This paper examines the fundamentals of branding and marketing, exploring how brands are built, maintained, and sometimes undermined in a crowded marketplace. Drawing on sources including David Aaker's Building Strong Brands and case studies from Tony Hawk, YUM Brands, and Procter & Gamble, the paper addresses key concepts such as brand equity, trademark versus trade name, brand extensions, and multibranding strategies. It also analyzes four identity traps — the brand image trap, brand position trap, external perspective trap, and product-attribute fixation trap — and concludes with a discussion of copycat branding at the retail level and the pressures it places on established brands.
The paper effectively integrates multiple source types — academic texts, trade publications, and business news — to build a layered argument. Rather than summarizing each source in isolation, the author weaves them together to show how theoretical concepts (brand equity, identity traps) play out in documented business practice. This synthesis technique is particularly evident in the brand equity and multibranding sections, where NetMBA frameworks are immediately illustrated by named corporate examples.
The paper opens with the problem of brand overload and market confusion, then differentiates branding from marketing. It moves into a narrative case study (Tony Hawk), transitions to definitional groundwork (trademark, brand equity), explores strategic applications (multibranding via YUM), analyzes Aaker's four identity traps in sequence, and closes with the emerging threat of copycat branding. This arc — from macro challenge to theory to strategy to threat — gives the paper a satisfying and logical progression.
"A brand is a living entity — and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures." — Michael Eisner, former CEO, Disney
What are brands, how do they work, how are they created, and why? What is a position trap? What is a product-attribute fixation trap? What impact, if any, does branding have on the cost of goods and services that consumers deal with? These and more questions regarding branding and marketing will be addressed and reviewed in this paper.
Are consumers being essentially branded out? Are there simply too many brands in the marketplace to allow any single brand to stand out? Outside of the few high-visibility, top-shelf corporate brands, what chance do smaller companies have of wedging their brands in between the thousands that compete for consumer attention?
An article in Advertising Age (Hughes, et al., 2004) explains that "brand development has never been so difficult." Indeed, Hughes writes, a "staggering number" of marketing executives are failing at their chosen profession — they "just aren't up to the challenge." To illustrate the problem, Hughes uses the example of the old West, when cattle received a brand on their hides so that ranchers could tell which animals belonged to them and which were the property of neighboring ranchers.
That worked "just fine if four ranches and 1,000 head of cattle share a valley," Hughes explains. "But put 800 brands on 1,000 head of cattle and you've created a valley of confusion." No one is better at creating brand confusion than the auto industry, the writer asserts. Automotive News reports that in 1974 there were about 130 automotive nameplates, and today there are 260. Whereas there were 33 SUV nameplates in 1997, seven years later there are approximately 100. Too many marketers "beaver away, 'branding' everything in sight and 'partnering' with everything from Turkey World magazine to the Little Sisters of the Poor," says Hughes.
Branding should assist people in making choices, not confuse them further. Branding requires "making a product stand out in a look-alike herd," Hughes continues. Acura is a case in point: "how a car that good can be so invisible is a continuing mystery," he writes. The problem is Acura's advertising, which has become "no more than costly white noise" because the brand relies on every conceivable "sports-sedan cliché."
So what is the answer? Being "different" does not always mean being better, the writer acknowledges; but being "the same" is "never better." Enduring brands are built on differences "that mean something to their customers." Over time, a high-quality brand acquires a "patina of authenticity that the herd can't emulate." It takes teamwork, vision, good execution, and a host of other qualities to create a great brand. But "most of all," Hughes concludes, "building a brand with a genuine, desirable difference takes courage" — and today, courage is in "short supply."
Marketing is about "planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create satisfactory exchanges," according to a university communications forum (UMNCF). Branding, meanwhile, is not just about getting your target market to select you over your competitors — "But it is about getting your key audiences to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem."
The UMNCF discussion points out that it is pivotal to distinguish between marketing and branding because the "process" of branding is as valuable as the product being branded. "We can't lose sight of the forest through the trees," UMNCF concludes; the "sum of the parts" is all that we have to go on. Taglines will "come and go," but a brand is supposed to be permanent.
A classic example of how to build a brand — and then market it expertly — is found in the story of Tony Hawk, the skateboard icon who, approaching 40 years of age, still "hasn't lost his juice with kids," which is a trick very few "aging sports celebs have mastered" (Hyman, 2006). In order to build his own brand, Hawk resisted taking millions from mega-deals offered by giants like Nike. "Tony Hawk wouldn't be Tony Hawk if he had a swoosh on head to toe," says Pat Hawk, the skater's sister and COO of Tony Hawk Inc., in Vista, California.
The Tony Hawk brand took shape because Hawk was a great skater at a time when skateboarding was coming into its own. He was a "heavyweight champ of his sport through the 1980s and 1990s, rolling to the No. 1 ranking in vertical skating (on a steep sloped track) 12 straight years through 1999," Hyman writes in BusinessWeek. Although Hawk has not skated competitively since 2003, he performs at exhibitions, releases videos, and — perhaps most importantly — "lives and breathes the lifestyle that these kids are either doing or want to do," says Jeff Bliss, president of Javelin Group, a sports marketing company in Virginia.
By keeping his brand to himself and staying "clean-cut" — without the ubiquitous tattoos that can turn parents off to some hip-hop and NBA stars their kids idolize — Hawk has remained at the forefront of skating and "X-Games"-style sports that young people love.
His marketing has been remarkable. Starting with the video game Tony Hawk's Pro-Skater, released in 1999, which generated upward of $1.1 billion in revenue, Hawk rocketed himself and his brand into pop culture. The video game also "stretched the Hawk brand far beyond kids with crash helmets in their closet," Hyman writes. Hawk insisted that the initial video game — and his later releases, Tony Hawk's Project 8 and Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam — depict realistic stunts and authentic human movement on the boards. "I'd played video games since Missile Command in the local arcade," he is quoted as saying. "When I got the chance to work on a game, I wanted it right."
Additional marketing efforts that pay off for Hawk include his extreme-sports touring show, "Boom HuckJam," which plays at Six Flags parks and other venues.
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