

The ability to retrieve the brand from memory when given the product category, a purchase, or usage situation as a cue.

Advantages of Brand Awareness

  • Learning advantages: Register the brand in the minds of consumers.
  • Consideration advantages: Likelihood that the brand will be a member of the consideration set.
  • Choice advantages: Affect choices among brands in the consideration set.

Target Market & Segmentation

Defining a Market

A set of all actual and potential buyers who have sufficient interest, income, and access to a product.

Market Segmentation

Divides the market into distinct groups of homogeneous consumers who have similar needs and consumer behavior (and thus respond to the same marketing mix). Requires a trade-off between personalization vs. cost.

Basic Criteria for Brand Segmentation

  • Identifiability: Can we identify the segment?
  • Size: Is there sales potential in the segment?
  • Accessibility: Can we reach this segment?
  • Responsiveness: Will the segment respond to our marketing program?

Points-of-Difference (PODs)

Attributes or benefits that consumers strongly associate with the brand, evaluate positively, and strongly believe they could not find elsewhere. Two types:

  • Functional/performance-related considerations
  • Abstract, imagery-related considerations

The benefits should be backed up with proof points, also called Reasons to Believe (RTBs). RTBs can come in many forms:

  • Functional design
  • Key ingredients
  • Key endorsements

They are essential to consolidate the PODs.

Points-of-Parity (POPs)

Three kinds of POPs:

  • Category POP: Attributes that you expect from the product category.
  • Competitive POP: Attributes shared with competitors, aiming to neutralize their points-of-difference.
  • Correlation POP: Potentially negative associations that arise from positive associations.

Crafting a Brand Mantra

A short, three- to five-word phrase that captures the essence or spirit of the brand positioning. Similar to brand essence or core brand promise.

  • Communicate: Define the category of the business to set the brand boundaries and clarify what is unique about the brand.
  • Simplify: Be simple and memorable.
  • Inspire: Stake out ground that is personally meaningful and relevant to as many employees as possible.

Building Brand Resonance

Brand Salience

To achieve the right brand identity, you need to create brand salience with customers. It measures various aspects of the awareness of the brand:

  • To what extent is the brand top-of-mind and easily recalled or recognized?
  • What types of cues or reminders are necessary?
  • How pervasive is this brand awareness?

Brand Performance

Describes how well the brand meets customers’ more functional needs. Designing and delivering a product that satisfies customers’ needs is a prerequisite for successful branding.

Attributes and benefits that underlie brand performance:

  • Primary ingredients and supplementary features
  • Product reliability, durability, and serviceability
  • Service effectiveness, efficiency, and empathy
  • Style and design

Brand Imagery

It is the way people think about a brand abstractly, rather than what they think the brand actually does. Intangibles linked to a brand:

User Imagery

Type of person or organization that uses the brand. Results in customers’ mental image of actual users or more aspirational, idealized users. Consumers may base associations of typical or idealized brand users on descriptive demographic factors or more abstract psychographic factors.

Brand Feelings

Customers’ emotional responses and reactions to the brand. The concept of “Lovemarks” highlights important brand-building feelings:

  • Warmth
  • Fun
  • Excitement
  • Security
  • Social approval
  • Self-respect

Brand Resonance

The ultimate relationship and level of identification that a customer has with the brand:

  • Behavioral loyalty
  • Attitudinal attachment
  • Sense of community
  • Active engagement

Selecting Brand Elements

General Criteria for Choosing Brand Elements

  1. Memorable
  2. Meaningful
  3. Likable
  4. Transferable
  5. Adaptable
  6. Protectable

Brand Naming Principles

  1. Simplicity and easy pronunciation and spelling.
  2. Familiarity and meaningfulness.
  3. Differentiated, distinctive, and unique.

Jonathan Bell’s Naming Procedure

  1. Define objectives
  2. Generate names
  3. Screen initial candidates
  4. Study candidate names
  5. Research the final candidates
  6. Select the final name

Visual Brand Language

  • Color
  • Imagery
  • Typography
  • Composition

Consumer Empowerment & Company Benefits

Consumer Empowerment

Consumers are empowered in several ways:

  • Can obtain a great amount of information.
  • Can interact with other consumers and share reviews.
  • Can purchase a greater variety of available products.
  • Can more easily place and receive orders.

Company Advantages

Improvements for companies:

  • Can operate a powerful new information and sales channel with augmented geographic reach.
  • Can facilitate two-way communications.
  • Can customize their offerings to individual customers.

Aftermarketing Strategies

Activities to enhance the post-purchase experience:

  • Improve user manuals.
  • Customer service programs.
  • Loyalty programs.

Channel Strategy

Key aspects of channel strategy:

  • Channel intensity
  • Channel integration
  • Channel selection

Conclusion: Product & Brand Equity

The product is at the heart of brand equity. To create loyal customers, marketers need to invest in aftermarketing activities: delivering superior value before, during, and after the purchase to enhance the product experience.

Marketing Communication Strategies

1. Advertising

Any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.

2. Sales Promotion

Sales promotions are short-term incentives to encourage trial or usage of a product. Advertising provides consumers a reason to buy, but sales promotions offer consumers an incentive to buy.

3. Online Marketing Communication

Utilizing digital platforms for brand messaging.

4. Events & Experiences

Engaging consumers through sponsored events and immersive experiences.

5. Mobile Marketing

Product advertising on various mobile platforms.

Geotargeting

Marketers send messages to consumers based on their locations and the activities they are engaging in.

Opt-in Advertising

Users agree to allow advertisers to use specific, personal information, send them targeted ads and promotions.

Brand Amplifiers

Publicity

Creates public awareness and attention around a brand. Nonpersonal communication such as press releases, media interviews, press conferences, and films.

Public Relations

PR focuses on building relationships and managing an image. Apart from creating awareness, PR includes functions like:

  • Media monitoring
  • Event coordination
  • Crisis and reputation management

Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Consumers share likes, dislikes, and experiences with each other. It assures a greater degree of credibility and relevance.

Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)

Criteria for an effective IMC program:

  • Coverage: Proportion of the audience reached by each communication option, as well as how much overlap exists among communication options.
  • Contribution: Inherent ability of a marketing communication to create the desired response and communication effects from consumers in the absence of exposure to any other communication option.
  • Commonality: Extent to which common information conveyed by different communication options shares meaning across communication options.
  • Complementarity: Describes the extent to which different associations and linkages are emphasized across communication options.
  • Conformability: The extent that a marketing communication option is robust and effective for different groups of consumers.
  • Cost: To arrive at the most effective and efficient communication program, evaluations of marketing communications on all of the preceding criteria must be weighed against their cost.

Leveraging Secondary Brand Associations

Eight main ways to leverage secondary associations:

1. Company & Corporate Brands

  • Existing brands can be related to a corporate or family brand.
  • A corporate or family brand can be a source of brand equity.
  • Leveraging a corporate brand may or may not be useful.

2. Country of Origin

Consumers choose brands originating in different countries based on:

  • Their beliefs about the quality of certain types of products from certain countries.
  • Can create strong points-of-difference.

3. Distribution Channels

Retail stores can indirectly affect brand equity through an “image transfer” process. Retailers have their own brand images in consumers’ minds due to the following associations:

  • Product assortment
  • Pricing
  • Credit policy
  • Quality of service

4. Co-Branding

When two or more existing brands are combined into a joint product or are marketed together in some fashion. To create a strong co-brand, both brands should possess complementary strengths and positive associations.

5. Licensing

Creates contractual arrangements whereby firms can use names, logos, and characters of other brands to market their own brands for some fixed fee, “renting” another brand. Firms may license corporate trademarks to:

  • Generate extra revenue and profits.
  • Protect their trademarks.
  • Increase their brand exposure.

6. Celebrity Endorsements

Rationale to work with a famous person:

  • Draw attention to a brand.
  • Shape brand perceptions, by virtue of consumers’ perceptions of the famous person.

7. Events & Sponsorships

Sporting, cultural, or other events contribute to brand equity by:

  • Becoming associated with the brand and improving brand awareness.
  • Adding new associations.
  • Improving the strength, favorability, and uniqueness of existing associations.

8. Third-Party Endorsements

Involves linking the brand to various third-party sources (e.g., awards, reviews, certifications).