Meaning of Brand Identity and Brand Equity

Brand Identity and Brand Equity

Brand identity depicts what the firm wants its brand to represent and it drives all the brand-building efforts. The entire components involved in the marketing mix bring about an effect on the equity of the brand. The building blocks of brand identity include vision, mission, core competencies, values, and personality. Vision depicts the rationale for the brand’s subsistence and encompasses its core values. The mission is viewed as the most fundamental brands’ philosophy element. However, the values serve the purpose of communicating the emotions as well as expressions or functional benefits with the aim of building a brand-stakeholder relationship and provide value. On the other hand, brand personality refers to a combination of human traits related with brands (Petek & Ruzzier, 2007). Brand personality facilitates the development of a relationship with individuals possessing similar personality attributes through the presentation of the grounds for brand-customer relationship. The major competencies within the HP Company entail strong, unique and favorable brand attributes derived from a brand’s value and vision. Nevertheless, due to the fact that the emotional and functional values facilitate stakeholders in distinguishing the promised brand experience, it is believed that brand experience should also be included in brand identity. Since brands today are not viewed as social objects, but rather as socially constructed with customer participation, the main focus should also be devoted to fostering brand relationships (Petek & Ruzzier, 2007). To this end, the brand ought to be communicated through visual elements, as well as through a brand narrative written for every key market segment. Marketers hold the supposition that the strength of a brand underlies within the minds of their customers, as well lessons and concepts learned and experienced regarding the brand after a while. The gain of understanding brand identity and brand equity from the customer’s viewpoint is that it facilitates managers to consider explicitly how their marketing programs improve their brand’s value. Although the eventual goal of numerous marketing programs regards increasing sales, it is foremost necessary to set up the brand’s knowledge structures so that customers can respond positively to the brand’s marketing activity.

Brand equity can be defined as a combination of 5 groups of brand assets related to a brand name or symbol, which add to the value offered by a product. These 5 brand equity dimensions range from the brand awareness to the perceived quality of the brand and its associations. These may be followed closely by brand loyalty; as well as other proprietary brand assets such as channel relationships, patents, and trademarks. For instance, understanding brand equity in the HP Company from a consumer’s viewpoint facilitates the portrays the particular marketing tactics and strategies guidelines, as well as areas in which research could be helpful in aiding the managers’ decision making process. In this regard, marketers are required to take a wide outlook of the marketing practice for the brand, recognize its influence on brand knowledge, and also how the brand knowledge changes affect more conventional outcome measures like sales (Jankovik, 2012). In addition, markets should take in that the long-standing success of a brand’s future marketing programs is highly influenced by the knowledge on the brand within memory, which has been formed by the company’s short term marketing practices. In short, since the memory’s content and structure of the brand can influence the success of future brand approaches, it is vital for managers to comprehend how their marketing practices affect customer learning and therefore consequent recall for the brand-related information (Jankovik, 2012). To sum up, brand equity aids in differentiating the product from the rivals’ offerings; acts as a stand-in for quality, creates affirmative images in customers’ minds; depicts erosion for market share during promotional and price wars; and puts off market share erosion through giving a company time to retort competitive threats.