Page 384 - The Principle of Economics

390 PART FIVE FIRM BEHAVIOR AND THE ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY
IN THE NEWS
TV Networks as Brand Names
BRAND NAMES CONVEY INFORMATION TO consumers about the goods that firms are offering. Establishing a brand name—and ensuring that it conveys the right information—is an important strategy for many businesses, including TV networks.
A TV Season When Image Is Everything
BY STUART ELLIOTT
A marketing blitz to promote fall tele- vision programming, estimated at a rec- ord $400 million to $500 million, has been inundating America with a barrage
of branding.
Branding is a shorthand term along
Madison Avenue for attempts to create or burnish an identity or image, just as Coca-Cola seeks to distinguish itself from Pepsi-Cola. For the 1996–97 prime-time broadcast television season,
which officially began this week, viewers have been swamped by the torrent of teasing practically since the 1995–96 season ended in May.
At the center of those efforts is the most ambitious push ever by the broad- cast networks to brand themselves and many of the blocks of programming they offer—a marked departure from the past, when they would promote only specific shows.
“The perception was that people watched shows, not networks,” said Bob Bibb, who with Lewis Goldstein jointly heads marketing for WB, a fledg- ling network owned by Time Warner, Inc., and based in Burbank, California.
“But that was when there were only three networks, three choices,” Mr. Bibb added, “and it was easy to find the shows you liked.”
WB has been presenting a sassy singing cartoon character named Michi- gan J. Frog as its “spokesphibian,” per- sonifying the entire lineup of the “Dubba-dubba-WB”—as he insists upon calling the network.
“It’s not a frog, it’s an attitude,” Mr. Bibb said, “a consistency from show to show.”
In television, an intrinsic part of branding is selecting shows that seem related and might appeal to a certain au- dience segment. It means “developing
AN ATTITUDE, NOT JUST A FROG
an overall packaging of the network to build a relationship with viewers, so they will come to expect certain things from us,” said Alan Cohen, executive vice president for the ABC-TV unit of the Walt Disney Company in New York.
That, he said, means defining the network so that “when you’re watching ABC, you’ll know you’re watching ABC”—and to accomplish it in a way that appeals to the primary ABC audi- ence of youngish urbanites and families with children.
SOURCE: The New York Times, September 20, 1996, p. D1.
physically possible, it is obligatory that the firm identify itself on the good or packaging with a “production mark.”
Goldman quotes the analysis of a Soviet marketing expert:
This [trademark] makes it easy to establish the actual producer of the product in case it is necessary to call him to account for the poor quality of his goods. For this reason, it is one of the most effective weapons in the battle for the quality of products. . . . The trademark makes it possible for the consumer to select the good which he likes. . . . This forces other firms to undertake measures to improve the quality of their own product in harmony with the demands of the consumer.