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This book is for anyone with a brand. It is a book about future-proofing your brand's identity. It will help you set up a long-term strategy to build Distinctive Assets, and tell you what you need to do to protect them. Do you want to get better at branding? You'll learn which strategies and actions work, as well as which ones don't, to help you take advantage of opportunities and avoid minefields. Building Distinctive Brand Assets is for anyone with a brand logo, font or colour scheme, and is essential reading for those who have wondered if (or have been told) it's time for a change. Readers will learn how to set up a long-term strategy to build a strong brand identity, and how to make use of knowledge, metrics and management systems in order to build and protect a brand's Distinctive Assets. Building Distinctive Brand Assets is divided into three sections that capture the processes involved in brand asset creation, implementation and ongoing management. The first section is focuses on strategy, and covers how Distinctive Assets are created and their role in a broader brand equity building. The second section covers measurement approaches, and how to use and interpret key metrics. The third section delves into the strengths and weaknesses of different types of assets and introduces the idea of a Distinctive Asset palette. This section also outlines how to set up a Distinctive Asset management system to provide an early warning system to identify potential threats before they evolve into major issues

AbstractCreating long‐term heavy buyers underpins many theories of consumer behaviour and marketing plans. This makes heavy‐buying households an attractive target for research and marketing activities. However, analysis across over 150 brands in 15 categories reveals that only around 50 per cent of the heavy‐buying households of a brand in 1 year to remain heavy brand buyers in the next year. This provides a benchmark for marketers implementing strategies to reduce leakage from heavy‐buyer segmentations. This result, however, casts doubt on the reliability of heavy buying as a household/buyer targeting characteristic and calls into question the idea that long‐term heavy brand buyers can be cultivated. There is evidence that category heavy buying is consistently more stable behaviour, averaging 67 per cent year‐on‐year buyer stability. Therefore, if heavy buying behaviour is a targeting characteristic, the results support the use of category buying, rather than brand buying weight. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This commentary is written in response to the paper 'Brand Relationship and Personality Theory: Metaphor or Consumer Perceptual Reality?' This paper raises two issues regarding brand personality: Do consumers see brands as having human traits, as per the 'brand as human' idea? Is there a consistent consumer vision of brands that provides a distinct 'personality' which distinguishes it from other brands, as per the idea of brand personality as a metaphor? Based on our own empirical evidence, we would answer 'no' to both of these questions. Despite the popularity of the personality concept, respondents rarely attribute personality-based traits to a brand (e.g. Charming or Helpful). Further there is little evidence of distinct brand personalities for competing brands. This leads us to question the value of brand personality to consumers when choosing brands, and therefore to marketers when designing brand strategy.

Historically, brand salience has been considered synonymous with the brand being 'top of mind' (mentioned first) when the product category is used to cue retrieval from memory. In this article we argue that this conceptualization (and associated measure) is too narrow. We show that there is value in distinguishing salience from the concepts of awareness and attitude by conceptualizing brand salience as the brand's propensity to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations. Brand salience reflects the quantity and quality of the network of memory structures buyers' hold about the brands. This article offers guidelines to facilitate research on the role of brand salience in brand choice and buyer behaviour that are an important progression from the evaluation (attitude) focus of contemporary marketing theory.

ABSTRACTThis paper documents the application of prior knowledge about response patterns in brand image data for private label (PL) brands. We investigate if a well‐known pattern about response level and usage experience also holds for PLs. The main finding is that advertised national brands (NBs) enjoy a higher level of knowledge amongst their non‐users than do PLs. We did not find this to be the case for small non‐advertised NBs and small PLs. The finding emphasises the importance of advertising for NBs to maintain their position. Well‐branded and appropriately scheduled advertising leads to building up brand associations in consumers' memory, which increases the probability of thinking about or noticing a brand. We suggest that the higher knowledge among NB non‐users is the main advantage NBs have over PLs in the market. We provide implications of the findings for managers and academia. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Advertising research has largely neglected to evaluate the relative effectiveness of the different forms of branding devices available to advertisers. Branding can be direct, through explicit use of brand names, or indirect, through use of (non-brand name) brand elements, such as logos, spokes-characters and slogans that are connected to the brand in consumers' memory. Advertisers often downplay brand names in favour of brand elements because the latter are seen as less intrusive and more creative. This experiment in three categories demonstrates that direct branding often produces higher brand recall than indirect branding without compromising advertising likeability. There is, however, a clear picture-superiority effect, whereby picture elements (logos, spokes-characters) consistently elicit higher brand recall than text elements (slogans). The findings highlight that advertisers need not be reluctant to call out the brand name for fear of losing attention due to an unappealing ad, because consumers do not appear to penalise advertising with direct branding, nor do they reward advertising with subtler indirect branding.

This study examines individuals' refusal to support, or rejection, of charity brands. Drawing from an online survey of 490 Australian respondents, we find a low incidence of charity rejection. At brand level, the average rejection is 3%, with Greenpeace (19%) and World Vision (9%) showing the highest levels of rejection. The majority of respondents (71%) did not reject any of the 29 charity brands listed. The results show that for any specific charity, rejection is rare and that non-awareness levels are 14 times higher than rejection levels. This has important strategic implications for recruiting supporters, with non-awareness providing greater explanation of non-support than rejection. Charities should focus on raising knowledge and salience of the charity brand rather than trying to negate objections.