Branding (in Marketing)

For deeper, more loyal customer relationships and enhanced profit margins, companies must actually "live" the brands they sell. This approach is called "integrated branding" and it's not just a communications strategy. It is a way of operating, an overall way of doing business, and a way to make certain a company's products are based on two mutually reinforcing concerns: what do customers value and what does the company do best in relation to what customers want? The tools to accomplish this are called "drivers." LePla and Parker show clearly and comprehensively how drivers work and how to apply them. Marketing professionals will find this essential, as will corporate strategists and others who make decisions that ultimately determine the organization's future.

The advent of the Internet and other new digital technologies means that companies—be they virtual or traditional bricks-and-mortar—must develop a successful strategy for presenting compelling brands in the virtual world. Drawing on their experience with Interbrand, the world's largest branding consultancy, and including chapters by branding experts from such companies as Pepsi-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Hewlett Packard, the authors focus on the strategic role of e-branding. Practical, tested, and designed for companies in any industry, this book presents a lively look at creating and sustaining e-brands beyond the current dot-com fizzle.

Until recently, profit in the television industry went to the owners of the conduit, the distributors of content. As the industry enters the digital age, the distribution bottleneck will disappear and be replaced by the content creators themselves. Television today is not just 500 channels: it is countless millions of hours of programming stored on video servers around the world. For media companies wanting to create value in this new era, including the major networks, digital branding is key. This book provides detailed historical data, financial, models and informed discussion of profitability trends in the industry. It offers a framework for understanding and predicting profitability and describes the nature of branding as it applies to the television industry. It shows how a handful of dominant brands will emerge as sought-after organizers of content. Investors, industry consultants and executives, policy makers, students and academics will all find this book fascinating and informative.

Eastman has assembled this exemplary volume to spotlight media promotion and to examine current research on the promotion of television and radio programs. The studies included here explore various types of promotion and use widely differing methods and approaches, providing a comprehensive overview of promotion research activities. Chapters include extensive literature reviews, original research, and discussion of research questions for subsequent study. Research in Media Promotion serves as a benchmark for the current state of promotion research and theory, and establishes the role of promotion as a primary factor affecting audience size. Appropriate for coursework and study in programming, marketing, research methods, management, and industry processes and practices, this volume offers agenda items for future study and is certain to stimulate new research ideas.

Coke adds life. Just do it. Yo quiero Taco Bell. We live in a commercial age, awash in a sea of brand names, logos, and advertising jingles -- not to mention commodities themselves. Are shoppers merely the unwitting stooges of the greedy producers who will stop at nothing to sell their wares? Are the producers' powers of persuasion so great that resistance is futile? James Twitchell counters this assumption of the used and abused consumer with a witty and unflinching look at commercial culture, starting from the simple observation that "we are powerfully attracted to the world of goods (after all, we don't call them 'bads')." He contends that far from being forced upon us against our better judgment, "consumerism is our better judgment." Why? Because increasingly, store-bought objects are what hold us together as a society, doing the work of "birth, patina, pews, coats of arms, house, and social rank" -- previously done by religion and bloodline. We immediately understand the connotations of status and identity exemplified by the Nike swoosh, the Polo pony, the Guess? label, the DKNY logo. The commodity alone is not what we are after; rather, we actively and creatively want that logo and its signification -- the social identity it bestows upon us. As Twitchell summarizes, "Tell me what you buy, and I will tell what you are and who you want to be." Using elements as disparate as the film The Jerk, French theorists, popular bumper stickers, and Money magazine to explore the nature and importance of advertising lingo, packaging, fashion, and "The Meaning of Self," Twitchell overturns one stodgy social myth after another. In the process he reveals the purchase and possession of things to be the self-identifying acts of modern life. Not only does the car you drive tell others who you are, it lets you know as well. The consumption of goods, according to Twitchell, provides us with tangible everyday comforts and with crucial inner security in a seemingly faithless age. That we may find our sense of self through buying material objects is among the chief indictments of contemporary culture. Twitchell, however, sees the significance of shopping. "There are no false needs." We buy more than objects, we buy meaning. For many of us, especially in our youth, Things R Us.