Brand and Product Management

Companies are collecting increasing amounts of information about their customers. This effort is based on the assumption that more information is better and that this information can be leveraged to predict customers' behavior in a variety of situations and product categories. For example, information about a customer's purchase behavior in one category can be helpful in predicting his potential behavior in a related category, which in turn could help a firm in its cross-selling efforts.

Customized communications have the potential to reduce information overload and aid customer decisions, and the highly relevant products that result from customization can form the cornerstone of enduring customer relationships. In spite of such potential benefits, few models exist in the marketing literature to exploit the Internet's unique ability to design communications or marketing programs at the individual level. We develop a statistical and optimization approach for customization of information on the Internet.

Increasingly, the greatest source of economic value for many companies is a set of intangible assets that, typically, are not reflected on their balance sheets. Whereas for B2C companies these intangible assets are often dominated by brand value, for many B2B companies these assets are a set of relationships with a core group of powerful customers. When these relationships are well-developed and ongoing, they produce sustainable returns to shareholders.

I investigate the effect of large increases in the number of drugs available to treat rare diseases and HIV on mortality associated with them. Mortality from both diseases declined dramatically following increases in drug approvals. Before the Orphan Drug Act went into effect (between 1979 and 1984), mortality from rare diseases grew at the same rate as mortality from other diseases. In contrast, during the next five years, mortality from rare diseases grew more slowly than mortality from other diseases.

This article proposes a model of judgment revision, which posits that counterattitudinal challenges to a brand initially trigger a memory search for proattitudinal information about this brand. The proattitudinal information accessible from memory is then aligned with information contained in the challenge in order to assess the diagnosticity of the challenge, that is, how much it "damages" the retrieved brand information. If the challenge is not perceived to be diagnostic, the retrieved brand information is used to defend the previous attitudinal position.

Traditionally the management of brands has been entrusted to middle management. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that brands are of such critical strategic importance, that they are more appropriately placed under the direct responsibility of senior management. Indeed, we believe that senior managers should act as brand custodians. For this new responsibility, senior managers need integrative overviews of brands and their management.

Despite the importance of decisions regarding international brand names, research on brand naming has focused primarily on English name creation. The authors conceptualize the local brand-name creation process in a multilingual international market. The authors present a framework that incorporates (1) a linguistic analysis of three translation methods—phonetic (i.e., by sound), semantic (i.e., by meaning), and phonosemantic (i.e., by sounds plus meaning)—and (2) a cognitive analysis focusing on the impact of primes and expectations on consumer name evaluations.

The authors examine two aspects of brand loyalty, purchase loyalty and attitudinal loyalty, as linking variables in the chain of effects from brand trust and brand affect to brand performance (market share and relative price). The model includes product-level, category-related controls (hedonic value and utilitarian value) and brand-level controls (brand differentiation and share of voice). The authors compile an aggregate data set for 107 brands from three separate surveys of consumers and brand managers.