Brand management: Category management

 

The article argues against two marketing myths, uniqueness and table stakes. People buy a brand not because it is unique but because it delivers what they want a little better. Most differentiations a

Branding can help an organisation own an innovation, create and dominate a new subcategory and enhance the perceived effectiveness of the organisation. In this article, branding expert David Aaker arg ...

Adopting a reach optimising approach to category assortment development presents significant advantages over a simplistic volume based solution. In evaluating category reach, however, we must take int ...

This paper argues that the category management initiative, as a whole, has not unfolded as was expected 15 years ago. With the benefit of hindsight, it is unlikely that it would proceed in such a fair ...

The Chief Marketing Officer and Group VP, Personal Care, at Unilever describes how Unilever's structural reorganisation has improved global brand development. While operational implementation remains ...

This article summarises the WARC-published IPA report 'Driving Top-Line Growth', which analyses 52 winners from the last ten years of the IPA Effectiveness Awards. The report looks at brands which dou ...

Argues that marketers are wrong to believe (as they do) that products in their markets are always getting better. On the contrary, as soon as a product becomes mass-market, it declines in quality and ...

Refutes as a myth the widespread marketing belief that brands in a category lack differentiation in functional performance, and therefore depend wholly on the emotional elements in branding to create ...

This provocative article argues that companies who promise high-quality service inevitably break that promise and lose their custom. The reason is simple: the cost of employing the staff who can provi ...

Describes Whitbread’s three-year Winning Brands programme covering its various service sector brands (Premier Travel Inn, TGI Friday’s, Beefeater, Costa Coffee and Marriott (no longer part of Whitbrea ...

Describes how Lego launched Bionicle, a new range of toy products for boys. The project involved close partnership with the Danish advertising agency, Advance, developing a movie storytelling context, ...

Shigeo Okazaki and Sean Corcoran, consultants to Dentsu Inc, discuss some key components of their brand audit and brand analysis system. They introduce four key brand-perception measures (relevance, c ...

Describes the research which helped the Columbia TriStar Marketing Group to develop the Spider Man brand around the film.

Describes how research helped Platinum Guild International (PGI) to develop the marketing of platinum jewellery as a brand. Research was in three phases: positioning, brand identity formation, and adv ...

Claude Singer, senior vice-president at Siegal & Gale, believes that maintaining brand differentiation is a ceaseless exercise in saying no: no to fads, no to temptations to wander from a brand’s core ...

Can we ever succeed if we are only pretending to have soul and passion? Peter Wells looks at the success of Australian surfing brands and questions what their future will hold.

This paper describes the Category Management methodology used through Consumer Panel information in different countries in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil and Chile), aimed at opportunities for manuf ...

The paper will establish the need and illustrate the advantages of an integrated brand architecture framework combining the advantages of linking overt benefits and underlying human needs / motivation ...

Case study describing how the mobile operator MobiMak, in the multicultural environment of Macedonia, has developed and re-branded itself from an inward-looking technology company into a consumer-cent ...

Describes the restructuring process in which General Electric has rebranded itself into a diversified technology, media, and financial services company dedicated to creating innovations that make life ...

Using academic and their own research, Joseph Plummer and Eric Einhorn, McCann Worldwide, argue that we are now living in a demand driven economy, and that marketing companies must rise to the new cha ...

Bruce Tait, co-founder of Fallon Brand Consulting, believes there is a crisis in brand differentiation and creative brand management. He lays this at the door of ‘marketing science’ – the current pro ...

Ian Ryder, vice-president brand and communications EMEIA for Unisys, is dismayed that though corporate governance and customer loyalty appear top of CEO’s attention lists, ‘brand reputation’ (the aspe ...

Brand guru David Aaker describes and illustrates the five key concepts that underpin the building of brand portfolio strategy.

Describes how Wachovia Bank, one of the world’s leading correspondent banks, has grown and developed its branding. It competes head-on with local banks without having their local presence. Key proposi ...

Describes how ExxonMobil, Lubricants and Specialities, creates and develops global branding for its Exxon, Mobil and Esso lubricant brands. The strategic process involves creating branding blueprints, ...

Tim Stock and Marie Lena Tupot, of New York’s scenarioDNA, explain the concept of ‘embed marketing’, which moves beyond the conventional push/pull theory of advertising and aims to implant the evolvi ...

Contemporary brand building is no longer a one-way street where organizations vie for consumers' trust and action, but a dynamic, interactive process of conversation between brands, consumers and othe ...

From MIT Sloan Management Review (winter 2004): Sawhney et al, `Adding value through utility’, discusses how to develop add-on services, with examples;

It is human nature to rebel against unremitting success, however justified the evidence. The harder it is sold, the more it is questioned. Politicians and brand marketers constantly fail to grasp this ...