Over The Counter Pharmaceutical Product: Brand Analysis

2.7 Branding Process for over the counter Pharmaceutical Product.

According to Malone (2004), the branding process begins long before creation of a brand personality. Step 1, the brand analysis, is the information-gathering phase. Scott Bedbury, former senior vice president of marketing for Starbucks and former head of advertising for Nike, said: Anyone who wants to build a great brand first has to understand who they are. They don't do this by reaching some internal consensus on what they think the brand means. The real starting point is to go out to customers ad find out what they like or dislike about the brand and what they associate as the core of the brand concept. (Bedbury as quoted in Malone, 2004)A company needs to know that whatever

Emotional branding is defined as the attachment of emotions and a bond to a brand, and is found to be one the key branding topics of today (Malär et al., 2011). Consumers are no longer seen as passive victims of marketing that only seek for functional benefits of the products, but active relationship-forming and experience-searching partners (e.g. Fournier, 1998; Valette-Florence & Valette-Florence, 2011). Rossiter and Bellman (2012) introduce five widely utilized and known emotions to be attached to brands: bonding, resonance, companionship, love, and trust – the latter which Blackett and Harrison (2001) as well as Schuiling and Moss (2004) defined a value especially important in the pharmaceutical market. These are also emotions Fournier (1998) finds are related to the strongest brand consumer relationships. Thomson et al. (2005) add that brands may use emotions of passion, connection, and affection. To consumers, all of these emotions are strong, particular, and usage-specific-type, and when properly attached to a brand they bring profitable, loyal customers who do not require promotion of the brand or a price competition, the traditional challenge in the pharmaceutical industry. Thomson et al. even claim that emotional branding may be used as a strategy of differentiating a

During this process various products features that the consumer associates with each product option, can be evaluated and its importance determined. (Kotler et al. 2005 pp. 282-283).The evaluation of alternatives can either be very extensive at times and rather narrow and fast at others. Consumers can create different rules that help and facilitate their decision making, and decreases the amount of information that they will process. The consumer narrows down the alternatives by the help of his or her personal heuristic rules. These rules can be of various natures and can represent different assumptions or mindsets. They can be related to their personal beliefs about products and companies, if they associate product familiarity with product quality, or how they interpret product quality based on indications that they obtain from a prod-uct’s visual appearance. Some consumers tend to judge a book by its cover and it is common to associate high price with good quality, or to form beliefs of product attributes based on the country of origin. (Solomon et al. 1999 pp. 225-226). Companies oc-casionally use advertisement to connect their products with feeling of nostalgia, a some-times even sad longing of the past, because these feelings that arise can influence the consumer to choose a certain product over another. (Solomon et al. 1999 p. 83). In some cases the buying