Brand Ownership

The legal owner of a brand is generally the individual or entity in whose name the trademark has been filed. Operationally speaking, brand ownership should be the responsibility of an organization’s management and employees. Brand ownership is about building and maintaining a brand that reflects your principles and values. Brand building is about effectively persuading customers to believe in and purchase your product or service. Iconic brands, such as Apple and Disney, often have a history of visionary leaders who champion the brand, evangelize about it, and build it into the organizational culture and operations.

Branding Strategies

A branding strategy helps establish a product within the market and to build a brand that will grow and mature. Making smart branding decisions is crucial since a company may have to live with their decisions for a long time. The following are commonly used branding strategies:

branded house strategy

A branded house strategy (sometimes called a house brand) uses one brand, often the company name, as the identifying brand name for a range of products (for example, Mercedes Benz vehicles or Black & Decker hardware and appliances).

Because the primary focus and investment is in a single, dominant house brand, this approach can be simpler and more cost-effective in the long run when it is well aligned with broader corporate strategy.

house of brands strategy

With the house of brands strategy, a company invests in building out a variety of individual brands. Each of these brands has a separate name and may not be associated with the parent company name at all.

These brands may even be in competition with other brands from the same company. For example, Kool-Aid and Capri Sun are two fruit-flavored beverage products, both owned by The Kraft Heinz Company.

The house of brands strategy is well suited to companies that operate across many product categories at the same time. It allows greater flexibility to introduce a variety of different products, of differing quality and features, that can be sold without confusing the consumer’s perception of what business the company is in or diluting brand perceptions about products that target different market segments.

private label branding

Also called store branding, private label branding refers to the brands that retailers create and sell exclusively within their stores.

In cases where the retailer has a particularly strong identity, the private label sold exclusively by the retailer may be able to compete against even the strongest brand leaders and may outperform those products that are not otherwise strongly branded. The northeastern U.S. grocery chain Wegman’s offers many grocery products that carry the Wegman’s brand name while grocery chain Safeway offers their own private label brands such as Safeway Select, Organics, Signature Cafe, and Primo Taglio, among others.^[1] 

no-brand branding

No-brand branding can be considered a type of branding since the product is made conspicuous by the absence of a brand name.

A number of companies successfully pursue no-brand strategies by creating packaging that imitates generics, plainly packaged products often sold at a discount. Brandless is a company that sells personal health, beauty, and home products, all packaged with labels that describe the products but without a brand name.

Personal or organization brands

Personal and organizational branding are strategies for developing a brand image and marketing engine around an individual or organization. Personal branding treats persons and their careers as products to be branded and sold to target audiences. Organizational branding promotes the mission, goals, and/or work of the organization being branded.

The music and entertainment industries provide many examples of personal and organizational branding. From Lizzo to Giannis Antetokounmpo to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, virtually any celebrity today is a personal brand. Likewise, bands, orchestras, and other artistic groups typically cultivate an organizational brand. Faith branding is a variant of this brand strategy, which treats religious figures and organizations as brands seeking to increase their following. Mission-driven organizations such the Girl Scouts of America, the Sierra Club, and Habitat for Humanity pursue organizational branding to expand their membership, resources, and impact.

place branding

The developing fields of place branding and nation branding work on the assumption that places compete with other places to win over people, investment, tourism, economic development, and other resources. With this in mind, public administrators, civic leaders, and business groups may team up to brand and promote their city, region, or nation among target audiences.

Depending on the goals they are trying to achieve, targets for these marketing initiatives may be real-estate developers, employers and business investors, tourists and tour/travel operators, and so forth. While place branding may focus on any given geographic area or destination, nation branding aims to measure, build, and manage the reputation of countries. “I ♥ NY” is an example of successful place branding for New York State.

co-branding

Co-branding is an arrangement in which two established brands collaborate to offer a single product or service that carries both brand names.

In these relationships, generally both parties contribute something of value to the new offering that neither would have been able to achieve independently. Effective co-branding builds on the complementary strengths of the existing brands. It can also allow each brand an entry point into markets in which they would not otherwise be credible players.

For example, Target collaborated with LEGO to create items that would be exclusively sold in Target stores. The products included housewares, pet accessories, clothing for adults and children, and, of course, LEGO bricks and minifigures.^[2]

Co-branding is a common brand-building strategy, but it can present difficulties. There is always risk around how well the market will receive new offerings, and sometimes co-branded offerings turn out to be unpopular. Also, these arrangements often involve complex legal agreements that are difficult to implement. Co-branding relationships may be unevenly matched with the partners having different visions for their collaboration, placing different priority on the importance of the co-branded venture, or one partner holding significantly more power than the other in determining how they work together. Because co-branding impacts the existing brands, the partners may struggle with how to protect their current brands while introducing something new and possibly risky.

brand licensing

Brand licensing is the process of leasing, or renting, the right to use a brand in association with a product or set of products for a defined period of time and within a defined market, geography, or territory.

Through a licensing agreement, the licensor provides some tangible or intangible asset to the licensee and gives the licensee the right to use the licensor’s brand name and related brand assets in return for some payment. The licensee obtains a competitive advantage in this arrangement, while the licensor obtains inexpensive access to the market in question.

Licensing can be extremely lucrative for the owner of the brand, as other organizations pay for permission to produce products carrying a licensed name. The Walt Disney Company was an early pioneer in brand licensing, and it remains a leader in this area with its wildly popular entertainment and toy brands: Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, Disney Princesses, Toy Story, Mickey Mouse, and so on. Toy manufacturers, for example, pay millions of dollars and vie for the rights to produce and sell products affiliated with these super brands.

Line extensions and brand extensions

• A company creates a line extension when it introduces a new variety of offering within the same product category.
• A brand extension moves an existing brand name into a new product category, with a new or somehow modified product.

For example, in line extensions, a company might add new flavors, package sizes, nutritional content, or products containing special additives. Line extensions aim to provide more variety and hopefully capture more of the market within a given category. More than half of all new products introduced each year are line extensions. M&M candy varieties such as pretzel, peanut butter, and crunchy cookie are all line extensions of the M&M brand. Diet Coke is a line extension of the parent brand Coca-cola. While the products have distinct differences, they are in the same carbonated soft drink product category.

In contrast, with a brand extension, a company uses the strength of an established product to launch a product in a different category, hoping the popularity of the original brand will increase receptivity of the new product. An example of a brand extension is the offering of frozen Jell-O Pudding Pops in addition to the original product, Jell-O pudding mix. This strategy increases awareness of the brand name and increases profitability from offerings in more than one product category.

Line extensions and brand extensions are important tools for companies because they reduce financial risk associated with new-product development by leveraging the value in the parent brand name to enhance consumers’ perceptions and receptivity towards new products. Due to the established success of the parent brand, consumers will have instant recognition of the product name and be more likely to try the new line extension.

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