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The brand a few definitions

A consumer panel was shown the picture of two
beautiful women and asked who was more beautiful. The vote split 50-50. Then the experimenter
named one woman Jennifer and the other Gertrude. The woman named Jennifer subsequently
received 80 percent of the votes.
Philip Kotler

~ Ph. D. Lecturer Alexandra Craciun (University of Bucharest)

Abstract: This article discusses a series of definitions of the term brand in order to highlight the
fact that in a world dominated by hyper-consumption and products with similar functional benefits the role
of branding is every day more important, being the only means by which the consumer is oriented. People
no longer consume products but brands, because now the differentiation does not start from physical attributed but from emotional benefits. That is why the brand managers role is all the more related to the
management of a symbolic world.
Keywords: brand, strategy, brand identity, consumption, brand capital, products, category,
market.
Introduction
In 1988, Philip Morris Companies purchased Kraft for $12.6 billion, 6 times its actual value. The difference is the brand price
or, better said, the price of the word Kraft1
(NK, p. 28) with everything that implies in
the mind of consumers.
The same thing happened when Ford
purchased Jaguar, when the physical goods
were not estimated at more than 16% of the
total value of acquisition (MN, p. 31).
1

Naomi Klein source, No logo

This means that the rest of 84% was the price

of the name Jaguar.
There are facts that changed the perspective over advertising. Its not only a voice that
calls us from the shop: Buy me, buy me! but it
becomes the products content, the essence of
what we actually buy, the brand.
But, in order to understand all this alchemy, lets see together a few definitions.
We will do this not because there is no hope
to find the meaning of branding in one single
definition, but because we are positive that
brand is a hard to define term.

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Therefore, where is the difference between Jennifer and Gertrude? Is it in the picture, in the name, in consumers head or in
the 80 percentages for Jennifer?
Some would say its in the 80 per cent.
And so we reach the first and probably most
austere definition of the brand.
That would be a definition that valid for
the grown-ups, if we are to listen to the Little
Prince: Grown-ups love numbers. When
you tell them you have a new friend they
will never ask questions about the most important problems. They will never ask how
his voice is, what games he enjoys playing?
They ask: How old is he? How many brothers he has? ... How much money does his
father earn? Only from these numbers they
get to know a few things about him. Lets
approach things as grown-ups and see what
brand means in numbers. The experts in such
measurements are those from Interbrand, a
company that calculates every year how
much cost the 100 first brands in the world.
Therefore, at the question: What is the
brand? Coca-Cola answered with 39 billion
US dollars in 1995, with 83.8 billion US dollars
in 1999, with 67.3 billion US dollars in 2005.
In 2009 the answer was: 68.734, 3% more than
in 2008. But, as Alice in Wonderland would
say: This is not a satisfactory answer.
It is like you would say about the beautiful woman Gertrude that she represents
only 20%. And still, David Aaker shows that
for the first 9 of the top 60 world brands, the
value of the mark exceeds 50% of companys
total value: From the 15 top brands, only
General Electric has the brand value under
19% from companys estimated value. In exchange, 9 of the top 60 most valuable brands
have the brand value over 50% from the value of the company. But, in the case of BMW,

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Nike, Apple or Ikea the brand capital is over

75% from the market capitalization.2
That would mean to have a good name.
Is the reverse of the famous headline of John
Caples: They laughed when I sat down to the
piano or, in other words, its not good to be
called Gertrude, at least not in a cultural environment where Jennifer sounds sexier.
But then, I think we still have to observe
something. We can easily imagine a character
that owns a BMW, wears Nike, uses an Apple
computer and he just furnished his house
with Ikea sofas. It is not odd that, between all
the brands in the world, those that have the
image capital highly exceeding companys
assets address the same type of character? A
character that is ready to offer almost 80% of
the price on the companys name.
Moreover, these brands seem to be part
of those types of brands that Kevin Roberts,
CEO at Saachi&Saachi Worldwide, called
LOVEMARKS, meaning charismatic brands
that people cant live without.3, brands that
people excuse even the strategy mistakes,
brands they are ready to even tattoo on their
chest in order to be recognized as users of
those brands products.
And I am sure that those kinds of users do not know the value of that particular
brand. But they know how much they paid
for the product, and more than that, they
know, as Little Prince says: the sound of his
voice and what games he enjoys playing.
Moreover, they also know that if their mother calls them Gertrude, having a BMW, is like
their name is also Jennifer.
2

David Aaker - Brand Leadership, New York, The

Free Press, , 2000, p. 18
Out of love for brands , interview with Kevin Roberts, CEO at Saache&Saachi Worldwide for the Biz
Magazine, nr.91/sept. 2004, p.26

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But lets let aside the ghosts of branding and lets get back to a coherent definition, much more prosaic. The trendy brand is
etymologically more related to cows than to
BMWs, because brandon4 or brandr in
its older, Germanic form meant marking the
cattle with the red-hot iron. Also the French
marquee is related to the same action. We
are looking at the first definition of brand:
Brand means marking, labeling,
attribution.
That is of course the most innocent definition and that is what most of the producers do with their marks: attribute them, but
without making them known.
Actually, the brand specialists declaim
against this definition, saying that branding starts where this definition ends, as the
career of a great actor starts where he is no
more figurant.
But lets move a step forward; in this
stage we will add another element: Vision.
Scott Galloway said that: A brand is the face
of business strategy.5
And thats true. I remember the most
elementary strategy lesson I have ever heard
was in fact a joke about the country branding.
Accidentally or not the joke was referring to
cattle: two in general. It sounded like this:
You have two cows. You sell one and
force the other to produce milk for four. You
are surprised when the cow dies. This is an
American company. You have two cows. You
strike because you want to have three. You
can found with them a French company. You
have two cows. You reset them so as to be
ten times smaller than an average cow and
4

Jean Kapferer, op cit, p. 48

A brand is the face of a business strategy, the quote is taken from David Aakers work Brand Leadership, The Free Press, New York, 2000.
5

to produce two times more milk. Then you

make intelligent animated images with the
cows, call them Cowkemon and sell them
worldwide. Thats clear: this is a Japanese
type of management.
You have two cows. You reset them as to
live 100 years, eat once a month and to strip
themselves. Thats a German company.
You have two cows. Both are mad. That
is only if you founded a British company.
If we are talking about an Italian company: you have two cows, but you dont know
where they are. You go for a lunch break.
But it can be worse: you have two cows. You
count them and you find out they are 5. You
count them again and you have 42. You count
them again and you have 12. You stop counting and open another bottle of vodka. Thats
for sure a Russian company.
But lets take another example. You
have 5000 cows, none of them is yours. You
take money for storage. That means you
think strategically in a Swiss style.
And on other continents:
Indian company: You have two cows.
You hollow them.
Chinese company: You have two cows.
You have 300 people stripping them. You
declare 0% unemployment, high cattle productivity and you arrest the reporter that
published the news.
As we talked about strategical ideas
related to the country brand, lets see how
a Romanian company would look like: You
have 6 cows, costs as if you had 10, you milk
only 3, you run like heck around them, you
bring personnel for other 5, you declare
bankruptcy and you blame the twerp.
If all these methods seem very little encouraging then we didnt hear the worse.
Theories show that cows can multiply also

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otherwise than with a bottle of vodka, and

some would call that the Enron model: You
have two cows. You sell three of them to your
listed in the stock exchange, using letters of
credit opened at the bank by your brotherin-law, then you make an exchange debt/account receivable with an associated general
offer, so as to regain the four cows, with a relief from taxation for four cows. The rights of
the six cows are transferred, through an intermediary to a company in Cayman Islands,
secretly hold by the majority shareholder that
resells to your company all the right on the
seven cows. According to the annual report,
the company holds eight cows, with an open
option for another one. You sell a cow to buy
a USA president, and that will leave you with
nine cows. No balance sheet is given together
with the communiqu. The public bears with
it and says nothing.
Chasing the herd of country and then
company branding long the way we wondered from Scott Galloways definition: A
brand is the face of business strategy6. What
we wanted to underline was the fact that between strategy and brand we have a strong
relation that can lead to certain stereotypes.
In other words, if you laughed at the above
joke, that means you recognized the strategic
face of country brands we referred to.
Going from national level to the supermarket level, things sound more prosaic.
What strategic face do yoghurt and salami
have? Its hard to say. A few years ago I was
counting in a Carrefour supermarket approximately 20 types of yoghurt, but only Danone
was having a strategic face.
Now we can talk about the old time
tradition of Napolact yoghurt, about the
A brand is the face of a business strategy, the quote is taken from David Aakers work Brand Leadership, The Free Press, New York, 2000.

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healthy taste for life of Tnuva yoghurt. We

now have brands, or in other words, we have
business strategies.
That is why I believe this definition is
appropriate. It takes the brand out of the
marketing department and puts it on the
CEO desk. And that is the normal way to
be. Because Harley Davidson is not making perfumes, women are not ready to have
Cosmopolitan yoghurt, they dont want to
wear Bic lingerie or brush their teeth with
Ponds toothpaste.
You recognized in the above examples
some of the most roaring marketing mistakes
that started from the wrong brand evaluation.
In other words, managers did not understand that their brand as Scott Galloway
says is the face of business strategy and
from here they have to start when they want
to build up their name. When companies
contradict their brands, consumers amend
them immediately.
Jean Nol Kapferer was saying: The
brand is a point of view on the category of
products7 and this definition is almost similar to the one previously enounced. Because,
what else is strategy other than a point of
view on the category? You cant do strategy
outside the category you are in. And still, we
like more this definition.
Why? Because it bears the same subjective distance given by the point of view that
strategically involves the brand manager, but
does not mechanically anchor the attributes
of the trade mark in market quota and distribution systems. Of course, the brand can still
mean all these, but it represents, as Kapferer
says, a point of view on them.
And so we reach another definition of
brand, a more metaphoric one, but which is
extremely important, as I see it.
7

ibidem, p.54

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A brand is more like a box in someones head. () When time goes by, only
few things we can recover from it. But we
can know if it is a heavy or light box. We also
know the room it was in if it is in the room
of positive boxes (that of objects associated to
positive feelings and attitudes) or in that of
negative boxes 8.
So, as consumers we have our heads full
of boxes, bigger or smaller, fuller or emptier,
useful or useless, good or bad, but in anyway,
perishable. Nevertheless, the most important
discovery is that those boxes are in the consumers heads and not elsewhere.
In fact, this theory that moves the brand
box from the objective world, defined in
terms of product benefits, to the consumers
head, is at the base of branding.
Al Ries and Jack Trout named this process since 1972 positioning.
The positioning represents the place a
product occupies in the consumers head.
In the brand managers language: positioning is not what you do with a product.
The positioning is what you come to create in
the mind of the beneficiary9.
In Aakers terms that is equal to: place
the brand of a product in the positive and
negative brand rooms, to determine if they
get a bigger or smaller place. Evidently,
each brand manager wishes for his brand a
big and shiny box. But it happens often that
a small and shabby box keeps better the essence of the brand.
This is the starting point of another vision on trademarks that says brands are
David A. Aaker Building Strong Brands, New York,
The Free Press, 1996, p.10
8

Ries, Jack Trout, Poziionarea lupta pentru un loc

n mintea ta, Bucureti, Curier marketing, 2004, p.16
(Positioning The battle for you mind Published by
McGraw-Hill, 2001)
9

adjectives. All that is necessary to make a

brand wanted enters this box. To the rest, we
only have a succession of Russian dolls that
hide deeper and deeper the essence.
Luke Sullivan, executive creative director at West Wayne Advertising was saying: I use the expression brand=adjective.
Volvo=safety, Fedex=overnight.10
This adjective is practically a type of
Unique Selling Proposition11 that is applied
attributively to the category. But, at a closer
look none of the words attached to brands
is an adjective. They are made adjectives
only when attributed to category. Therefore,
Volvo is a safe car, Fedex the ultra fast post
with which you can do transfers overnight,
Bergenbier the beer you drink with your
friends.
Coming back to Kapferer, we will enrich the idea of branding by another definition. Jean Nol Kapferer was observing that:
A brand is a living memory12 because it has
to eliminate what is atypical, dissonant.
The adjective brand is a good example,
because it can only preserve one trait, it has
to eliminate all thats irrelevant. But what can
be irrelevant for a brand that the better you
know it the less you know about it?
For example, years ago, working in DDB
Romania I took part in a pitch for Ford. The
Luke Sullivan, Hei, Whipple, ncearc asta un
ghid pentru a crea reclame de excepie, Bucureti, Curier marketing, 2003, p.35 (Hey Whipple, squeeze this
a guide to creating great ads)
10

The Unique Selling Proposition (also Unique Selling Point) is a marketing concept that was first proposed as a theory to explain a pattern among successful
advertising campaigns of the early 1940s. It states that
such campaigns made unique propositions to the customer and that this convinced them to switch brands. It
was invented by Rosser Reeves.
11

12

Jean Nol Kapferer, op cit, p. 49

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brief: a campaign for Ford Focus along with

the strategical part. The agencys proposition
comprised, as usual, more creative directions
all set on the same strategical platform. As it
often happens I was one of the first victims of
the campaign and I ended in buying a Ford
Focus.
Now, after years of using the product
it is difficult to find an adjective for it, as I
could when I first heard about the product.
Therefore, it is much simpler to talk about
brands as adjectives when you know nothing
about them. But after you position them and
you build their strategical forms and then
you also used them for some time, the adjective becomes too narrow to characterize them
with. Therefore, when they start to move another theory arises, and more when many
brands move very fast, and this movement is
evidently influenced by category.
In 1975, W.P. Dizzard13 show that if the
car industry had developed as rapidly as the
computer industry, a Rolls Roys would have
cost 2.5 US dollars and it could have used
only a gallon of gas for 1.600km (995 miles).
Of course, it is almost impossible to
cover all this metamorphosis with an adjective. That is why some see more plausible
the verbal equivalence of brands. And then
Nike exhorts. IBM solves. Sony dreams.14
Apple means Think different, Philips Making
things better, And McDonalds Im loving it.
Even Google means to google, and
Yahoo transformed into Do you Yahoo?
The reference is found in the book of Charles
U.Larson, Persuasiunea . Receptare i responsabilitate, Iai, Polirom, 2003, p.108 (Persuasion: Reception and Responsibility) and it refers to the work of
W.P.Dizzard, The Coming Information Age: Overview
of Technology, Economics, and Politics
13

Dan Weiden cited by Luke Sullivan in Hey Whipple,

squeeze this a guide to creating great ads, p. 35

14

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And what about the Nestl cereals, that

instead of communicating something significant about themselves they ask for milk
the famous slogan Got milk? or about
Budweiser that asks with specific intonation:
Wassup?- making history with beer brands.
What is then the relevance of these
verbs and why do they have more meaning than an adjective? Why sometimes what
makes the brand is more important than the
brand itself?
A simple answer would be that the verb
better expresses the relation. It has a person,
is transitive or intransitive, it makes better
reference to the consumer.
The adjective is static. Is stuck in the
product without possibilities to make variations outside the superlative, that most of
the times it is a sign of aging. The adjective
is opaque.
The verb is more transparent. When
saying Got milk? Nestl. Is the brand of cereals you can never get enough of, and this
implies also an attribute good, delicious,
tasty, excellent. That means that with the
help of the verb, the adjective looses opacity
and the consumer is able to see more in a way
that involves him/her.
The verbal form sends us to another
definition of the brand that says:
The brand is a program15 Setting the
product on a moving stairway, we would say,
and like any other program it has to imply
certain movement. The branding program is
the distance between the product memory
and its projections Kapferer was saying,
and so it is easily to be verbally consumed.
In fact, overcoming the adjective phase
of branding and touching the verbal liberty
is both dangerous and benefic. It indicates
15

Kapferer, op.cit., p.55

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that the trademark is mature. But, when the

brand becomes verbal before time it can get
out of hand.
We say that Google is to google, or Nike
means Just do it! when we know enough
about these brands. Otherwise is better to
talk about them in adjectival terms.
It was better to say at first about the WV
that its a German car and only then introducing Bill Bernbachs Think simple.
The conclusion is that only famous
brands can afford to be verbal. Here we depend very much on the category, because its
hard to be verbal when you are a hard surface cleaner than when you sell high speed
cars.
I think there are brands that exist and
brands that do. Is good to have a brand
that does but it has to be sufficiently mature to do what it has to do, otherwise you
could lose control and, as Kapferer says: it
will exit the program.
And, as we are talking about Kapferer,
he added something else also: the brand is
both products memory and futuree16.
Consequently, in branding the programming is made from the roots, but it
functions so restrictively that it prescribes
what the company has to do from then on.
That is why Xerox couldnt launch computers and it had to focus on printers. That is
why Coca-Cola consumers boycotted the
New Coke product because it has a similar
taste with Pepsi, even though at the blind test
they said that the flavor they like most.
The brand is programming, it offers
that legitimate territory in which all products and all its slogans have to be comprised.
Defined in this way, the brand starts to look
like that psycho-analytic house described by
16

ibidem

Gaston Bacheleard there the attic is the memory, the ground floor is the conscious and the
basement is the subconscious. Only that they
seem to be put downwards: the basement
should be the memory, the ground floor the
present of the trademark and the roof the
developments that the brand suffers. What
brand managers should keep present in their
minds is that they cannot build a roof which
is outside the perimeter of their house, or is
too heavy or over-dimensioned.
And at this point I would propose an exercise. Try to draw the house of your brand.
Identify the memory elements of the brand
that you would put into the basement. Bring
those important to the surface and those you
want to forget deep inside the basement.
Place on the basis line those attributes on
which you try to build the resistance structure. See which the brand doors are, what
the things that make the consumers enter the
house are. See what the brand windows are,
that your consumers see in the brand. Draw
a roof trying to place there your own projections related to the brand. At the basis of
the roof put opportunities. On the top write
the place that you want your brand to occupy in consumers mind in 5 years time. Take
out through the chimney what you want to
eliminate from the brand content as it is now.
Under the threshold put the brand key. What
would the word be? The definitive element
related to the brand, an element that you
hold and wish to keep. The brand key is what
some call One Word Equity, which WOW!
capable of sustaining the brand capital of all
products you have under the same name.
And if we tried to see how a brand
house would look like, we remind also David
Aaker suggestion of assimilating the brand to
a ship whose captain is the brand manager

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and which, always in competition, has to precisely know where its competitors are, where
they are heading and what is their power.
But, more than this, it is essential to know the
tendencies that could influence the behavior
of target groups consumers perceptions
and motivations are like wind. Its important
to know their direction, their force and their
possible changes.17
We have seen that the brand can be a
box in the consumers mind, a house as legitimate territory where we can sometimes

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change furniture; we can paint it or extend

it, but always on the same foundations. It can
also be a ship, namely another type of box,
but a box with wings and whose biggest part,
the best organized side is under water, and
that which is seen is vulnerable in front of
trends.
We have also seen that brand is memory as well as programming, a kind of genetic code that impedes the BMW to produce a
product that would be similar to Renault.

Aaker Building Strong Brands, New York, The

Free Press, 1996, p. 21
17

REFERENCES:
1.Aaker, David Building Strong Brands, New York, The Free Press, 1996;
2.Aaker, David - Brand Leadership, New York, The Free Press, 2000;
3.Decker, Charles - S ctigm n afaceri cu Procter&Gamble. 99 de principii i practici care au asigurat succesul
companiei Procter&Gamble, Editura Image, 1999;
4. Kapferer, Jean-Nol - Les Marques Capital de LEntreprise. Les Chemins de la reconqute, Paris, Les Editions
DOraganisation, 1997;
5.Kotler, Philip Conform lui Kotler, Editura Brandbuilders, Bucuresti, 2006;
6.Kotler, Philip Marketing de la A la Z, Bucuresti, Editura Codecs, Bucuresti, 2004;
7.Klein, Naomi No logo: tirania marcilor, Bucuresti, Comunicare.ro, 2006;
8.Matt Haig - Brand Royality, London, Kogan Page Limited, 2004;
9.Ries, Al; Trout, Jack - Poziionarea lupta pentru un loc n mintea ta, Bucureti, Curier marketing, 2004;
10.Lindstrom, Martin Branduri senzoriale, Bucuresti, Editura Publica, 2009;
11.Newman, Michael Salturi creative, Bucuresti, Editura Brandbuilders, 2006;
12.Sullivan, Luke - Hei, Whipple, ncearc asta un ghid pentru a crea reclame de excepie, Bucureti, Curier
marketing, 2003;
13.Chernatony, Leslie de; McDonald, Malcolm Creating Powerful Brands, Oxford, Elsevier Butterworth
Heinnemann, 2003.

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