New Trends in Brand Management

Branding is both a science and an art. The analytical perspective of branding can be viewed as science while the implementation of branding strategies according to the market environment appears to be a work of art. Managers of the companies should develop skills in both science and art of branding to gain brand leadership in the market. Financial and economic interactions of various players in the market including consumers, competitors, distributors, retailers, and governments are the culmination of human transactions in the broad sense. Marketing transactions begin with analyzing the needs, exchanges of thoughts, emotions, experiences, satisfaction, and social dynamics on the product-market behavior. Therefore, marketing activity is guided by branding, which represents the convergence of innovative thinking and consumption patterns. Innovation in developing or analyzing a brand is a science, while deriving brand as consumption object and optimizing the satisfaction from the perspective of a company and consumer emerges as a piece of art. Broadly, branding may be considered as a human science. The principles of environmental sciences like butterfly effect also guide the companies toward making appropriate branding decision. The butterfly effect suggests how small changes in branding strategy in one market induce larger differences across the markets and augment the brand value. For example, the start-stop device for automobiles was designed and invented by Toyota in 1964, which has become a popular feature in the green, hybrid cars today. In automobiles, a start-stop system or stop-start system automatically shuts down and restarts the internal combustion engine to reduce the amount of time the engine spends idling, thereby reducing fuel consumption and emissions. This is most advantageous for vehicles that spend significant amounts of time waiting at traffic lights or frequently come to a stop in traffic jams.