ABSTRACT
We have regularly referred to the need for financial information to be analysed into the appropriate segments for decision-making and this often can be reduced to a product and customer matrix. One marketing strategy issue which can be important is which element, product or customer, is seen to be dominant as this will tend to control how the marketing image is developed. If the company consider the customer as the critical marketing asset, then it will probably wish to generate the maximum level of company association in the customer’s mind across the whole product range. This may lead to the company name being the brand name or being closely associated with each product. For single product companies this may not be a problem but even here some businesses have decided to retain a number of distinct brand images whereas others have only one profile in the market place (for example, in the car industry Ford, Mercedes, BMW have only one brand but Rover Group until recently had several different names and General Motors maintains Vauxhall in the United Kingdom and Opel in Germany and several distinct images in the United States).
