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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Vol.2 Issue 1, January 2012, ISSN 2231 5780

A CONCEPTUAL STUDY OF BUILDING A STRONG BRAND WITH CBBE MODEL

MRS.T.KALAKUMARI*; DR.M.SEKAR**
*Assistant Professor, Department of Commerce, Sri Krishna Arts and Science College, Coimbatore 641008, Tamil Nadu, India. **Assistant Professor, Department of Commerce, CBM College, Coimbatore 641042, Tamil Nadu, India.

ABSTRACT A brand is essentially a sellers promise to deliver a specific set of features, benefits, and services consistently to the customers. It helps an organization to communicate desirable images about the quality, features and uniqueness product offerings. A strong brand should be able to communicate that it is better than the other brands on some parameters that customers evaluate, equally important and it must match with the customers personality. Building a strong brand is not an easy task, but there is a marketing model providing guidance for brand building, called the Customer Based Brand Equity model (CBBE model).This model incorporates recent theoretical advances and managerial practices in understanding and influencing consumer behaviour. This paper describes about the tracks of CBBE Model, which provides a unique point of view as to what brand equity is and how it will be built, measured and managed. KEYWORDS: Brand, Brand Awareness, Brand Extensions, Brand Imagery, Customer Based Brand Equity. ______________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION Brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme. A brand is a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service. A brand serves to create associations and expectations among products made by a producer. A brand often includes an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols, sound which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality. The visible elements of a brand such as colors, design, logotype, name, symbol that together identify and distinguish the brand in the consumers' mind. Effective brand names build a connection between the brand personalities as it is perceived by the target audience and the actual product/service. Strong brands are important. The challenge is to build a brand that is strong, unique and favourable a brand that evokes positive, emotional feelings. A brand where customers react and experience positively to the brands product/services/ideas/people. There are two core elements to a strong brand emotional value and practical value. Emotional value: Experience works would help in connecting the brand emotionally.

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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Vol.2 Issue 1, January 2012, ISSN 2231 5780

Practical value: Innovate continuously and explore new options with creativity. Building a brand is not an easy task, but there is a marketing model [2] providing guidance for brand building, called the customer-based brand equity model (CBBE model).The basic premise of the CBBE model is that the power of a brand resides in the minds of its customers. The CBBE model acts as a branding ladder, or building blocks to guide a firms marketing programs. 2. BENEFITS OF A STRONG BRAND Branding [3] is a very powerful component in business. The brand must have a logo to make branding easier and more possible. The consumers decide if they will buy a product or use a service based on how they view the brand. Once a customer likes the brand, they will definitely come back for repeated services or products. The qualities of the product or services are ensured through the customers minds from the brand image. Brand is not only convenient for businesses for repeated customer purchase but also easier for customers to filter out the countless generic items. Brand gives consumers the reason to buy it and wastes less time for consumer to choose. The following are the major benefits of a strong brand. Brand will add value to a company Requires less persuasion for consumers to use other products from the same brand Customer relationship due to trust Brand helps identification of a product in a cluttered marketplace Allows differentiation between very similar products, for example still mineral water Brand can attract merchandising contracts Leads to the perception of quality 3. CUSTOMER-BASED BRAND EQUITY Customer Based Brand Equity (CBBE) is the customers brand knowledge and their response to the brands marketing [2]. A customer can have negative and positive CBBE towards a brand.Companies can create brand equity for their products by making them memorable, easily recognizable and superior in quality and reliability. Mass marketing campaigns can also help to create brand equity. If consumers are willing to pay more for a generic product than for a branded one, however, the brand is said to have negative brand equity. This might happen if a company had a major product recall or caused a widely publicized environmental disaster. 4. BRAND EQUITY MEASUREMENT AND TRACKING Brand equity is essentially an expression of a brand's value or strength. It is also known as brand resonance, brand power or some other euphemism. Brand equity can be measured for product brands, service brands as well as corporate brands. Brand equity is an intangible asset

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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Vol.2 Issue 1, January 2012, ISSN 2231 5780

that depends on associations made by the consumer. There are three perspectives from which to view the brand equity: FINANCIAL - One way to measure brand equity is to determine the price premium that a brand commands over a generic product. For example, if consumers are willing to pay $100 more for a branded television over the same unbranded television, this premium provides important information about the value of the brand. However, expenses such as promotional costs must be taken into account when using this method to measure brand equity. BRAND EXTENSIONS - A successful brand can be used as a platform to launch related products. The benefits of brand extensions are the leveraging of existing brand awareness thus reducing advertising expenditures, and a lower risk from the perspective of the consumer. Furthermore, appropriate brand extensions can enhance the core brand. However, the value of brand extensions is more difficult to quantify than other direct financial measures of brand equity. CONSUMER-BASED - A strong brand increases the consumer's attitude strength towards the product associated with the brand. Attitude strength is built by experience with a product. This importance of actual experience by the customer implies that trial samples are more effective than advertising in the early stages of building a strong brand. The consumer's awareness and associations lead to perceived quality, inferred attributes, and eventually, brand loyalty. The Fig.1 shows that the measurement and management of CBBE model through the subsequent pyramid. FIG 1: CUSTOMER BASED BRAND EQUITY PYRAMID

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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Vol.2 Issue 1, January 2012, ISSN 2231 5780

Source: From Kevin Lane Keller's Brand Equity Model from Strategic Brand Management (1998 & 2002, Prentice Hall)

4.1 BRAND SALIENCE Brand salience measurement [2] is the assessment of the brands ability to be retrieved by customers in a purchase situation. Marketers need to consider two approaches to build a Brand Salience. 1. FOCUS ON DEFINING AND COMMUNICATING DIFFERENT COMMON EQUITY Brands need to execute creatively against the cues to maximize the number of memory structure associations. For example, Subways fresh and healthy positioning can be executed via a range of cues like good for my kids, for people on diets, good for outdoor activities, etc. These are all different cues that may lead to a consumer considering Subway for a fresh and healthy offering. 2. CREATE AND OWN DISTINCTIVE EXECUTIONAL MEMORY STRUCTURES A second approach is to increase the quantity and quality of executional memory structures. This can be achieved by strengthening a strong brand association and maximize the number of consumers who has to think the same brand in all buying situation. So, brand salience is an important tool but often ignored challenge for marketers. 4.2 BRAND IMAGERY Brand imagery deals with the extrinsic properties of the product or service including the ways in which the brand attempts to meet customers psychological or social needs. It also represents how people think about a brand abstractly rather than what they think the brand actually does. Brand image is developed over time through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme, and is authenticated through the consumers' direct experience. Brand image makes people think in a certain way about the business. Clearly defined brand image is essential for long-term business success. Here are four basic steps in creating a brand image. 4.2.1. BE UNIQUELY VALUABLE Brand image is very important to define some ways in which we can be uniquely valuable to the customers, and then communicating that unique benefit in a way thats easy to remember and clearly understandable. 4.2.2. STAND OUT FROM THE PACK Examine the competitors carefully and look for the key selling points and the basic promises they make. Under this stage the business man has to decide what differentiates strategy applied to make the brand in an effective way. 4.2.3. DRIVE THE CORE MESSAGE HOME In the third step all the major marketing tools must revolve around this central theme
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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Vol.2 Issue 1, January 2012, ISSN 2231 5780

4.4.4. LIVE UP TO MEET PROMISE The above all previous steps are hard and difficult to achieve without getting this fourth step which means brand is about creating and meeting expectations. 4.3 BRAND PERFORMANCE Brand Performance relates to the ways in which the product or services attempts to meet the customers more functional needs. Thus Brand Performance refers to the intrinsic properties of the brand in terms of inherent product or service characteristics. This has to provide a measurable contribution to the success of a business as a whole. The following are the major dimensions of brand performance. 1. Primary characteristics and secondary features 2. Product reliability, durability, and serviceability 3. Service effectiveness, service efficiency 4. Style, design, and price 4.4 BRAND FEELINGS Brand feelings are customers emotional responses and reaction with respect to brand. Brand feelings also relate to the social currency evoked by the brand. The following are six important types of brand-building feelings. 1. Warmth: The brand makes consumers feel a sense of calm. 2. Fun: The brand makes consumers feel amused, playful, and cheerful and so on. 3. Excitement: The brand makes consumers feel energetic and feel that they are experiencing with something special. 4. Security: The brand produces a feeling of safety. 5. Self-respect: The brand makes consumers feel better about themselves. 6. Social approval: The brand results in consumers having positive feeling about the reactions of others. 4.5 BRAND JUDGMENTS
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Brand judgments focus on customers personal opinions and evaluation with regard to the brand. To create a strong brand four types of brand judgments are important: Quality, Credibility, Consideration and superiority. 4.6 BRAND EQUITY Brand equity [5] is the consumers subjective and intangible assessments of the brand. Brand equity is beyond the objectively perceived value. Brand Equity refers to the nature of the relationship and the extent to which customers feel that they are familiar with the brand. Brand Equity can be broken down into four categories. Behavioral Loyalty Attitudinal Attachment

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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Vol.2 Issue 1, January 2012, ISSN 2231 5780

Sense of Community Active Engagement The difference between branding and brand equity is that branding is the structural processes that make a brand, and brand equity is the value that one feels towards the brand. 4.6.1 THREE MAIN CONCEPTS OF BRAND EQUITY BRAND AWARENESS Brand awareness consists of brand recognition and brand recall performance. Brand recognition requires that consumers can correctly discriminate the brand as having been previously seen or heard. Brand recall requires that consumers correctly generate the brand from memory. BRAND ATTITUDES The brand attitude will tell what people think about a product or service, whether the product answers a consumer need, and just how much the product is wanted by the consumer. Knowledge of brand attitude is very helpful in planning an advertising campaign. BRAND ETHICS A companys brand name is one of its most valuable assets, and it needs to be protected accordingly. An expanding global marketplace, coupled with ever popular technologies such as video-sharing websites and social networking, bring daily threats to corporate brands everywhere. The best companies are investing in their ethics programs to help and protect against these threats and strengthen their valuable brands. 5. CONCLUSION The basic premise of the CBBE model is the true measure of the strength of a brand. It depends on how consumers think, feel, and act with respect to that brand. Achieving brand equity requires eliciting the proper cognitive appraisals and emotional reactions to the brand from customers. The strongest brands are those for which consumers become so attached and passionate to share their beliefs and spread the word about the brand. Strong brand equity provides the following benefits: Increases cash flow by increasing market share, reducing promotional costs, and allowing premium pricing. Brand equity is an asset that can be sold or leased. However, brand equity is not always positive in value. Some brands acquire a bad reputation that results in negative brand equity. Negative brand equity can be measured by surveys in which consumers indicate that a discount is needed to purchase the brand over a generic product. Finally Companies can create strong brand equity for their products by making them memorable, easily recognizable and superior in quality and reliability through mass marketing campaigns.
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Facilitates a more predictable income stream.

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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Vol.2 Issue 1, January 2012, ISSN 2231 5780

BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Ethics and Brand Value: Strategic Differentiation John Paluszek Senior Counsel, Ketchum at Santa Clara University Markkula Center for Applied Ethics April 6, 2005 2. Kevin Lane Keller, Strategic Brand Management-Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity (2007), Prentice Hall India. 3. Kevin Lane Keller and David A.Aaker, The Effects of Sequential Introduction of Brand Extensions, Journal of Marketing Research (29th Feb 1992):35-50. 4. Philip Kotler.P (2002) Marketing Management: 11th Edition Tata McGraw-Hill, Newyork. 5. http://www.brandfortalent.com/ 6. http://www.experientialforum.com/survey/AWBWEMF.pdf 7. http://www.ehow.com 8. www.cgey.com
9. http://EzineArticles.com

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