Talk:Brand/Archives/2016

Assessment comment
Substituted at 10:12, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Potential Direction for Clean-Up and Overhaul of Page
This page needs a major overhaul with a restructure of headings,consolidation of repetitive material, reconciliation of contradictory material and better quality sources.

Here are my suggestions for a major clean up.

Organising Framework: The page is desperately in need of an overall architecture or organising framework that would organise the existing material into logical categories, and allow prospective editors to identify the best place to add new material. The lead section and the first two headings are OK as far as they go, but then the page starts to become messy. Section 5.4. Multiproduct branding and the headings that follow consist of a grab-bag of ideas that broadly consist of three themes; types of brands, branding strategies and problems/ challenges in brand management. To organise this content, I recommend that three new headings be created along the following lines:

Once these headings have been created, a lot of existing content could be moved around for a better overall fit and a logical progression.
 * Types of Brands (e.g. private brands, multibrands, national brands etc)
 * Brand Strategies (e.g. brand extension, fighting brands, challenger brands etc)
 * Problems and Challenges in Brand Management (e.g. brand dilution)

In relation to the first heading, Types of Brands some of the less frequently cited brand types such as doppelganger brands and crowd-sourcing brands could be grouped together under a general sub-heading, "Other types of brands" Consolidation of Repetitive Material: This page contains numerous repetitions which are problematic not only because they are unnecessary (add to verbiage without adding to value), but because they allow for internal contradictions to creep in. Some of the observed repetitions are as follows:

Removing these repetitions, by collapsing them together, will reduce overall word length, making the page more readable. In addition, the use of an overall organising framework should limit the number of repetitions and contradictions that creep into the page in the future by giving prospective editors clear guidelines about logical categories and the optimal place for new material to be added.
 * Private brands/ private labels: Generics, Private Labels and 'No brands': Private labels are discussed in muiltiple sections e.g. 5.6 Private branding strategy, Sec 5.14 Private labels
 * Multi-branding: Two sections are devoted to multibrands, Section 5.5 Multibrands and 5.13 Multibranding and other commentary is interspersed throughout the page
 * Brand Awareness:  Brand awareness: (currently very confused discussion) is discussed in Section 2.0 Concepts; Section 2.2 Brand awareness, where it is discussed three times; in  the preamble to Section 2.2, and in the definitions and in the expanded discussion (of 2.2). In each case, different terminology is employed and different definitions advanced while errors of interpretation are numerous
 * Brand Extension: Two sections are currently devoted to brand extension; Section 5.4.3 Brand Extension and 5.11 Brand Dilution and Extension
 * Brand identity: Two sections are devoted to brand identity - 3.4 Brand Identity and 3.4.1 Visual brand identity

Reconciliation of Contradictory Material:

Although there are several places where internal contradictions occur, the main problem is the treatment of brand awareness. As mentioned, brand awareness is discussed in Section 2.0 Concepts; Section 2.2 Brand awareness, where the concepts are discussed no less than three times- in the preamble to Section 2.2, in the definitions (presented as a bulleted list) and in the expanded discussion in section 2.2. The overall result of this level of repetition and contradiction is that the discussion becomes confusing, and difficult to follow. It is conceptually unsound and potentially misleading. (For example, one sentence claims that brand recall is the initial stage of awareness - which really misses the point and misinterprets the reference provided).

First, the opening paragraphs claims that there are two forms of brand awareness - brand recognition and recall, both of which are discussed ( I agree with this and would argue that this is the consensus view in the marketing literature!). However, the section then goes onto to state that there are three types of awareness - aided awareness, top-of-mind awareness and strategic awareness, now introducing one new type of awareness, but completely overlooking brand recognition (aka unaided brand awareness, as mentioned in the introduction). From the reader's perspective, it is unclear whether there are 2, 3, or possibly 4 different types of awareness and moreover with little idea as to what those types of awareness might actually be.

These problems arise for a variety of reasons; because of the use of different terminology (brand recognition vs aided awareness and brand recall vs unaided brand awareness) and because of the failure to recognise that top-of-mind awareness is NOT a different type of awareness, but rather a special case of brand recall.) Another issue is that the poor quality definitions used may cause confusion in that readers or editors may fail to recognise that brand recall is actually the same as unaided brand awareness because the definitions of each appear to be different. It appears that much of this discussion has been written by different contributors who have failed to check what went before, or who have failed to recognise that published authors sometimes use different labels to describe the same underlying concepts (e.g. brand recognition and aided awareness are actually the same thing).

This section on brand awareness really needs someone with subject matter expertise to clean it up, with a view to providing clearly articulated explanations of the core types of awareness along with a discussion of their significance. In this particular case more definitions would be unhelpful. What is desperately needed is a reconciliation of the material that is already on the page. Major omissions:

I feel that the page would be incomplete without a brief discussion of the following:


 * Country-of-origin branding
 * Metrics used to measure brand health (e.g. brand equity, brand shares, awareness tests, attitude tests etc)

It might also be worth considering that 'destination branding' is a special case of 'country-of-origin branding' and grouping these two together in their own sub-section. If there is someone with expertise in either of these areas, their contribution would enhance the page by providing a more comprehensive discussion of the current ideas in branding and brand management.

Relevance:

Finally, the last paragraph deals with advertising budgets and does not appear to be integrated into the concept of brands/ branding/ brand management in any way. My instinct is to delete this passage entirely, but maybe someone can find a way to move it and integrate it into the page's other contents?

I had begun the clean-up process by moving a few definitions around and clarifying others and also added a new sub-section on the recent development of 'designer private labels'. Unfortunately following an unpleasant encounter with an over-zealous editor who has decided that he (or she) does not approve of my contributions and deletes them, I have decided to refrain from making substantive changes (although I am still willing to add references and/or correct English usage).

If prospective editors are willing to tackle one or more of my suggestions, the page has the potential to become really useful.

BronHiggs (talk) 23:42, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

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