The Science and Art of Branding

Giep Franzen, Sandra E. Moriarty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317454663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This innovative work provides a state-of-the-art overview of current thinking about the development of brand strategy. Unlike other books on branding, it approaches successful brand strategy from both the producer and consumer perspectives. "The Science and Art of Branding" makes clear distinctions among the producer's intentions, external brand realities, and consumer's brand perceptions - and explains how to fit them all together to build successful brands. Co-author Sandra Moriarty is also the author of the leading Principles of Advertising textbook, and she and Giep Franzen have filled this volume with practical learning tools for scholars and students of marketing and marketing communications, as well as actual brand managers. The book explains theoretical concepts and illustrates them with real-life examples that include case studies and findings from large-scale market research. Every chapter opens with a mini-case history, and boxed inserts featuring quotes from experts appear throughout the book. "The Science and Art of Branding" also goes much more deeply than other works into the core concept of brand equity, employing new measurement systems only developed over the last few years.

PART 1

THE NATURE OF BRANDS

CHAPTER 1

THE BRAND AS A SYSTEM

Diesel: A State of Mind

Systems and Subsystems

The Brand Conversation

A Hierarchy of Systems

The Black Box

Brands Through the Lens of Systems Theory

The Agents in the System

The Brand System

Brand Theories

Brand Strategy Concepts

Deconstructing the Branding Lingo

The Primary Components of a Brand System

Applying the Concepts of Branding

The Diesel Brand as a System

The statement “Diesel is not my company, it’s my life” is a reflection of the passion of Renzo Rosso, founder of and driving force behind the Italian clothing brand Diesel. Intuitively he manages the Diesel brand as a totally focused system of decisions, forces, and stakeholders. The following story briefly reviews the Diesel brand philosophy.

DIESEL: A STATE OF MIND

Diesel is a state of mind: it means being open to new things, listening to one’s intuition and being honest with oneself. We would like to offer consumers a total look which reflects this attitude.

—Renzo Rosso

The brand Diesel was born more than thirty years ago and is today an innovative international design company, manufacturing jeans and casual clothing, as well as accessories. It is present in over eighty countries with 5,000 points of sale and 270 single-brand stores, 170 of which are company owned. When Renzo Rosso founded the company in 1978, he wanted it to be a leader, a company that took chances and carved out a niche for itself in its field. He surrounded himself with creative, talented people—innovators who, like him, rejected the slavish trend-following typical of the fashion industry. Rosso wanted to come up with a more dynamic and imaginative line of clothing than was available anywhere. He gave his open-minded new designers broad stylistic freedom, hoping they could create a line of clothing perfect for people who follow their own independent path in life—particularly for those who decide to express their individuality also by the way they dress. From the very beginning, Diesel’s designers let their own tastes lead them, turning their backs on the style dictators and consumer forecasters of the fashion establishment. And from the very beginning, these designs, as well as the outrageous Diesel advertising, appealed to the iconoclastic tastes of Generation Y.

Ever since the beginning, Renzo Rosso believed in addressing the world with one product and one brand language, and one of his first steps was building a solid, vast distribution platform stretching across all five continents. Most of Diesel’s current production is outsourced to small- and medium-sized companies. Production of denim jeans is based exclusively in Italy. All international logistics operations (wholesale and retail) are centrally managed and carefully controlled. Today Diesel is a global brand with a consolidated annual turnover of $1.5 billion in 2005, 85 percent of which is generated outside Italy. The headquarters are located in Molvena, in the northeastern part of Italy, where the company manages twelve subsidiaries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Diesel employs over 3,300 people worldwide.

The company views the world as a single, borderless macroculture. The Diesel staff reflects this view: a wide variety of people and personalities from all parts of the globe, creating an unpredictable, dynamic vitality and energy within the company. The style and graphics departments literally work side by side in one huge open space, a creative group strengthening itself through close collaboration. Diesel’s stylists come from widely diverse cultures and backgrounds, and they all contribute to the creation of a truly global brand. As Rosso explains, “Diesel isn’t just about making clothing and accessories. Its design team is creating Diesel ‘spaces’ that help communicate the message and the feeling, as well as the personality, of the brand it is selling.”

Parallel to its wholesale distribution through multibrand stores and corners (in chain and department stores), in 1996 Diesel embarked on a new adventure: retail. Flagship stores (in New York, London, San Francisco, and Rome) and single-brand stores (from Santa Monica to Milan, Paris, and Antwerp) are the ideal vehicle to bring the Diesel concept to life in its entirety, providing enough space to showcase all Diesel collections. While each individual store is unique, they all share a similar atmosphere. The stores help Diesel’s retail and wholesale divisions to grow simultaneously because they strengthen the company’s image and increase customer product awareness. They guide the market and help immeasurably in communicating the true vibe of the company to the public.

When advertising is at its best, it expresses the inner feelings associated with the company and the brand. The now famous Diesel advertising campaigns started in 1991 and ever since have been characterized by a single creative execution run in every market of the world, helping the company to become truly global. The ad campaigns are developed by bringing together the work of Diesel’s internal creative team and external advertising agencies. The creative team is a small, cross-functional group of people with creative and marketing functions in the company. It is their creativity and knowledge of the brand values, together with the executional skills of advertising agencies, that guarantee that all Diesel communications stay true to the company’s particular brand philosophy.

Diesel appropriated the “consumer products make better living” theme (so beloved by advertisers from the 1950s onward) and translated it into the “DIESEL—FOR SUCCESSFUL LIVING” campaigns. Diesel images of a retro consumer paradise must, however, be interpreted very ironically: the standard promise of “success” found in most advertising is exaggerated and made absurd. Serious themes seem to be lurking everywhere in the advertising, but any suggestion of worthiness is undercut by a final admission that it is all just a joke.

The real showcases for the broad range of Diesel collections have been the various eclectic catalogs produced, in which the product often serves only as illustrative, incidental content. These publications have been celebrated over the years for their radical approach, every edition representing a significant evolution in graphic and photographic technique. New Diesel catalogs feature the product a bit more prominently (a concession to the expansion of the company’s range and growing customer base), but still maintain an edgy creativity and high artistic standards. Diesel is also globally recognized in communication circles for its progressive interactive media activities. Diesel was one of the first companies to have a major presence on the Internet (www.diesel.com), launching its site in 1995. Today the site contains information about all Diesel clothing collections, as well as its licensed products, plus a complete archive of all Diesel advertising. Members of the Diesel Club receive new information, exclusive previews, and regular updates via e-mail.

Diesel first entered the world of e-commerce in 1997, selling jeans online in Finland and Sweden. In 1998 Diesel opened an Internet-based virtual store for home delivery of products to customers in selected markets. Creatively using new media, Diesel’s communication is no longer a one-way message, but rather a complex, entertaining dialogue between Diesel and its customers that enables active participation and interaction with the brand. Beyond the Internet, Diesel’s new media activities stretch into many different areas. The company has produced award-winning CD-ROMs, such as Digital Adrenaline—55DSL, a game- and music-filled CD-ROM in support of the 55DSL clothing line. Additionally, Diesel has begun to make a big splash in the world of video games, contributing its logo and creative content to new video game releases.

By 2005 Diesel had become one of the big fashion brands and started to license its brand to other manufacturers. Under its supervision, Diesel Shades (sunglasses), Diesel Footwear, Diesel Time Frames (watches), Diesel Plus Plus, Zero Plus, and Diesel Green (cosmetics and perfumes), and Diesel Jewelry are now being produced. All these products represent the character of the brand, as does its latest marketing communication effort called www.dieselsweeties.com, which is a romantic comedy starring a burned-out porn star and her robot boyfriend. To cement the appeal of the brand to young people, the Web site also features indie rockers and metalheads.

Source: www.diesel.com; www.dieselsweeties.com; T. Duncan, IMC: Using Advertising and Promotion to Build Brands (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 345; Adweek, “What’s New Portfolio,” December 22, 1997, 24.

A brand like Diesel comes alive as it takes on meaning for its users. The meaning of a brand, and ultimately the equity of the brand, are an outgrowth of two primary marketing systems operating in parallel and sometimes in conflict. The corporate nature of a brand is manifest in a set of management decisions and strategies; the consumer meaning of a brand is manifested as an integrated perception that is deriv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Nature of Brands
• Part II Brand Strategy Development
• Part III Brand Strategy Meets Brand Perception
• Part IV Brand Equity
• References
• Index
• About the Authors