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Branding: How Many in Marketing Really Understand What Branding Is About?

Ageless Marketing, 10/18/09

Abstract:

Perhaps nothing is more misunderstood in marketing than brand husbandry – what Margaret Marks and Carol Pearson in The Hero and the Outlaw incisively call “meaning management. “  Indeed, more than a few marketers have disdained the value of managing the meaning of products.

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers declared 15 years ago in a Marketing Tools article, “Once any marketer takes over the customer relationship, the consumer will have very little need for a mass-marketed name brand.”  Of course Peppers, with a background in direct marketing reflects the traditional inattention to branding in the world of direct marketing.

The advent of the Internet delivered the coup de grace to branding in the minds of many marketers.  But like one-to-one marketing gurus Peppers and Rogers, those who believe that way don’t understand the dynamics of branding, and indeed the contribution that branding can make to a balance sheet.  Of Coca-Cola’s $127 billion market cap, $66 billion is attributed to brand equity. As such, Coke is the most valuable brand in the world, beating out such formidable behemoths as IBM, Microsoft, General Electric and Toyota.

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