4.5 Branding

Brand is the major enduring asset of a company. A renowned branded company cares more about their brand names than their physical assets. This is because the brand name is recognized and accepted by the customers and potential customers in the society. Coca cola, McDonalds, Pepsi, DHL, and Air Asia are but few examples of brand name.

Strong Brand Formation
Branding strategy is one of the critical challenge decisions that a company or marketer has to overcome. Decisions such as brand name choice, brand positioning, brand sponsorship and brand development.

Brand Positioning
The brand positioning can be made at any of the three levels. These are lower, medium and high levels.

At the lower level also called attributes, a company can focus on the attributes of the product.

At medium level also called benefits level, the company can focus on the special benefits that the product can offer to the customers.

4.5 Branding

High level also called beliefs and values levels. Company here positioned on strong beliefs and values.

When positioning a brand the marketer is expected to establish a mission for the brand and a vision of what the brand must be and do. A brand is the company`s promise to deliver a specific set of features, benefits, services, and experiences consistently to the buyers (Kotler and Armstrong, 2005, p. 293).

Brand name choice
Choosing good name is a critical success factor for a company and its product. The selection of the name should reflect the feature of the product, price, target market and value to be delivered to the customers.

Brand Sponsorship
Generally there are four sponsorship options open to the company to lunch a brand these are

i)	Manufacturers` brand or national brand: when a company sells its output under their manufacture`s brand names.
ii)	Private brand or store brand: when a private company creates many names.
iii)	Licensed brands: when an established company that spend a lot of resources to form a brand name, issues license to another manufacturer to use its own brand name and pay the licensing
iv)	Co-branding: where two or more companies combine to create one brand name

4.5 Branding

Brand Development
As in the case of brand sponsorship, company has four options for brand development (Kotler and Armstrong, 2005). These are

i)	Line extension: when a company uses the same brand name to introduce additional items in a given product category such as size and colors
ii)	Brand extensions: when a company uses a successful brand name to introduce new or modified products in a new category.
iii)	Multi-brands: when a company introduces additional brand in the same category.
iv)	New Brands: when a company introduces new brand name in a new product category where there is appropriate current brand name.

Managing Brands It is equally important, as in the case of marketing product, the company needs to manage its brand carefully to ensure sustainable customer`s experiences, maintain sales, update services and products. This is important to avoid lost of image of the brand name in the face of customers or hijacking of brand name by other competitors.