ABSTRACT
Brands are part of our everyday life. Take a look at your shirt, shoes, hat, or cell phone and chances are you will encounter a brand name or brand logo that is intended to communicate something about the item and likely something about you as well. Brands are what advertising is mostly about because they are the overt offerings of the marketer and convey ownership of the product or service. Marketing and advertising plans are centered around the brand. Brands are a focal point of the company or organization’s efforts including how they market and communicate. Basically, a brand is a promise (Kotler, 2005; Landor Associates, 2010) and much of that promise is conveyed via advertising in traditional media, new media, social media, or any other vehicle used to disseminate the message. Although the concept of branding is not at all new, the term “brand” has taken on added importance in our language and at times goes well beyond the identification and value of the offering. Most people intuitively understand what we mean by the concept of brand when it is associated with a marketer’s products or services. However, the term has broadened and is now included in more parts of our conversations and descriptions than ever before. For example, our ears perked up a few years ago when at a university meeting one of our deans referred to her/his college as a brand; this was quickly followed by our university referring to itself as a brand. The goal here is to demonstrate why branding serves as an integral part of advertising theory and to examine some of the key concepts that explain branding. The concept of brand intersects with almost all areas pointed out in Figure 1.1 “Components of the Advertising Process Circle” framework discussed in Chapter 1 of this text. While initially the province of the marketer that owns the brand, the brand operates in a social, political, and economic environment, and brand messages are communicated via traditional and nontraditional media. Brand consideration and use are negotiated processes where a reciprocal
relationship is formed between the consumer, the social environment, and the organization. We first discuss the importance of theory and how it relates to advertising and branding, the inseparable link between branding and advertising, and key concepts used to explain branding-ownership/market power, promise/trust, image/meaning, contact, negotiation/collaboration, and brand valuation. We also discuss challenges to the concept of brand and identify when the concept of brand loses its central meaning and tightness of explanation.
