Modeling the Process of Branding - Essay Example

The key factors that have led to the evolutionary trend of branding are the search for individualism, globalization, and the desire for symbolic experience in demand. This paper will seek to clarify how the post-modern world, modeling the process of branding has shifted from a lifeless engineering orientation to a living/organic orientation.

Because of the desire to dominate markets, brands were managed by firms to maximize profits through differentiating brands to command large market shares. The application of brand in this aspect led to the equity approach to brand management. The main objective of this approach was maximizing profits. Branding was taken as a process of economic exchange of a firm’s (producer of the brand) brand for the customer’s money. This approach portrays branding as a well-structured engineered process, whereby consumers provide measurable feedback through buying or failure to buy. This was evidenced by the use of geometric figures such as circles, and triangles when modeling the branding process (Keller, 2008).

This branding process under the equity approach begins with an extensive brand awareness campaign aimed at satisfying consumers’ functional needs by availing products and services. Consequently, after meeting functional needs a firm aims to satisfy emotional needs by associating its product or services with desirable image, and design through marketing. Thereafter, the firm differentiates its product from the competition by creating a connection with customers, enhancing customer loyalty, and thus achieving brand equity.

The brand equity approach is viewed as incomplete due to its rational approach to the branding process based on the scientific style of brand management. This rational approach leads to missing the ‘ontological reality” of brands and their “social ecology” (Grassl, pp. 313-360). The equity branding approach depicts the brand as a lifeless controllable object which has no social capability with its consumers. In addition, the rational approach overshadows the individual aspects of a brand as it concentrates solely on creating an objective brand.

Due to the failures of the equity approach to branding, a new concept of a social approach to the branding process emerged. This marked the transition of moving from the lifeless engineering orientation to a living/organic orientation of the branding process (Stern, pp.216-223). This approach borrowed ideas from behavioral sciences like social psychology and sociology to enhance the branding process. Social-psychological approach to the branding process aims at creating strong personal associations between customers and the brand thus building brand identity rather than brand equity. These brand and customer personal relationships are created on sincerity, competence, and excitement dimensions.

The Social-psychological approach depicts the branding process as the creation of harmony between customer and brand qualities. It attains this by using ethnically implied messages delivered through strategic marketing communications. Consequently, the approach reduces the function of culture and social relationships to means of communicating and enhancing brand identity. Therefore it does not cater to all social aspects of a brand.

In the anthropological branding process approach, brand identity emanates from the culture rather than culture being a means of communicating the brand. Thus this approach portrays branding as an attempt by consumers to create their own identities from their own culture. The process of branding according to this approach is as follows from culture to brand formation and then the consumer which is the exact opposite of the social-psychological branding approach. Thus under this approach, a brand changes from a market-driven to a market-driving force.  Currently, there has been an effort to seek a hybrid approach to the branding process which accommodates both the equity and the social approaches (Wattanasuwan, pp.179-184).

Thus from the above changes in branding engineering, it is clearly evident that the branding process has transformed from being an economic process of devising means of providing and satisfying customers' needs better than competitors to the social side of the brand. This brand management has evolved from being a dead mechanical process under an equity approach to the current lively and friendly process as per the social branding approach. In addition, the branding process has changed from being firmly controlled to being culturally driven.