Branding for Differential Advantage with Jagdish Sheth

Overview

Class Central Tips

This course suggests how branding creates value for the product through standardization and quality assurance. Branding can also differentiate your product or offering compared to competitors. In marketing, it is the ultimate differential advantage. Branding also creates a value independent of the product or service you’re offering. It is an intangible asset often commanding 5-10 times product revenue. For example, the highest brand value today is Apple, which has replaced Coca Cola as the highest intangible value asset.

Syllabus

Introduction to Branding for Differential Advantage

There are two types of brands: full-line generalists such as Walmart and Amazon, and unique specialty brands including Footlocker and Toys“R”Us. The full-line generalists are volume-driven brands, whereas specialty brands are margin-driven.

Branding for Differential Advantage (part 1)

This module focuses on how to differentiate brands as opposed to differentiating products. It also shows how commodities such as dairy and agricultural cereals can be differentiated through branding. Moreover, this module highlights several ways brands such as Coca Cola have differentiated their soft drinks.

Do Brands Have Nine Lives?

This module is focused on how to extend well-known brands into other products and services to enhance the value of the brand. Launching a new brand is outrageously expensive and therefore extending a brand which has strong loyalty is faster and cheaper.