[MUSIC] Hi, welcome back to our product module. In this part of the module, we are going to define and explore what a brand is. According to Professor Phillip Kotler's definition, a brand is a name, a term, a sign, a symbol or design or a combination of these elements intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or a group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of our competitors. What are the characteristics of a good brand? Characteristically or ideally, a brand must be memorable. What do we mean by that? It must be easy to remember and to recognize. One of the characteristics that makes easier a brand to be recognized or remembered is the shortness. Brands today are becoming shorter and shorter, and I will give you a clear example of this. The first national city bank of New York today is just Citi. And if we want to provide another brand example, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation is becoming HSBC in the same way as the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria today is just BBVA. These are just some examples from the banking industry that shows you that brands are becoming shorter, as time passes by. Another characteristic that helps brands to be recognized is that they must be easy to write and pronounce in the language you are using. Another good example of that is that of the soap brand Ala in Brazil. Ala is a soap targeting the bottom of a pyramid. People in the bottom of the pyramid are not very literate. Because of that, Ala is a very good brand, simply because it has only three letters and two of them are the A vowel, which is the first letter that even every person in the first grade of primary school learns. Because of that Ala, because it's short and it's easy to be read and to be remembered, is a very good example of a brand targeting this bottom of the pyramid. Another characteristic of good brands, they must be meaningful. What's the meaning of being meaningful? The name of a product must be easy to link with the product and service we are identifying. This gives another good characteristic, which is credibility. Brands must have credible names and must have also attractive names. What do we mean by that? The name must be appropriate to the product and the positioning we want to give to the product. Brands must be liked and appealing, aesthetically speaking. Another good characteristic is brands must be timeless and classic. In marketing, we say that a brand if well-managed is eternal. What examples can we give on that? Coca-Cola. How old do you think Coca-Cola is? Well, Coca-Cola is a venerable brand that is more than 100-years old, but I will give you another practical example, which is that of Beretta. Many of you may identify Beretta with the guns used by the Chicago mafia movies in the 30s. However, Beretta entered into the weapons industry almost 500 years ago. In 1526, the company was formally founded and they will be celebrating their fifth centennial in 2026. Beretta is a very good example, because they make part of a very selected and restrictive group of companies, which is called Les Henokiens. Les Henokiens is a very exclusive club composed of family companies or family businesses that must meet at least three characteristics to become part of this club. They must be companies of at least 200 years old. But that 200-year old, the company must have remained from a shareholder viewpoint within the same family and the CEO and the general management must be direct descendants of the founder. These three characteristics are part of the Beretta company and all these companies that we know as Les Henokiens. Just as a curiosity, I would like to mention that the oldest family owned business in the world is a hotel chain in Japan, whose name is Hoshi that has remained within the same family since the year 717, which means this family business will be celebrating 1,300 years within the same family. Other good characteristics of good brands, brands must be able to be protective. The protectability of a brand is the ability of a brand to be registered, to protect them from other enemies or intruders. Brands also must be transferable and globalizable. What do I mean by globalizable? If brands are protected, they can be taken global provided that they are clean. What do we mean as a clean brand? Brands must have no dirty meanings and the problem is that a word or a name in a particular language may not have no offensive meaning, but it may be completely the opposite in a different language. This is why building global brands is something very difficult and it requires lots of research. So building a brand ideally implies time and patience and it requires coherence among the objective product attributes at the desired positioning. It requires temporal coherence to give a consistent positioning over time. Besides, we could say that building global brands requires a deep local knowledge. Just to summarize that, we can apply the saying, think global, act locally and this is all for today. In the next session, we will explore some concepts related to the idea of product life cycle. Thank you very much. See you in the next session. [MUSIC]
