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MANAGING BRANDS
Managing brands successfully, extending product lines and service businesses is the essence of marketing. In many organizations, brand managers manage the individual brands and the product managers manage individual product line. Product and brand managers are responsible for the product innovation, development, packaging, pricing, promotion, distribution, and sales of an entire product line.

“A brand is a name of an individual product that may include a design or symbol intended to identify and differentiate the product of a seller from its competitors’ products.” A brand might include a trade mark (TM), which includes a unique name and/ or design and symbol of a product that protects the brand from exact copying under the trade mark law. A company might acquire famous foreign brands through licensing or franchising agreement. Many companies also produce private brands for their big customers. Many companies sell unbranded products without a particular name (such as rice, wheat, sugar, cotton, etc).

The benefits of branding include building brand equity or worth, corporate image and goodwill, ease in launching additional hit products under the same brand name, which is called a brand family, such as Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Max, etc. The other benefits include chances of higher sales growth, greater profits (due to charging a premium price), product’s enhanced age, etc. But brand management needs continuous promotions, especially advertising, and allied marketing techniques. An un-branding or selling unbranded product is simply trading, which also offer substantial returns but comparatively, branding has proved much more profitable in the long-run.

The world’s top ten superpower brands, according to Interbrand, are (in rank order): Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s, Kodak, Marlboro, IBM, American Express, Sony, Mercedes Benz, and Nescafe. According to one estimate, the brand equity of Marlboro is $31 billion and Caca-Cola$24 billion, which may be much higher than their annual sales. Many brand leaders of 70 years ago are still brand leaders today, including Coca-Cola, Gillette, Kodak, Del Monte, and Campbell’s.

BRAND-NAME DECISIONS

Manufacturers use four key strategies in selecting brand names.

1. Individual brand names of products, such as parker pens, Dollar ink, etc.
2. A family name for a product line (group), such as Clean hand wash, Clean perfumed hand wash, and Clean soup.
3. Separate family name for all product lines, such as Lux almond oil soap, Lux honey soap, Lux Alloe Vera soap, etc, and Dalda ghee, Dalda vanas pati, etc.
4. Company trade name combined with individual product name, such as National spices, National pickles (achar), National gem, National jelly, etc.

PRODUCT-LINE AND PRODUCT-MIX DECISIONS
“A product-line is a group of products that are closely related because they perform similar functions, are sold to the same customer groups, are marketed through the same channels, but may or may not fall a particular price range.” “A product mix is the combination of all product-lines of a company.” See examples of Lux and Dalda above.

PRODUCT LINE STRETCHING OR EXTENSION
After noticing the sales and profits growth of a product, a company can easily add new products in the line, which have sheer chances of success in the marketplace, the typical example includes Head and Shoulders and Pentene shampoos lines. After the success of Lux soap, if the company launches low-priced Lux soaps, it’s called downward stretching (of price) and conversely is upward stretching.

PACKAGING AND LABELING
Packaging includes activities of designing and producing the container or wrapper pf a product. Label includes the name of the product and the written words on the wrapper, such as ingredients, price, batch number, expiry date, manufacturer’s name, etc. A sticker pasted on the wrapper is also a Label. Packaging is called the 5th P of marketing mix because it plays a vital role in selling. Packaging and labeling should be appealing, colorful, when possible, and convenient in carrying

MANAGING SERVICE BUSINESSES
“A service is a performance of certain actions to satisfy a need, such as healthcare services, cleaning service, legal services, banking services, etc.” A service is intangible because unlike physical goods, it can not be seen, tasted, felt, heard, or smelled. A service is inseparable because it can’t be separated. A service is imperishable because they are not perished like other perishable commodities and items like food and beverages.

Managing services require three careful tasks: 1. Increasing their competitive differentiation (such as repair, warranty, customer training, free delivery, installation, etc). 2. Service quality (that refers to the degree of customer satisfaction). 3. Productivity (through skillful work, addition of standardized equipments and procedures, and customer involvement). A typical instance of customer involvement is the trends in fast food restaurants, whose self-service system is replacing watering work with customer’s work. Another area of service business is customized services (and goods), made on the specifications of buyers, such as custom or tailor made or make-to-order dresses, jeans, shoes, ice creams, jewelry, health or accidents insurance, etc. Another area is customized mass production; some examples include restaurants and catering service businesses, and garment factories that produce bulk stock to fulfill a specific order.

POST SALE/AFTER SALE SERVICE STRATEGY
A manufacture can cater to post sale services, especially which require technical expertise in one of four ways: 1, through its own customer service department; 2, by hiring a service- specialist firm; 3, by making such arrangement with distributors and dealers; and 4, by leaving it to customers to find service specialists.

MANAGING PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE (PLC)
Normally, every product has a life cycle, from start to finish. As a product is introduced in the market, with promotional efforts, it sales grow, reaches to a peak or stability level, and eventually decline. Refer the figure 15.1.

The reasons for decline in sales, demand and profit include changes in technology, fashion and customer preferences, arrival of substitute products (as coffee against tea or brown sugar against white sugar), intensive competition, economic recession, slowing population growth and government policies (as ban on cigarettes).

STRATEGIES FOR PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE STAGES: A product can be a hit product, if it follows a pattern: at the introduction stage, launch product with high quality and innovated features (but this is not always necessary because even low quality products get good market share), competitively price the product, do heavy advertising and promotions, ensure wide distribution, and customer service. At the growth stage, improve quality, add new features and new models, cut prices of old models for lower segment of customers, increase advertising and promotions, enter new market segments and niches, and enhance distribution coverage. At the maturity stage, a firm should apply the same strategies to restore growth or enhance maturity period. At the decline stage, a firm should adopt many strategies to revive or rejuvenate its products, such as increasing its investment to strengthen its position, decreasing its investment in unprofitable customer groups and markets, needs major product improvements, build repositioning strategies, introduces new uses, and find new distribution out lets. The ultimate option in case of no improvement is to divest the product or sell it out with brand equity and invest in new products.