At its most basic level, a brand is made up of all the marketing elements that can be trademarked– logos, symbols, slogans, packaging, signage, and so on. Strong brands mix and match these elements to perform a number of brand-related functions, such as enhancing or reinforcing consumer awareness of the brand or its image and helping to protect the brand both competitively and legally.

Managers of the strongest brands also appreciate the specific roles that different marketing activities can play in building brand equity. They can, for example provide detailed product information.

They can show consumers how and why a product is used, by whom, where, and when. They can associate a brand with a person, place, or thing to enhance or refine its image.

Some activities, such as traditional advertising, lend themselves best to “pull” functions–those meant to create consumer demand for a given product. Others, like trade promotions, work best as “push” programs– those designed to help push the product through distributors.

When a brand makes good use of all its resources and also takes particular care to ensure that the essence of the brand is the same in all activities, it is hard to beat. Coca-Cola is one of the best examples. The brand makes excellent use of many kinds of marketing activities.

These include media advertising (such as the global “Always Coca-Cola” campaign); promotions (an effort that focused on the return of the popular contour bottle, for example); and sponsorship (its extensive involvement with the Olympics). They also include direct response (the Coca-Cola catalog, which sells licensed Coke merchandise) and interactive media (the company’s Web site, which offers, among other things, games, a trading post for collectors of Coke memorabilia, and a virtual look at the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta).

Through it all, the company always reinforces its key values of “originality,” “classic refreshment,” and so on. The brand is always the hero in Coca-Cola advertising and creates a classic example of how integrating IMC leads to superior market performance.

Tags: brand equity, brand loyalty, call to action, customer loyalty

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 9:16 pm and is filed under About Us, Branding, Great Ideas, Highly Recommended. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.