Learning Activity #1: Well-Known Brands

Your textbook describes a brand as some feature (e.g., a name, design, symbol, letter, or sound) that uniquely identifies an organization's product or service. Brands often involve some type of intellectual property such as registered trademarks. A brand provides an image that consumers can relate to and there are many that are immediately recognizable to people around the world.

1) Take a minute and describe what you predict are the top 5 most valuable brands in the world are and rank them 1-5. How well did you do at guessing the most valuable brands? How many of these brands do you have personal experience with and is it generally positive? Notice the types of firms that are at the top of the list. You probably have heard of all of the ones listed in the top 10 and most of the others in the top 100. Some brands that were once powerful ones have ceased to exist. For instance, Pan Am and TWA were absorbed by other airlines and catalog retail pioneer Montgomery Ward went out of business (a different catalog retail firm bought the intellectual property rights associated with the name a few years later but ended up being acquired by another company shortly afterward). Can you think of any brands that were once strong that have now fallen on hard times or may not even exist in the near future?

2) Choose one of the brands from the bottom of the Forbes list (i.e., the ones ranked from 60 -100) and tell us more about the brand and how it developed over time to become as well-known as it is (look through some of the other students' postings first and try to choose a different organization if possible). Use concepts from the text when you describe what exactly the brand is, what the organization's branding strategies appear to be, how the brand may have evolved, and so on along with the behavioral targeting the organization most likely does and your personal impression of the brand is if you have experience with it.

Learning Activity #2: Building a Brand and Behavioral Targeting

Over the last few learning activities you explored an organization that you might like to start (some of you are already involved in creating a real startup venture).

1) Discuss how you might build a brand or perhaps multiple brands for your proposed organization and describe the behavioral targeting that would be most relevant for it, particularly any such activities that might be related to using the internet using concepts mentioned in the textbook.

2) Many profit and nonprofit organizations try to develop a brand and use advertising to promote it. For example, some would suggest that the Army's "Be all that you can be," "Army strong," and "an Army of One" have been part of this effort and the slogan "The Few, the Proud, the Marines" won a place on Madison Avenue's Advertising Walk of Fame a few years ago. Have you worked for an organization with a particular brand image (if you haven't, you can describe the experience of a friend or family member)? How well did the organization build the brandand was the image that it portrayed an accurate and effective one?