A modo de conclusiones

Brand enhancement is a process of value creation through augmenting the use value, point of sales experience and customer relationship. Other elements which add to the brand enhancement include product and customer segments, competitive posture of the brand, goals and moves and directions of the brand. Potential brands are categorized in different ways in reference to the products and customers. Brands pertaining to products and services may be classified as per the product line matrix - length and width (category of products and brands within the category). The core elements of brand enhancement strategy are exhibited in Table 4.5.

Table 4.5 Core Elements of Brand Enhancement Strategy

Scope Competitive Posture

Goals Moves and Directions

Customer and product segments

Product line Features Functionality Services Brand and sales CRM*

Type of Strategy Influence Positioning Marketing-mix Vision

*Customer Relationship Management

Brand profiles are directly related to the customer needs and availability of the products.

The distributing channels know the brand’s position and value better than the competitor, hence gaining confidence would also help in enhancing the brand value of products and services as well as in lifting up the corporate image. The competitive posture of a brand reveals how a rival brand behaves in the market place to attract the customers and subsequently win and retain them. In this process customer is the kingpin in determining the competitive posture of a brand. The competitive posture of brand consists of corporate image, attributes of the product, functionality, service, availability, image, sales relationship and pricing pattern. The product attributes vary in terms of shape, design, style, color and added

advantages. Further, customers may view the functionality of the product as the satisfaction derived from the products while dimensions of the functionality are highly product specific.

Growth in the global wine market continues to be driven by increased consumption while traditional producing countries struggle with declining exports. As the international market becomes increasingly consolidated and brand focused, it is established multinationals are considering this industry very lucrative. In recent years Australian wine has been the real success story, especially in "showcase" markets, notably the UK, where consumers are less inhibited by tradition. It has been evident from the global strategies of wine marketers that the basis of this success comes from the strong recognizable brands supported by focused marketing and advertising campaigns. The Australian brewer Foster's has become an important wine player owning key brands Wolf Blass and Beringer. Pernod Ricard of France, traditionally focused on spirits, is the owner of Australian labels Jacob's Creek and Long Mountain. In the face of greater consolidation in the spirits market, major producers are increasingly looking towards wine to drive growth.

The Australian brewer Foster's has become an important wine player owning key brands Wolf Blass and Beringer. France's Pernod Ricard, traditionally focused on spirits, is the owner of Australian labels Jacob's Creek and Long Mountain. In the face of greater consolidation in the spirits market, major producers are increasingly looking towards wine to drive growth¹⁶.

In the competitive markets, efficiency of the services discharged and extended to the buyers also contributes in building or breaking the market place strategy. Brands, in the same market or competitive domain, largely vary in their availability may be due to weak or faulty supply chain management. The price game played by the mercantile and service sector companies is very sensitive in establishing the brand value. The example of price war may be cited appropriately of the airlines - Jet Airways, Sahara India and Indian Airlines for attracting more passengers on the domestic trunk routs by slashing the prices and trying to enhance their brand value. Besides, it is also important to understand that companies which position themselves for the mass market can provide outstanding customer-employee interactions and profit from them, if they train employees to reflect the brand's core values¹⁷. A firm can create pride in the services brand, however service quality depends directly on employees' attachment to the brand. Many companies have made concerted efforts to build customer loyalty through a sense of brand community which stays as top of the mind brand on several occasions. It has been observed that global branding strategies now rule marketing.

ING is one of the largest financial services companies among the prominent global firms, offering banking, insurance and asset management in 60 countries. It has spread over its business to 60 million private, corporate and institutional clients in 60 countries with a workforce of over 115,000 people as in 2003. ING was founded in 1991 by a merger between Nationale-Nederlanden and NMB Postbank Group to become the first bancassurer of Netherlands. During the past 15 years ING has become multinational with very diverse international activities. The company holds insurance operations and asset-management activities in the Americas. It is well-established in the United States with retirement services, annuities and life insurances and has leading positions in non-life insurance in Canada and

16 Andy Tiverton-Brown (2002), Multinational look to big brand wines, Euro Monitor on line, August 15

17 Bendapudi Neeli and Bendapudi Venkat (2005), Creating the Living Brand, Harvard Business Review, 83 (5), 124-132

Mexico. Furthermore, the company is active in Chile, Brazil and Peru. The operating profits for the company in Americas have been increasing from €1310 million in 2003 to €1669 in 2004 before tax. In 2004, ING successfully repositioned itself in the wholesale banking market. The insurance business of the company in the Netherlands introduced a far-reaching plan to improve its customer service, with positive results so far. The business lines of the company further sharpened their focus on profitable top line growth, managing costs and risks and showing good bottom-line results. These four pillars are all equally important to generate above-average returns for shareholders. ING has diversified business activities in developing markets which offer a broad range of services in the fields of banking, insurance and asset management and has made its identity obvious in Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Central Europe amidst the competing local and multinational companies. In Latin America, ING is the largest insurer in Mexico and has important businesses in Chile and Brazil¹⁸.

In order to increase profitability, corporate managers must equip themselves with long-term measures of brand performance and apply strategies to make smarter decisions on alliances with leading brands. Alliance brand managers may need to make difficult decisions about when to partner and with whom, as well as how to structure and manage the partnership. Managers who can leverage information and knowledge across each stage of the alliance process will find that a knowledge-based approach is critical to the success of any partnership. In reference to the alliance of USA-Japan based companies in the past, Japanese companies saw these partnerships as a way to learn from their partner, while their U.S.

counterparts used these alliances as a substitute for more competitive skills, ultimately resulting in an erosion of their own internal skills. Therefore, with companies that consider brand alliances as a way of learning from their partners, practices that enable knowledge sharing, creation, dissemination and internalization become critical¹⁹. Cisco Systems and Polycom Inc. have a strategic agreement for joint development, licensing, and sales of Internet protocol (IP) telephony solutions. The objective of the alliance is to deliver enhanced IP telephones to enterprise customers; this agreement combines Polycom's leadership in audio conferencing technologies and Cisco's industry-leading expertise in IP networking and IP telephony. Based on this agreement, Polycom and Cisco have brought a Voice over IP (VoIP) conference phone to market that provides customers with industry-leading group conferencing capabilities within the Cisco IP Telephony environment²⁰.

A company may have low price and high consumer loyalty and also more trade leverage.

It would be difficult to measure the brand equity of various brands in the market as the parameters are very subjective and the whole exercise may turn out to be arbitrary²¹. Brand equity has four major variable viz. awareness, acceptability, preference and brand loyalty and the integration of all these variables offer high brand equity for the company. Brand equity further leads to brand personality of the company. The company may decide the brand personality strategy after analyzing the strength and weakness of the existing brands in the market. Research on assessing the brand personality may be conducted by using the brand rating method to get quantitative measures. The methods of photo sorting (trademark), phrase

18 Rajagopal (2005), Virtual Sales Offices for Insurance Services in Mexico: A Case of ING Comercial America, Discussion Case, ITESM, Mexico

19 Salvatore Parise and Lisa Sasson (2002), Leveraging Knowledge Management across Strategic Alliances, IBM Institute for Business Value Study, Cambridge, Massachusetts. USA

20 Polycom Corporate Website: Information on strategic ally partners, http://www.polycom.com

21 Aaker, David A : Managing Brand Equity, The Free Press, New York , 1991, pp 20-46

writing and simulation games may be used for assessing the brand personality. Sample consumers for this purpose should be self-directed, principled, externally directed, status oriented action-oriented consumers and non-driven consumers. The effective strategy for implementing the brand personality measures would be to go for aggressive advertising using the consumer reviews and comparative product advantages. However, consistency in the message should be properly taken care of.

Brand extension in the same company can be explained as product line²². It has been observed that majority of new product activities consists of line extension. The company may have four basic options in brand strategy – line extension in which the existing brand can be extended to new attributes in the existing product category, brand extension which enables the company to introduce new brand names to new product categories, multi-brands may be used if new brand names are provided to the same category of products and finally new brands where new brand names are used for the new product categories. The brand extension would be more beneficial if it serves to increase the sales of existing as well as the new products of the company. Sometimes the companies feel that multi–brands help in establishing different features to generate appeal to different buying motives. The example may be cited of the multi-brand strategy of Proctor and Gamble, which has introduced as many as nine different brands of detergents. The multi-brands may always gain small market share as compared to the solo brands and in particular, these brands may not be able to generate sustainable sales revenue.

Brand equity may be understood as the highest value paid for the brand names during buy-outs and mergers. This concept may be defined as the incremental value of a business above the value of its physical assets due to the market positioning achieved by its brand and the extension potential of the brand²³. In the market a strong brand will be considered to have high brand equity. Brand equity will be higher if the brand loyalty, awareness, perceived quality strong channel relationships and association of trademarks and patents are higher.

High brand equity provides many competitive advantages to the company.