ABSTRACT
The primarymotivation for a business to embrace the principles of brandmanagement is competition, and although the notion of branding is not new to most American consumer goods, it is relatively new to media brands. One of the first occasions where the concept of media as brands was presented in a public forum was within a speech made in 1993 by David Bender, president and CEO of Mediamark Research. He asserted that “media vehicles are one of the few examples of brands which don’t, for the most part, conceive of themselves as brands; as a result, they often are not able to take advantage of the insight that accrues to those aware of the thinking and research on brands” (Bender, 1993, p. 2). A mere 2 years later, as network prime time ratings began to lose ground to cable, the notion of media as brands began to take form. An editorial in Broadcasting and Cable trumpeted that “Branding has become the buzzword of the day . . . more is riding on the success or failure of broadcast branding than at any time in the medium’s history” (Editorial, 1995). Practical branding guides for broadcast professionals began to emerge, such as Dickey (1994) and McDowell and Batten (1999). A decade later, the lexicon ofmedia brandmanagement is pervasive amongmedia executives, such as Cecile Frot-Coutaz, producer of the wildly popular “American Idol,” who insists that “we don’t look at shows purely as television programs. We look at the shows as brands (Albiniak, 2004, p. 1).”
