CREATIVITY CENTRED BRAND MANAGEMENT MODEL FOR
Journal of Content, Community & CommunicationAmity School of CommunicationVol. 12 Year 6, December - 2020 [ISSN: 2395-7514 (Print) ]Amity University, Madhya Pradesh [ISSN: 2456-9011 (Online)]CREATIVITY CENTRED BRAND MANAGEMENT MODEL FOR THE POSTCOVID MARKETING 5.0 WORLDDr. Arpan YagnikPenn State University, The Behrend CollegeDr. Sujo ThomasAmrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad UniversityDr. Susmita SuggalaLJIMBA, Gujarat Technological UniversityABSTRACTThis article directly responds to the call for new visions that impact the field of brandcommunications in the Marketing 5.0 world. It does so by using creative principles to deconstruct andreconceptualise an important marketing management tactic namely brand management. Brandmanagement is a polarizing tactic in the overall strategic marketing planning. It is easy to findscholars and practitioners in support of it as well as opposing it. This article reviews popular existingbrand management strategies to see how creativity is treated and presents a new futuristic model ofwhere and how should creativity be in the overall brand communication and management process.This model helps marketers take advantage of creativity principles. The model will reimagine thenarrative of brand management and creativity will be included in the dynamic mix where thechanges will hopefully have a deeper impact on the future brand management practices and itspositioning in the overall marketing management.Keywords: Creativity, Communication, Branding, Values, StrategyINTRODUCTIONThis article directly responds to the call fornew visions that impact the field of brandcommunications in the Marketing 5.0 world. Itdoes so by examining the existing approachesto brand management and presentingrevisions in perspectives and approaches tobrand management. Brand management is akey marketing management function. Everyproduct manufacturer desires that the brandequity and brand value of his product increaseconsistently. The main reason why brandmanagement is important is because brandshave enjoyed a front row seat in the minds andhearts of consumers for over a century.Interestingly, it could be argued that the veryreason why brands occupy the front row seatis brand management. Brands and brandmanagement have had a successful run overthe last century. However, brand managementas a function is hitting a plateau. Last twodecades have seen scholars and practitionersquestioning the relevance and impact of brandmanagement in its most recent avatar. Thereare hundreds of thousands of brands and ifthey are all choosing from the same pool ofbrand management strategies then it is likelythat consumers become desensitized to thestrategies and the efficiency of the strategyDOI: 10.31620/JCCC.12.20/21declines. Thus, it is important to not onlyinclude creativity in brand management butalso to apply principles of creativity tocreatively reimagine brand management,especially in the post coronavirus era whereshopper, shopper behavior and shopperloyalties have either shifted or stalled.Creativity is like the elusive unicorn. It isdifficult to locate it. Forget locating it, notmany even believe that it exists. Like it or not,you can use and have as many systems andmodels and data as you want but without thetouch of creativity brand management ishollow. We believe that Creativity despitebeing an important element of brandmanagement, is typically ignored in the brandmanagement approaches and literature. Thisarticle highlights the neglect of creativity andargues for the explicit inclusion of creativity inbrand management, and finally introducesand explicates a new creativity centredapproach to brand management for theMarketing 5.0 world.BRAND MANAGEMENTBrand management is the set of actions takento elevate a brand in the minds and hearts ofthe people. Brand management has gone227
through four phases in the last century.Branding per se goes way back but we will notbe concerning our readers with the ancienthistory of branding and discuss the namingmarks on the pots and pans or the brandingmarks on cattle. Time begins in this articlefrom 1870s. The earliest brand managers werethe founders themselves or the inventorowner themselves who were courageousenough to assume responsibility of theirproduct. These were the individuals whoproclaimed to the market that they had asubstantial role to play in ensuring that aproduct reached to the market and thereforethey were certain about the quality of theproduct. These individuals were vested andwere interested in seeing their brand grow.They led the charge in doing so and theiremployees followed.Gamble was the first to officially incorporatethis system of managing the reputation ofproducts in its organizational structure andsince then all major corporations have adoptedthis system of brand management.After second world war, brand managementstarted getting standardized and its space inthe organizational structure was alsocemented. Brand managers held clout inorganizations and its decisions. Theysymbolized dynamism, ownership, boldness,and the ability to break ground in unchartedterritories. For the reader reading this, severalof your closets and spaces in your home arefilled with these brands that you relate toeither due to the tangible or the intangiblebenefits and associations with attributes.21st century has given businesses quite a fewshocks financially, technologically as well aswith the changing natures of their belovedcustomers. These shocks loosened the grips ofmany large businesses and subsequently alsogave rise to entrepreneurs who were eager tomake the most of the turmoil and the changeto transform their offerings into brands. Mostof these start-ups were and still are not in aposition to afford brand managers. Many atimes, start-ups have a Chief MarketingOfficer (CMO) who also happens to be the incharge of logistics, accounting, sales and whoalso happens to be the founder-owner. Thistakes us back to the late 1800s but acompetitive advantage that today’s founderowners have is technology and thedocumented knowledge of strategic brandmanagement.Then came a class of salaried employees whotook upon the onus of making decisionspertaining to a product. There were tworeasons for the shift of management functionof brands from the owners to salariedprofessionals. 1) brand owners were by far toorich by now so they could afford creating newpositions and supporting extra salarymoreover, they also had the foresight that theprofit this one manager would bring would byfar exceed his salary, and 2) the expansion inthe business operations did not leave sufficienttime for the owners to be involved in day today affairs. Both the reasons along with theincreasing fashion of hiring managers todemonstrate the decentralization of decisionmaking power and a shift towards the conceptof organization gave rise to the powerfulmanagers of the brand.Brand management has worked tirelessly toassign products ranging from a soap to a car aspecial place in the minds and hearts ofconsumers. This marketing managementfunction is responsible for some of the longestlasting relationships between a consumer anda product. Kevin Keller initially gave us one ofthe most popular explanation of strategicbrand management through his book of thesame title in 1997. His third edition came outin 2008 where he breaks down strategic brandmanagement as activities that “involves thedesign and implementation of marketingprograms and activities to build, measure, andmanage brand equity” (Keller, 2008, p. 60). Hisapproach to brand management comprises offour steps that begin with “Identifying andBrand management, by the 1920s, mainlycomprised of production, promotion andpersonalselling.Brandmanagementexecutives were in close collusion withadvertising agency as these agencies werebelieved to hold the key to market intelligencethat would boost the demand for a brand. Thiscollusion ultimately became one of the mostsuccessful symbiotic relations in the field ofmarketing management. Newer means andtechniques of finding reliable informationabout consumers and identifying effectiveways to promote a new product in a way toelevate it to the desired status of a brandunder the direct supervision of an individualbecame a prominent practice. Proctor and228
establishing brand positioning” followed by“planning and implementing brand marketingprograms” and “Measuring and interpretingbrand performance” and concluding with“growing and sustaining brand equity”. Hismodel is linear, and all the four steps requirenumerous tactics to achieve the goals of agiven step. Recently, brand management hasbeen explored from different perspectives inmany studies and has been popular withresearchers in domain areas such as onlineretail, digital media, tourism, fitness trackers,and cause-related marketing (Bhakar andBhakar, 2020; Kushwaha et al., 2020; Thomasand Kureshi, 2020; Thomas et al., 2020a;Thomas et al., 2020b; Thomas et al., 2020c;Thomas and Kureshi, 2016; Kureshi andThomas, 2020; Kureshi and Thomas, 2019).also important because it inherently highlightsthe thought hierarchy. Creativity is at thebottom of the hierarchy; ideas are on top ofcreativity and innovation occupies thetopmost spot. Another way to understand thisis that creativity is like dry wood. Dry wood isthe essential fuel required for fire. Fire is theidea. Just as how dry wood helps generate fire,creativity helps generates ideas. Some amongmany ideas receive widespread acceptanceand those ideas transform into innovationwhich is commercialized and monetized.Creativity is a given in many aspects ofmarketing process such as product design andadvertising. However, creativity is not a givenwhen discussing brand management, which isan issue that this article highlights. Creativityprovides unique competitive edge andadvantage to the brand manager or a founderowner who is in the process of managing hisbrand.CREATIVITYCreativity is paramount for growth andprogress. However, as mentioned before,creativity is the elusive unicorn andharnessing the elusive unicorn is not easy.Creativity as the ability to generate ideas thatare novel and unique is a fairly populardefinition of creativity used in scholarlyliterature. Martindale (1989) further analyzedthe components of a creative idea and groupedthe elements. The first element was a unique,original or novel idea, the second element wasan idea with a meaningful functional use andthe third element of the process was toimplement the idea (Runco and Jaeger, 2012).The elusive unicorn in addition to the processhas also been looked at from the lens ofperson, product, and place where eachconsiders a different aspect of creativity suchas the individual who generates creativity orthe final creative output.CREATIVITY AND MARKETINGMarketing strives to add value to a company’soffering and aims to appeal to the customersby persuading them to develop an intention topurchase and ultimately consume. A marketerstrives to identify a unique set of values andnovel ways to communicate with his targetsegments to grab a share of customer’s mind.Creativity gives a message an extra edge andaffords the message a faster reception and alonger retention in the minds of the customersresulting in a cumulative increase in brandrecognition and sales in a cluttered market.Creative solutions increase the salience of thebrand giving companies a competitiveadvantage over the others in the same productclass. Savvy marketers have utilized creativityto gain more eyeballs and foot falls even withtight purse strings.A comprehensive understanding of creativitycan also be found in the FAQ section of theMacAurthur Foundation’s Genius Grantwebpage. It explains creativity and it givesexamples of the several forms in whichcreativity can be found and applied. Despitebeing comprehensive and the favourite of theauthors, it is broad and somewhat vague. Thedefinition of creativity provided by Sir KenRobinson is a good fit for the purposes of thisarticleandhenceforthwewillbeunderstanding creativity on the basis of thatdefinition. Creativity, as he defines it in hispopular TED Talk, is the ability to come upwith an idea that has a value. This definition isMarketing is about creating a meaningfuldifferentiation for easy recognition and recallin a crowded marketplace (Wadden, 2011).Martindale (1989) emphasized the need foreffective positioning for building a strongbrand. He describes creativity as an originaland useful idea irrespective of the fieldmaking creativity integral to the brandpositioning process. Creativity injects abreakaway from the tradition by re-arrangingexisting elements of the marketing in a newand useful way. Organizations haverecognized the need for creative methods as aneffective way to promote product innovations.229
CREATIVITYANDBRANDMANAGEMENTBrands have long been regarded as a point ofsustainable differentiation (Aaker, 1996) andtherefore, brand management has gained a lotof attention to academicians as well asmarketing practitioners. Sutton and Kelley(1997) acknowledge the impact of creativityand emphasise it as a major constituent forcrafting reputed brands. Van Gelder (2005)describes creativity not the same as ation(routinecreativity) and further asserts the inspirationalrole of creativity on brand. He also furtheradvocates creativity to be an idea visualizeddifferently or breeding an absolutely new ideawhich must be utilized while formulating avision for a brand. Kao (1991, p. 14) definescreativity as a human process leading to aresult which is novel (new), useful (solves anexisting problem or satisfies an existing need)and understandable (can be reproduced)''.However, when the initiatives lack originality,they miss the mark in attaining the desiredprofitability causing frustration and lack oftrust forcing the management to resort back totraditional methods of marketing (Andrewand Smith, 1996).Another important aspect of marketing isadvertising. Advertising exists to attractcustomers’ attention for either buildingawareness, interest, desire or influence thepurchase decisions of the customers. Severalstudies support the above observation thatadvertisements were developed to create afavourable image of the firm’s offering and tocreate a positive opinion to increase bothawareness and comprehensions (Yang andSmith, 2009; Till and Baack, 2005). A successfuladvertisement is a mix of important conceptsincluding creativity (Hopkins, 1972; El-Muradand West, 2004). The novel ideas andmessages appealed to the audiences resultingin higher brand awareness tilting theconsumer attitudes in favour of the firm’sofferings (Yang and Smith, 2009; Till andBaack, 2005). Both businessmen andconsumersembracedcreativityandacknowledged its significance in bringingabout a positive and favourable change in thepurchase decisions (Stump and Heide, 1996).Despite the fact that creativity is acclaimed byresearchers, its prominence is restricted tospecific industries and hence, does not deriveits due importance in every society (VanGelder, 2005). Jensen and Beckmann (2009)suggests that organizations to be successful incorporate branding should trust on a brandmanagement philosophyembodied bycreativity. Van Gelder (2005) states thatcreativity is one of the major influencingfactors for managing the brand effectivelyacross multiple markets and it becomes crucialfor organizations to adapt creativity not inparts but in its entirety. Baack et al. (2016)suggests that creativity led to positive brandevaluations and emphasized the role ofcreativity in designing communicationstrategies. Further, Smith et al. (2008) statesthat creativity also results in better brandcognitions, positive attitudes towards brandand higher brand purchase intentions.The concept of creativity in the marketingcontext is dealt in a limited way. Thus,exploring new ways to market products andservices by adapting the concept of creat
The first element was a unique, original or novel idea, the second element was an idea with a meaningful functional use and . definition of creativity provided by Sir Ken Robinson is a good fit for the purposes of this article and henceforth we will be understanding creativity on the basis of that definition. Creativity, as he defines it in his
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Strategic Brand Management Exeter MBA and MSc –Day 2 Brand Strategy Jack Buckner Aaker’s Brand Identity System BRAND IMAGE How the brand is now perceived BRAND IDENTITY How strategists want the brand to be perceived BRAND POSITION The part of the brand identity and value pro
STRATEGIC BRAND MANAGEMENT Strategic brand management process is important for creating and sustaining brand equity. Developing a strategy that successfully sustains or improves brand awareness, strengthens brand associations, emphasizes brand quality and utilization, is a part of brand management. The brand str
The brand meaning evolution model The brand resonance pyramid model Brand knowledge is defined in terms of two components: brand awareness and brand image o Brand awareness relates to brand recall and recognition performance by consumers o Brand image refers to the set of associations linked to
brand equity, brand image, brand personality and brand extension. 2. Brand Extension. Brand extension is a marketing strategy in which new products are introduced in relation to a successful brand. Various experts have defined brand extensions differently . though, these definitions look quite similar. Kotler and Armstrong (2002) defined brand
Brand values help to remain true to your brand values and will increase employee engagement. Benefit 2 Brand values make your brand more memorable. Benefit 3 Brand values will create deep emotional connections with your audience. Benefit 4 Brand values will maintain brand authenticity. Benefit 5 Brand values will guide everyone on your team .
brand awareness, brand association, perceived quality and brand loyalty to estimate brand equity [11]. Reference on Aaker, we define brand asset with four dimensions: brand awareness, brand association, perceived quality and brand loyalty. Brand awareness is the ability to consumers or potential consumers to realize relationships between a certain
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