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Creating brand resonance requires carefully sequenced brand-building efforts.
BUILDING A STRONG BRAND with great equity provides a host of possible benefits to a firm, such as greater customer loyalty and less vulnerability to competitive marketing actions or marketing crises; larger margins; more favorable customer response to price increases and decreases; greater trade or intermediary cooperation and support; increased marketing communication effectiveness; and licensing and brand extension opportunities.
Companies are interested in building strong brands with great equity, but getting there isn't always easy. To build brand equity, companies must start with the basics. What makes a brand strong? How do you build a strong brand? To help answer these questions, I developed a model of brand building called the customer-based brand equity (CBBE) model, which maps out what brand equity is and how it should best be built, measured, and managed.
The CBBE model was designed to be comprehensive, cohesive, well-grounded, up to date, and actionable. The premise of this model is that the power of a brand lies in what customers have learned, felt, seen, and heard about the brand over time. The power of a brand is in what resides in the minds of customers. Marketers' continuing challenge in building a strong brand is to ensure customers have the right types of experiences with products and services and their accompanying marketing programs so the desired thoughts, feelings, images, perceptions, and attitudes become linked to the brand.
The Four Steps
Building a strong brand, according to the CBBE model, can be thought of as a series of steps, where each step is contingent on successfully achieving the previous step. The first step is to ensure identification of the brand with customers and an association of the brand in customers' minds with a specific product class or customer need. The second step is to firmly establish the brand meaning in the minds of customers (i.e., by strategically linking a host of tangible and intangible brand associations). The third step is to elicit the proper customer responses to this brand identity and brand meaning. The final step is to convert brand response to create an intense, active loyalty relationship between customers and the brand.
The following four steps represent fundamental questions that customers invariably ask...