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See your brands through your customers' eyes
Harvard Business Review
|June 21, 2001
Summary
Conventional brand portfolio mapping overlooks customer perceptions. The new brand portfolio molecule visualizes all influential brands, owned or not, revealing customer decision-making forces for better brand strategy.
Area of Science:
- Marketing
- Consumer Behavior
- Brand Management
Background:
- Current brand portfolio mapping methods are outdated.
- They fail to account for brands not owned by the company.
- This limits understanding of customer perception and influence.
Purpose of the Study:
- Introduce a novel brand mapping tool: the brand portfolio molecule.
- To visualize all brands influencing customer purchase decisions.
- To enhance brand strategy by understanding customer perception.
Main Methods:
- Identify relevant brands (owned and unowned).
- Classify brands based on customer importance, influence (positive/negative), market position, inter-brand connections, and control.
- Map the brand portfolio molecule using 3-D modeling or manual methods.
Main Results:
- The brand portfolio molecule visually represents customer perceptions of brands.
- It maps brands as 'atoms' clustered by customer viewpoint.
- Identifies all forces impacting consumer buying decisions.
Conclusions:
- The brand portfolio molecule offers a comprehensive view of brand influence.
- It provides a powerful new framework for developing effective brand strategies.
- Enables marketers to better understand and leverage customer perceptions.