Brand Fundas by David Aaker

Brand fundas from the book Building strong brands by David Aaker:

Just a few basics:

According to Aaker the brand of a company survives today because of four factors: a commitment to quality, the generation of awareness, the fostering of loyalty and the development of a strong brand identity.

Brand equity generates value for the company. Brand equity is a set of assets linked to the brand’s name and symbol that adds value provided by the product and service to the customer.

The major assets are:

Brand Loyalty,Brand Awareness,Perceived Quality and Brand Associations.

Brand Identity, are the unique set of brand associations that the brand strategist aspires to create or maintain.

Brand Personality, can be defined as the set of human characteristics associated with given brand

One important lesson I learnt about Brand awareness is :

Awareness is measured according to the different ways in various ways in which customer remembers the product, ranging from recognition, to recall, to “top of the mind”, to dominant. According to Aaker recognition and recall gives the brand the added value. Recognition can give a positive feeling to the customer about the product/ service. Aaker says that a brand which has low recognition and recall can work on its image and build awareness. But those which have high recognition and low recall are the ones in graveyard. Also which have high recall but low recognition are ones which are looking at a niche market. Aaker believes that for building awareness a broad sales base is essential and that the most successful brand building firms are ones which are skilled in event promotions, sponsorships, publicity, sampling and other attention getting approaches.

The brand as an organization gives it a differentiating factor, a value proposition and a customer relationship. The values and culture of the organization go a long way in inspiring the employees and drawing the customer’s admiration and respect.