综合运用品牌分类的品牌建设.docVIP

标题：Integrated brand building using brand taxonomies 原文： Introdution The process of building and sustaining brands is changing. Until the early 1990s, it was an activity primarily undertaken by junior brand managers, who focussed on tactics, regarded their posts as good training grounds and moved on after a short tenure (Low and Fullerton, 1994). With harsher environments forcing firms to work harder to grow profits, a shift is occurring in the way firms are organized for brand management (George, et al., 1994). Firms are restructuring around customers and the processes that add value to customers’ consumption experiences. This is resulting in brand management becoming more of a team-based activity, managed at more senior levels by people who adopt a more strategic perspective. The strength of this is that a broad spectrum of skills can be richly fused to address the myriad of company-wide issues that need coordinating when implementing brand strategy. However, because of team members’ diverse backgrounds, there is a greater likelihood of differing interpretations about the nature of their brand (Assael, 1992). In these situations firms might not be gaining maximum benefit from harmonizing all the activities across their value chains, since different departments may not be working toward the same goal (cf. Mintzberg and Waters’ (1982) formulated versus realized strategy). As this paper shows, different categories of brands need managing in different ways. Unless all members of the brand’s team fully appreciate the type of brand they are managing, they may individually be making incorrect assumptions about the work their department should undertake, resulting in suboptimal efficiency. For example, one organization launched a successful drinks brand and a few years later then developed a variant which had a more up-market positioning. The nature of this new brand variant was poorly communicated internally, and because of this, some of the national accounts sales team a