Customer and brand manager perspectives on brand relationships: a conceptual framework

By: Saurabh Upadhyay Hitesh Patels

Introduction
Brand extension, co-branding and other associative techniques together with an increasingly communicative environment are resulting in an increasingly complex set of networks and relationships between brands, with singular and multiple relationship forms. There are two key perspectives on these complex relationships, that of the customer and that of the brand owner, i.e. what is seen at the point of transaction and what is expressed by the various brand constructors. Two key perspectives on brand relationships are used that of the customer and that of the brand owner, to describe and discuss an analytical classication of these relationships

 We commence by reviewing the sources of brand meaning and how brand meaning is understood before investigating how recent developments in networks and communications affect these concepts and the managerial issues that arise, and then develop a matrix to classify and better understand brand relationships.

Source Of Brand Meaning

Brand meaning is informed by a highly complex range of inuences, some of which can be controlled (managerially determined) more than others, which can only be observed and inuenced (customer determined). brand image, perceived quality, and brand attitude are separate and distinct dimensions of a brand impression, but which in turn are entirely dependent upon customer determined rather than managerially determined meaning

 In order to fully understand the meaning of a brand relationship, one must assess the total set of associations that are perceived by customers, and the total set of relationships between the brands. Further, that these associations must be considered together to assess their collective or aggregate effect on brand meaning.

Understanding Brand Meaning

Business Network
Consistency in brand communications is important in building and maintaining a strong brand image, but often a brands ultimate presentation to customers at the point of purchase is in the control of a retailer rather than the manufacturer or brand owner that context (such as retail) could create conditions in which customers relied more on external cues and less on previously formed attitudes the service brand acted as a relationship lever or fulcrum on which trust was built between consumer and service provider

 The nature and management have been considerably changed in recent years through the adoption of new communications technologies. The interactions between customer and customer, and between business and business, are represented as network associations in Figure 2, and the distance between customer and brand is represented as interaction.

Changing Branding environment

For a variety of reasons, including business activity on the internet with its increased communication between customers, the rise of brand extensions and co-branding, and the increasing importance of brand association and other associative effects, brand constellations are emerging There is certainly potential for increased drift between the meanings of brand identity, as created by an originator, and the meaning drawn from the user environment by a customer. Examples abound on the internet of web sites that are clearly outside the control of the large corporations that they attack, such as www.untied.com and www.mcspotlight.org that publicise apparent inadequacies in the business practices of United Airlines and McDonalds respectively.

Managing Brand Associations

A brand extension is an attempt to associate a new product with an existing one by use of a brand name. (Saving advertising cost too) Co-branding is another managerial technique used in establishing associations between brands in the eyes of the customer. This technique has been used to pair new brands with existing brands that have powerful images attached to them in the hope of associating those positive images with the new products, based on the psychological process of classical conditioning

A matrix of business relationships and brand interactions

the simplest way of illustrating the types of relationships involved is to represent them as two-dimensional. The two dening dimensions are the strength of business associations between the brands, and the strength of association between brands by customers. One factor is therefore business-based, and the other is customer-based. Business relationships may be inextricably and strongly associated, or weaker than that. The associations that customers make between brands, in turn, may be more or less close or distant. Hence, integrating the two views shown in Figure 2 gives us a simple two-dimensional set of axes, shown in Figure

The in-between area

Clearly not all business relationships or perceived brand associations fall neatly into one category or the other, so no boundaries have been drawn around any of the notional areas discussed above to reect this. An interesting example is the sponsorship by the American agribusiness giant Simplot of the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia; the food business believes that exposing its local managerial staff to the creative artists at the college will provide insights that will provide an advantage in the highly competitive Australian agribusiness market.(area 2-4) A slightly stronger association than that found in the centre of area 3 is the opportunistic relationships between businesses in different sectors such as specic arrangements between graduate employment agencies and universities; or Qantas, Telstra, ANZ Bank, Mobil petrol, and Visa credit cards that are all associated in the one loyalty points program.

Conclusion
conceptual synthesis of work on the dynamics of brand networks and the dynamics of business relationships with particular attention to new business environments, and has proposed a framework for better understanding the networks and associations between brands.