href="#i000001820000.png"/>Let’s illustrate the power of these 3Es. Undoubtedly, Harley-Davidson customers believe that the brand offers a good quality product at a fair price. But that logic can’t describe how the brand resonates with them. Harley buyers invest time, money, and their own reputation in this brand because it makes them happy, and it does so on multiple levels. Its machinery produces an exciting and thrilling ride (enticing benefits). Customers feel protected and in control while riding their Harleys (enabling benefits). Product accouterments, such as Harley jackets, symbolize membership in the Harley community, allowing customers to feel pride in membership in this brother- or sisterhood. Involvement in the Harley Owners Group gives customers a sense of being connected to others, allowing customers the opportunity to gain increasing respect from others as they move from novice to expert status. The fact that the brand symbolizes independence, autonomy, and freedom inspires customers and makes them feel as if they are getting in touch with their authentic selves and who they are as people (enrichment benefits). Chapter 2 describes other examples of brands that have created value for customers over extended periods of time by offering benefits that map onto these 3Es.
The Brand Admiration Management System
The perspectives on the value of admired brands to companies and customers provide the foundation for the brand admiration management system shown in Figure 1.1.
Let’s start with the assumption that admired brands provide value to companies by producing the outcomes noted on the right-hand side of Figure 1.1. Companies can enjoy these outcomes when their brands offer value to customers; that is, benefits that enable, entice, and enrich customers. When brands provide these three types of benefits and empower, gratify, and inspire customers, customers want to establish a long-term relationship with the brand. When a brand provides these three benefits, customers come to trust, love, and respect the brand; in short, they admire it. Chapter 3 discusses the 3Es and brand admiration in greater detail, and formally defines this concept. As we show in that chapter, creating brand admiration isn’t all about creating brand love. It’s about creating brand love, brand trust, and brand respect. These three components emanate from the 3Es, and they work interactively to affect brand admiration. They are the keys to driving long-term brand relationships.
A new brand needs to establish itself on the market by building brand admiration; that is, by offering benefits that enable, entice, and enrich customers. Providing these benefits fosters the three conditions that characterize brand admiration: brand trust, brand love, and brand respect. Chapter 4 suggests that building brand admiration with customers starts with building brand admiration among employees. As critical intermediaries between the company and the marketplace, employees (internal customers) need to embody the brand’s mission, embody the 3Es, and feel enabled, enticed, and enriched themselves. Chapter 5 considers strategic decisions companies must make in building brand admiration among external customers, particularly as it applies to developing a positioning statement that involves communicating and delivering the brand’s identity to target customers. Chapter 6 pushes these ideas further by showing how certain marketing decisions can accelerate the process of building brand admiration by enhancing top-of-mind brand recall.
Building a brand that customers admire is a huge achievement. However, the marketplace is continually evolving. The company’s resources that have been spent on achieving this success would be difficult to recover if brand admiration begins to wane. To create long-term value for companies and customers, brands should not only build brand admiration but also strengthen brand admiration over time. The competitiveness of the marketplace dictates that brand managers must continuously identify opportunities to best their own brands. A brand must continue to improve on its attempts to enable, entice, and enrich customers. By doing so, customers recognize and appreciate the brand’s continual commitment to making them happy. Chapter 7 describes various strategies that companies can use to strengthen brand admiration. Companies can (1) enhance the current benefit strength, (2) add new benefits, (3) delete unnecessary benefits, (4) adjust the current benefit-importance weight, and/or (5) create/change the referent alternative to which the brand is compared.
The more brand holders are able to cultivate brand admiration, the better able they will be to leverage brand admiration and efficiently grow the brand through product and brand extensions. By leveraging brand admiration, we mean seeking efficient brand growth through product and brand extensions. By using the brand name on new products (i.e., by using extensions), the brand can grow efficiently. Growth is efficient because customers are more accepting of a new product from an admired brand. They also see more ways in which the brand is relevant to their personal and professional lives. This expansion of the brand’s relevance strengthens brand admiration even further. Chapters 8 and 9 present innovative ideas about how companies can leverage an admired brand and what they should consider when using product and brand extensions.
Also relevant to leveraging brand admiration is the issue of brand architecture design; that is, the process of ensuring that the various products and businesses associated with the company provide a coherent face to the marketplace. Chapter 10 presents a theoretically driven structure of brand architecture design. That structure identifies five different levels of a brand hierarchy and illustrates eight different branding options. This structure and three key evaluation criteria serve as a basis for which a company can assess and choose an optimal brand architecture design.
The value of the brand to the company is revealed in the brand’s equity. Brand equity is a financial measure that reflects the economic value of the brand to the brand holder (the company), based on its efforts to build, strengthen, and leverage customer brand admiration. Chapter 11 provides a novel, useable, and informative measure of brand equity. The brand equity measure is based on three key variables that reflect the strength of customers’ brand admiration and marketers’ efforts to build (strengthen or leverage) the brand: (1) the brand’s unit price, (2) its sales volume, and (3) the marketing costs expended to generate its total revenue. This measure is theoretically grounded, reliable, and easy to implement. It also allows comparison of the brand’s equity with other (competing or non-directly competing) brands and with one’s own brand over time.
Finally, our brand admiration management system articulates additional metrics about how to measure brand success, regardless of whether a company is building, strengthening, or leveraging brand admiration. Without effective metrics, it’s difficult to assess how well a brand is doing overall and vis-à-vis its competitors and understand what’s driving current brand equity. Metrics allow companies to diagnose where critical problems are arising and how they may be rectified. As such, a critical aspect of the brand admiration management system involves using an insight-oriented brand admiration dashboard. This dashboard, which is linked to each component of the brand admiration management system, is discussed in Chapter 12. Data relevant to the brand admiration dashboard is easy to collect. Moreover, data from the dashboard provides clear insight into how the brand is doing right now, what’s contributing to good or poor performance, and what should be done next. As such, we are confident that brand
