Page 274 - Marketing Management

CREATING BRAND EQUITY | CHAPTER 9 251

Mountain Dew’s Dew Tour is a
high-energy sponsorship that
reinforces the brand’s credentials
for the youth market.

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Like brand names, slogans are an extremely efficient means to build brand equity. They can
function as useful “hooks” to help consumers grasp what the brand is and what makes it special,
as in “Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There,” “Nothing Runs Like a Deere,” “Citi Never
Sleeps,” “Every Kiss Begins with Kay” for the jeweler, and “We Try Harder” for Avis rental cars.
But choosing a name with inherent meaning may make it harder to add a different meaning or
update the positioning. 33

Designing Holistic Marketing Activities
Brands are not built by advertising alone. Customers come to know a brand through a range of
contacts and touch points: personal observation and use, word of mouth, interactions with com-
pany personnel, online or telephone experiences, and payment transactions.A brand contact is any
information-bearing experience, whether positive or negative, a customer or prospect has with the
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brand, its product category, or its market. The company must put as much effort into managing
these experiences as into producing its ads. 35
As we describe throughout this text, marketing strategy and tactics have changed dramatically. 36
Marketers are creating brand contacts and building brand equity through new avenues such as
clubs and consumer communities, trade shows, event marketing, sponsorship, factory visits, public
relations and press releases, and social cause marketing. Mountain Dew created the multicity Dew
Tour in which athletes compete in different skateboarding, BMX, and freestyle motocross events to
reach the coveted but fickle 12- to 24-year-old target market. 37
Integrated marketing is about mixing and matching these marketing activities to maximize
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their individual and collective effects. To achieve it, marketers need a variety of different market-
ing activities that consistently reinforce the brand promise. The Olive Garden has become the sec-
ond-largest casual dining restaurant chain in the United States, with more than $3 billion in sales in
2010 from its more than 700 North American restaurants, in part through establishing a fully inte-
grated marketing program.
Olive Garden goes to extraordi-
nary lengths to live up to its brand
The Olive Garden The Olive Garden promise of offering “the idealized
Italian family meal.”
brand promise is “the idealized Italian family meal” character-
ized by “fresh, simple, delicious Italian food,” “complemented
by a great glass of wine,” served by “people who treat you like
family,” “in a comfortable homelike setting.” To live up to that
brand promise, The Olive Garden has sent more than 1,100 restaurant
General Managers and team members on cultural immersion trips to Italy,
launched the Culinary Institute of Tuscany in Italy to inspire new dishes and
teach General Managers and team members authentic Italian cooking tech-
niques, conducts wine training workshops for team members and in-
restaurant wine sampling for guests, and is remodeling restaurants to give
them a Tuscan farmhouse look. Communications include in-store, em-
ployee, and mass media messages that all reinforce the brand promise and
ad slogan,“When You’re Here,You’re Family.” 39