"Customer-Based Brand Portfolio Analysis"(in Japanese)

With multi-facets of branding strategy, such as Co-branding, Brand Extension, Ingredient Branding, brand management is becoming increasingly complex yet crucial to corporate success. In Marketing, much attention has been paid to competitive brands, and competitive market structure analysis has been popular. In today's brand strategy, however, it is necessary to manage not only competition between firms but also coordination of portfolio brands a firm owns. When planning corporate strategy over multiple divisions with multiple brands, a firm must consider internal resources and competitive advantage of each business. However, what is more fundamental is to understand, through Marketing perspective, how customers perceive these multiple brands as a whole. How does brand strategy affect each member of the portfolio brands? Which brands share synergy from their respective marketing activities? Which brands affect the image of the corporate brand in what way? In brand strategy, it is important to analyze customer perception of each brand a firm possesses and to understand the brand portfolio structure. This leads to improving the efficiency of marketing activities such as advertising and promotion, and making better managerial decisions. In this research, we propose several scales that are derived from two aspects, "brand recognition" and "brand image", through the framework of "brand knowledge" in order to evaluate a brand portfolio structure. First, the direction and magnitude of influence among brands within a portfolio is expressed by scales called "vulnerability" and "clout" using brand recall data. Then the importance of each brand within the portfolio is evaluated by a scalled called "relevance". Next, using brand image data, a scale called "synergy" that quantifies how similar each pair of brands within a portfolio is derived. Finally, by combining brand recognition data and brand image data, we investigate which product brands affect the image of the corporate brand in what manner. The proposed scales and the framework for analysis is applied to study a brand portfolio structure of SONY, which is known to possess many well-known product brands.