Analysis of Brand Management Strategies: Semester 2

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Brand Management
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Table of Contents
Introduction...............................................................................................................................3
LO1............................................................................................................................................4
LO2............................................................................................................................................8
LO3..........................................................................................................................................11
LO4..........................................................................................................................................14
Conclusion..............................................................................................................................17
Reference List........................................................................................................................18
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Introduction
An organisation produces many goods and services for the consumption of the
consumers. It is of utmost essence for the company to properly to plan effective
marketing strategies to successfully propagate their products Brand management is
the process of maintaining the brand image of the company in the eyes of its
customers and employees. It also involves increasing the brand recognition of the
company. These operations are focused on maintaining the position of the brand in
the market. Brand management is essential because good brand management
results in higher sales and revenues earned by the government.
John Lewis and Partners will be used as the chosen organisation for this report.
The company is a high end retail chain organisation selling home wares, furniture’s,
and clothing product. The organisation was found in London, UK in 1864 (John
Lewis and Partners, 2019). This report will demonstrate an understanding of how a
brand is managed and built over time. The system of how brands are organised in
portfolios along with how the brand hierarchy is built over time and managed will also
be addressed. The extension of brands over time domestically and internationally will
also be explained along with evaluation of techniques that measure and manage
brand value over time.
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LO1
Demonstrate an understanding of how a brand is built and managed over time
P1 Explain the importance of branding as a marketing tool and why and how it
has emerged in business practice
Branding is used as a tool to successfully market and sale a product. It also helps
the brand in achieving its own corporate identity in the market. The chosen
organisation, John Lewis and Partners is trying to increase their market share by
improving their branding process. They will be able to do so by taking the help of
marketing and branding consultants to achieve their branding goals (Rehan, 2014).
Branding is important because it allows the consumers to know about a company or
a brand. Before a product or service is released into the market, companies conduct
extensive marketing campaigns to make the product known in the market. This
allows companies to generate brand interest which holds the capability of potentially
increasing first-impression sales of the products of John Lewis and Partners. The
products and services must be made in such a way that it effective aligns itself to the
market trends and demands of the consumers. The first hand impression is
important for a company because first hand impressions last the longest in the minds
of customers. In order for this impression to be effective, the products and services
should be properly promoted. This promotional activity should consist of many
elements like making attractive brand names, catchy brand slogans along with well
presented brand logos to capture the minds of the target audience. Merchandising is
also an effective way of brand management.
The importance of branding lies in its use in enhancing the value of brand products,
motivating the employees to work harder, and grabbing the attention of potential new
target consumers. Branding helps in distinguishing one product from other similar
products in the market. This is the biggest importance of branding. This helps the
company to gain an advantage in the competitive market if brand management is
done well. Branding can be done in a better way by implementing many models and
theories along with concepts. The importance of branding can be analysed below.
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 Getting Recognition: With proper branding, a product can be differentiated
from other similar products. This helps customers to buy the products they
want from their brand of choice. Branding is done by applying the brand logo
on the product. It is considered as the face of the business as it is the most
easily recognisable feature of a product, a reason why it is considered to be
the face of the company (Lilleker, 2015).
 Increasing value of business: Good branding will allow a company to
increase the value of their business because good and proper branding helps
in expanding the market of the product in its own sector. It will make the
business seem more attractive to probable investors, who will recognise the
company from its brand logo.
 Generating New Customers: Due to the power of branding differentiating the
brand’s products from other products, it can generate new customers who will
be attracted to the brand’s promotional activities. Also, they will be able to
differentiate it from other products due to proper branding effectively utilising
the brand logo.
 Improving employee satisfaction: When an employee works for a well
branded company, he or she feels more valued. This will effectively make the
employee more productive, which correlates with increasing the revenue
generated by the company and increasing profits earned (Foroudi et al.,
2016).
 Supporting Advertisements: Branding employs the use of advertisements to
successfully market their products. Advertisements help a company to attract
more customers if the advertisements cater to the demands of the consumers
for maximum efficacy.
 Generating more sales: Good branding will attract target customers, which
will allow more sales of the products of the brand. This will effectively increase
the revenues of the company and increase their income.
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P2 Analyse the key components of a successful brand strategy for building
and managing brand equity
Modern business scenario is extremely competitive. Most of the business
organizations are competition with each other for greater suitability and higher
profitability in business. However, in recent days, it has been noticed by market
researchers that the level of competition is continually increasing high. Building and
managing brand equity has become a serious challenge to all business
organizations from any business sector (Khanna et al., 2015). Especially, the retail
industry has highly competitive market places and numerous numbers of rivals that
make the process of building and managing brand equity more difficult. However, a
successful brand strategy consists of multiple components to build and manage
brand equity. Key components are as follows:
Target audience
Business organizations must have proper information and ideas about their target
customers’ purchasing behaviour and buying psychology so that they can better
meet the requirements and needs of modern customers in more effective manner.
Business organizations can manage their brand equity in a precise manner, if the
business organization is capable enough to reach out to the target customers.
Therefore, John Lewis and Partners must focus on analyzing and determining the
actual target customers of the company for betterment of he brand equity and
successful management.
Brand perception
It is necessary for managerial authorities of business organizations like John Lewis
and Partners to conduct survey for their valuable consumers. Survey can help the
organizations to know more regarding the perception of brands in the minds of
customers (Wheeler, 2017). Moreover, it allows ventures modifying their existing
brand management tactics within the workplace.
Brand promise
Brand promise is important step in development and management of brand equity.
Brand promise refers to those messages and statements that are made by business
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organizations over times for informing the customers regarding the organizational
targets and objectives. As a result, consumers understand what products they can
expect from the company.
Brand voice
Most of the successful organizations in UK market place conduct promotional
operations and events as well as speak to their valuable target customers regarding
their brands. However, it helps them in measuring their brand personality.
Companies must provide adequate scope to their customers in terms of
understanding and adopting their brands.
Brand positioning
Effective brand positioning allows business organizations like “John Lewis and
Partners” to successfully reach out more numbers of potential customers, who can
sell their products and accelerate the organizational sales revenues in an effective
manner. In this process, ventures design their logos and attractive but different
packaging to serve products to customers according to the positioning (Heding et al.,
2015). Apart from this, it allows them increasing customer perception of brand.
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LO2
Analyse how brands are organised in portfolios; how brand hierarchies are
built and managed
P3 Analyse different strategies of portfolio management, brand hierarchy and
brand equity management
In modern business aspect, portfolio management, brand hierarchy and brand equity
management are considered as important concepts that such impact over brand
management of organizations like “John Lewis and Partners”. However, in this
entire process, understanding the loopholes of the organization is another important
consideration. Successful retail business foundations like “John Lewis and
Partners” must conduct these business activities for better performance and greater
sustainability of organizations in market.
Portfolio management
Portfolio management tactics or strategies are considered as approaches, which are
applied with the aim of efficient portfolio management for generating the maximum
ROI at lowest risks (Hoesli and MacGregor, 2014). Modern researchers have
classified this portfolio management in two different segments that are active
portfolio management and passive portfolio management strategy.
Active portfolio management strategy
This active portfolio management depends upon the fact that specific style of
management or analysis can generate returns, which can beat competitors. It is
implemented through advices of managers and analysts those analyse, determine
and evaluate marketplace for existence of efficiencies (Chandra, 2017). However,
the entire portfolio management’s active management approach can be separated
into two following styles.
Bottom up approach
In this special approach, the evacuation of the organizations are relied upon the
strengths and qualities of their products, financial statement or any sort of other
criteria, avoiding market conditions as well as expected trends in market. This
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stresses that established and strong organizations perform will in any kind of
economic conditions.
Top down approach
In this approach, managerial authorities are responsible for observing the entire
marketplace as well as deciding regarding the industries as well as sectors, which
are expected for performing better in the ongoing economic cycle. After the
completion of decision making on the sectors, particular stocks are chosen according
to business organizations, which are expected to be performed well in that specific
business sector.
Passive portfolio management
Passive portfolio management is completely different from active portfolio
management approach. It relies upon the fact that marketplaces are efficient as well
as beating the market returns regularly over time. In this approach, maximum returns
are arranged from low cost investments that are kept for long time. It involves
multiple styles such as efficient market theory, indexing, patient portfolio, aggressive
portfolio and conservative portfolio (Jiang and Liang, 2017).
Most of the well-established companies “John Lewis and Partners” use active
portfolio management approach for better performance, high growth and
increasing managerial efficiencies effectively.
Brand hierarchy
Another important consideration in modern business aspect is brand hierarchy that
generally refers to summarizing the brand strategy through displaying the nature as
well as number of both distinctive and common brand elements throughout the
organizations (Keller and Brexendorf, 2017). The appropriate use of brand hierarchy
strategy allows the business organizations such as “John Lewis and Partners” for
functioning in perfect manner. However, brand hierarchy strategy is considered as
the strategic, logical as well as relational structure for exhaustive brands in portfolio.
One of the key concepts of brand architecture strategy is that consumers are related
brands at diverse standards (Herrero et al., 2017). It allows better performance and
better service of companies to their valuable customers and strengthening market
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sustainability. Hence, “John Lewis and Partners” must look for implementing
brand architecture strategy within their firm and workplace so that it would be
easier for the company to manage brand hierarchy in appropriate manner.
Brand equity management
Brand equity is accounted for the differences in consumer response, which a brand
name makes. For an instance, there are multiple companies in market such as
Apple, Nike, Bentley, BMW, Audi and others have strong brand equity. It is absolute
that all brands have few measures of the brand equity. Mostly four vital components
are required to be managed for ranking of the particular brands (Su and Tong, 2015).
Differentiation, knowledge, relevance and esteem are the four important factors of
higher up brand ranking in market place. Successful organizations like “John Lewis
and Partners” have eight essentials factors for building and managing strong brand
equity. Eight important factors of brand equity management are collaboration,
emotional capital, value, reputation, brand equity, strategy, communication, legal and
ethical decision making and last but not the least awareness. Companies like “John
Lewis and Partners” need to improve and work on these factors for better
management of their brand equity.
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LO3
Evaluate how brands are leveraged/extended over time domestically and
internationally
P4 Evaluate how brands are managed collaboratively and in partnership both
at a domestic and global level
Brand leveraging can easily be described as such a process that assists any existing
brand to make some upgrade at their existing organizational effort so that they can
make a brand new category of product. Through the assistance of effective and
efficient brand leveraging, it is entirely possible for different organizations such as
John Lewis Partners to state the overall functionality of their new products in front of
their entire consumer base. It is one of the most essential parts regarding the
foundation process of any new product or service from the perspective of
organizations like John Lewis Partners at certain extension. It can also effectively
make consumers feel the audacity that the new product or service has been
introduced at the market after assessing their overall needs and expectation.
Effective market research is an integral part of conducting market leveraging.
Organizations like John Lewis Partners are opted to conduct brand leveraging in
order to make their brand relevant towards both international and domestic level.
Strengths that can be leveraged by different brands after conducting brand
extension
Brands extension as a process mostly depends at a definite typology of strategy. It
can use by any existing brands for further increasing their overall popularity in
international and national level. John Lewis Partners is a very reputed brand and
they have extensive amount of popularity at both international and national premises
(Rosenbaum-Elliott et al., 2015). In addition to that, different strategies can be taken
into consideration by that organization for further improving their overall brand name
and extension between their overall consumer bases at some greater extension.
Different continuous promotional activities might also be extremely helpful towards
the overall process of brand leveraging and brand extension at certain extension.
Moreover, it can also describe from several different instances that maintaining the
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overall process and activities that are closely associated with brand leveraging and
extension might become extremely helpful towards the process of gaining positive
consumer experience while minimizing the overall rate of resource input
(Rauschnabel et al., 2016). This organization can also make subsequent smaller
brands, which will ultimately help them at distributing their overall brand extension in
an effective and efficient way.
Weaknesses of brand extension that need suggestions
Despite the fact that brand extension has different positive effects, it also has some
weaknesses that might or might not be mitigated by some suggestions. It is natural
that the overall commercial successes of different brands like John Lewis Partners is
entirely related with their overall marketing tactics that has been implemented by
their respective managers at their overall process of business operations. The
placement of different products might not actually able to target a specific consumer
base and ultimately resulting into failed brand extension and leveraging activity.
In addition to that, the overall presence of media at the time of leveraging the brand
might be negatively affecting the overall process of brand leveraging at certain
extension (Veloutsou and Guzman, 2017). Moreover, any form of mistake at process
of conducting marketing might also resulted into overall decreased brand value. It
might negatively affect their overall profitability and sales ration at certain different
extension.
Agreement and cooperation at partnership
At both domestic and international level, maintaining a brand is extremely
challenging especially in dealing with problems such as market competition, complex
business environment, supply distribution and others. However, especially at
international level, specified organization should be adaptive to certain frameworks
and regulations for better brand management performance. However, business
ventures must kept in mind that any forms of brands diversification, variants and
extension should not disturb the core value of the product. Apart from this, “John
Lewis and Partners” managed few of the partnership agreements for upgrading its
brand. In recent days, the company has cooperated with Primark that is a popular
fast fashion retail organization in UK market. The key aim of “John Lewis and
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