Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #5

Don’t separate your product names from your brand name.

The most powerful asset that marketing people are given by their company to perform their marketing job is the brand name.  In exchange for the use of this asset, marketing people have the responsibility to nurture their brand name.  Don’t revert to short hand when communicating about your products.  Each time the product name is used in copy, ensure that it is preceded by the brand name.  While this practice would seem to be redundant in body copy, your target customer learns through repetition.  Each repetition of your brand name builds the brand in the memories of your target customers.  Each repetition of the two words, links the product name to the brand name.  Whatever equity attributes are associated with your brand name are linked to your product.

In essence, this guide leads you to treating every product as a brand extension.  But isn’t that exactly what you want?  You want every product to be an extension of your brand.  I know that some popular marketing authors decry the over-use of brand extensions arguing that they dilute a brand, and they argue that the marketer should be creating new brands rather than relying upon brand extensions.  On one side of the coin, they have a legitimate point; generally speaking, the narrowly positioned brands tend to be stronger than those that have a more general positioning.  However, I would argue the opposite side of the coin:  building new brands is expensive and most marketers don’t have the resources to build and sustain a large number of brands.  If you de-link your product name from your brand name, you’re treating that product as a stand alone brand; and you better be prepared to have the resources to support that new brand.

Learn from Other Marketers’ Mistakes:  I’ve mentioned in this blog that Acura moved from product names that have meaning to alphanumeric product names because they had created so much equity for the Legend product name that the Acura brand name suffered.  Acura was taking advantage of the marketing guide that consumers tend not to remember alphanumeric names.  By using product names such as RL, TL, etc., Acura encouraged consumers to, more often than not, place the brand name in front of the product name when discussing their vehicles, Acura RL, Acura TL, etc. to ensure that they were understood.

Learn from My Mistakes:  I often tell people that in my 40-year marketing career, I have made every mistake that one can make in marketing.  In the early 1980’s, I was working for the tire division of The BFGoodrich Company.  At that time, the company was investing in its divisions that were in growth product categories and starving the mature tire division of resources.  While this approach to investment was entirely consistent with increasing shareholder value, the management of the tire division felt like abandoned children waiting for the company to harvest the division (which eventually occurred).  With no competitive advantage other than marketing, the tire division had survived competing in the category because of its line of high margin performance tires called T/A Radials.  Tire division management made the decision to use the product name T/A Radials de-linked from the brand name BFGoodrich.  For a long period of time, the marketing efforts of the firm centered on T/A Radials and minimized the brand name BFGoodrich. The result was that among the brand’s target customers, T/A Radials became more remembered than the brand, BFGoodrich.  Since other product lines were being marketed under the BFGoodrich brand, those product lines suffered with the decline in equity for BFGoodrich brand.