Page 20 - Marketing the Basics 2nd

12 Marketing: the Basics
occurs when the firm starts to market a product, not a solution to a need. In other words, they pay more attention to the product as a stand-alone object instead of highlighting the benefits and experiences a product offers a customer.
BRANDING
In the introduction of this chapter, we briefly touched on the notion of a brand. Brands are vital to the long-term success of a company. Without a brand, eventually a product will be regarded in the same manner as a commodity. Seen one cow, seen them all. One of the great challenges for marketers in this decade is to keep prices up in spite of cheap imports from China, India and other countries. Industry after industry and country after country have seen much of their livelihood greatly affected by lower cost producers in far lands. The fashion industry is one prominent example, among many. Even the great fashion powerhouse of Italy, long famous for the best cloth in the world for men’s suits, is seeing factory after factory closed as the quality of Chinese manufacturing continues to improve, much to China’s credit. What should Italian fashion marketers do? This is a difficult question but staying on the leading edge of design, cloth and manufacturing technology and ideas seems to be critical. Brands are undoubtedly part of the solution.
WHAT IS A BRAND?
The American Marketing Association defines a brand as ‘a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods, or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors’. A brand then, is a product or service that adds certain dimensions in some relevant way that differentiate it from other products designed to satisfy the same want. The difference may be functional, rational or tangible in nature. It can even be intangible; the brand could project a symbolic or emotional aspiration of the purchaser.
Branding is hardly new. Marketing historians have traced back the first brands to Ancient Greece. One of the key industries in that day was the pottery industry. The industry catered almost