Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 11

Essay Example Not especially the nature of brands and how consumers perceive them. With the combined efforts of the academe and the corporate world, the art of creating Brand Equity has been greatly helped, almost to the point of evolving a specific science for marketing success, or so it seems. This report will attempt to summarize the points articulated on the Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller’s definitive reference text â€Å"Marketing Management (13th edition)†, specifically on the chapter of Building Strong Brands. This discourse will venture into the basic elements of a brand from the perspective of the brand â€Å"owner or author†; the nature of the benefits which brands are supposed to provide; observations on how marketing outcomes are determined by the consumers perception of the brand (brand equity) and how they are arrived at; how a brand’s value can be assessed and quantified; an analysis of branding strategies through the cases provided in the text, and the role of different brands in an established brand â€Å"architecture† (brand portfolio) and how consumer responses can be similarly assessed so as to provide a measure of confidence that a brand can expect from its prospective patrons (consumer equity). We can do well to use the American Marketing Association’s definition of a brand as a jumping board for analyzing the concept of Brand Equity. AMA stipulates that brands consists of a â€Å"name, term, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.† (Kotler and Keller 276) Further, this system for identifying products (or services for that matter) maybe designed so as to represent a tangible, functional or rational attribute relating to a product’s performance or any intangible associations such as those that are implied symbolically