2 brand strategy
to buyers (Ehrenberg, Barnard, and Scriven,
1997). The relationship between brands and
their brand extensions is also important, as the
extension can affect the parent brand itself
–
either positively or negatively (see BRAND
EXTENSIONS AND FLANKER BRANDS
). A
further challenge with brand strategy today is
that managers no longer have complete control
over brand positioning and brand meaning (if
they ever did have it;see
POSITIONING ANAL-
YSIS AND STRATEGIES
). Courtesy of new
communications technologies and consumer
empowerment, cocreated brand meaning is
one of the more pressing challenges facing
twenty-first century brand managers, along with
consumer-led brand positioning (Beverland and
Ewing, 2005;see
VALUE CO-CREATION ). Thus,
brand strategists may at times need to ‘‘manage’’
multiple brand meanings, whereby the same
brand may come to mean different things to
different stakeholders despite seemingly consis-
tent positioning and marketing communications
messages (Berthon, Pitt, and Campbell, 2009).
Additional challenges facing brand strategists
in the short-to-medium term include managing
consumer backlash, anticonsumption, and the
rejection of brand hegemony (Cromie and
Ewing, 2009), recognizing and managing the
inevitability of brand demise: that is, not all
brands can nor should be saved (Ewing, Jevons,
and Khalil, 2009), and developing more effective
approaches to valuing brand equity and brand
capability (Ratnatunga and Ewing, 2009,see
BRAND VALUE). Finally, the extant literature
on brand strategy has a distinctly western,
distinctly blue-chip bias. There is still much
we need to learn about eastern, for example,
Asian, generally (Ewing, Napoli, and Pitt,
2001) Chinese (Ewinget al., 2002) and Indian,
approaches to brand management. Similarly,
while much has been written about managing
Fortune 500 and Interbrand top 100 (largely
iconic) brands, less is written about managing
brands within small and medium enterprises
(Berthon, Ewing, and Napoli, 2008). Thus,
despite a reasonably impressive corpus of brand
strategy knowledge, there is still a fair amount
more for brand strategists and scholars to
learn.
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