Compare and contrast customer, company, and competitor brand roles.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Whether the customer is a consumer or another business, brands have three primary roles. First, the brand conveys information about the product. Without any additional data, customers construct expectations about quality, service, even features based on the brand. Brands also educate the customer about the product. People assign meaning to their product experiences by brand and, over time, make judgments about which brands are best at meeting their needs and which are not. As a result, product evaluations and purchase decisions become less formidable as the customer relies on the cumulative brand experience to simplify the purchase process. A third brand role is to help reassure the customer in the purchase decision.

Brands also perform important roles for the brand's sponsor (manufacturer, distributor, or retailer). They offer legal protection for the product through a trademark. By protecting the brand, the company is able to defend essential product elements such as its features, patentable ideas in manufacturing or product design, and packaging. A second critical role is that brands offer an effective and efficient methodology for categorizing products.

Market-leading brands provide competitors with a benchmark against which to compete. In industries with strong market-leading brands, competitors design and build products targeted specifically at the market leader. In these situations, the competitor leverages its product strength against the market-leading brand's perceived weakness.