The Major Aspects of Brand Management

Brand management refers to the activity of overseeing or supervising the promotional activities that are carried out for a branded product or service. It involves detailed planning and analysis and has an important role to play regarding the manner in which a brand is thought of and viewed as in the market. Some tangible brand management elements are the product itself, packaging, the price and the look. This article analyzes various aspects associated with the brand management process such as the way brand are built and managed over time, the manner in which brands are organized in portfolios and how brand hierarchies are built and managed. It also assesses how brands are leveraged internationally and domestically and the different techniques that are used for measuring and managing brand value over time. Understanding How Brands are Built and Managed Over Time Building Brands The brand refers to a symbol, term, design, Continue reading

The Service Recovery Paradox

The present key business strategy eyes on keeping the current customers and developing relationships with the new ones. Providing services to the customers or the consumers is very difficult. Unfortunately the services provided to the customers can never be perfect, the failure can be due to unprompted employee actions, failure to respond to specific customer needs or also due to core service facilities. Hence the companies try their best to reduce the mistakes from repeating again and in satisfying the customers needs. This article discusses about the “service recovery paradox” steps that is being followed by the organizations to recover from their service failures. According to McCollough and Bharadwaj 2002, service recovery paradox can be said as the situation at which the customers post failure expectations exceed pre failure expectations. This is like the organization taking preventive steps to satisfy their customers by reducing their failures and also in not Continue reading

The Importance of Advertising in Marketing Communication

Advertising has four characteristics: it is persuasive in nature; it is non-personal; it is paid for by an identified sponsor; and it is disseminated through mass channels of communication. Advertising messages may promote the adoption of goods, services, persons, or ideas. Because the sales message is disseminated through the mass media – as opposed to personal selling – it is viewed as a much cheaper way of reaching consumers. However, its non-personal nature means it lacks the ability to tailor the sales message to the message recipient and, more importantly, actually get the sale. Therefore, advertising effects are best measured in terms of increasing awareness and changing attitudes and opinions, not creating sales. Advertising’s contribution to sales is difficult to isolate because many factors influence sales. The contribution advertising makes to sales are best viewed over the long run. The exception to this thinking is within the internet arena. While Continue reading

Introduction to Market Segmentation

Market is composed by the customers and sellers, and different customers may have different needs, characteristics, behavior or buying attitudes. Each customer is a separate entity, they have unique wants. Therefore, sellers may divide a market into different groups of individual markets. Every consumer group is a market segment, each segment are the tendency of buyers with similar wants or needs. They divide the market into distinct groups who have distinct needs, wants, behavior or who might want different products and services. This action is known as marketing segmentation. The modern concept of market segmentation was put forward by Phillip Kotler, who states that market segmentation is the “sub dividing of a market into homogenous subsets of customers, where any subset may be conceivably be selected as a market target to be reached with a distinct marketing mix“. It is a concept in economics and marketing. Marketing segmentation is marketers Continue reading

Firm That is Stuck in the Middle

The three Porters generic competitive strategies are alternative, viable approaches to dealing with the competitive forces. The converse of the previous discussion is that the firm failing to develop its strategy in at least one of the three directions – a firm that is stuck in the middle – is in an extremely poor strategic situation. According to Porter, a company’s failure to make a choice between cost leadership and differentiation essentially implies that the company is stuck in the middle. Porter argued that cost leadership and differentiation are such fundamentally contradictory strategies, requiring such different sets of resources, that any firm attempting to combine them would wind up “stuck in the middle” and fail to enjoy superior performance,  Cost leadership requires standardized products with few unique or distinctive features or services so that costs are kept to a minimum. On the other hand, differentiation usually depends on offering customers Continue reading

Effect of Relationship Marketing on Customer Retention

There is a relationship between two or more parties who are in contact with each other, comprise supplier (seller) and customer. Relationship marketing begins to provide framework for such marketing situations as describe by the two experiences. But its applicability has also invaded consumer goods and services. Relationship marketing became a common approach of marketing. Nowadays, there are the four waves of marketing comprise Mass marketing, Targeted marketing, Global marketing and finally Relationship marketing. Those waves play an important role by itself. Three of four waves share one thing in common. Its goal is maximizing sale in Mass marketing, Global marketing or Target marketing. After all they try to increase sale and endure profitable growth simultaneously and marketers are beginning to appreciate that they need more creation and reinforcement of building customer relationships. The relationship marketing is influenced by some areas of marketing comprises traditional marketing, sale management and marketing Continue reading