People have all heard about brands, people can all name hundreds of them and could probably come up with a list of some characteristics of good and bad brands, but in the morning of  Dec. 6, CEIBS MBA students got some more insight into how to manage a brand. Prof Don Sexton is a visiting professor from the Columbia University who shared some of his knowledge in this field with the audiences.

The students started by looking at the brand values of some of the top companies in the world. Coca-Cola has a mind blowing brand value of $67 billion according to research done by Business Week. This is big money. All of the top ten global brands have values about $20 billion. To get values such as these, the top companies have all done a few things in common. Firstly, they kept their message consistent. The students were shown some examples of advertisements over many years from Burger King and McDonalds. Both of these are powerful brands with much strength, but where McDonalds (top 10) was particularly strong was the consistency of its message over time. It does not mean a company cannot change its positioning over time but the caution was given that if a company does want to reposition itself, it must do so slowly and steadily. The second main point was that brands that focus on psychological benefits rather than functional benefits generally are able to stand the rest of time better. An example of a company that is struggling to change its image from a functional focus to a psychological focus is Kodak, which is trying to get away from a perception of being a 'film' brand given the advance in digital technology.

Of course, 1.5 hour's lecture is never enough to capture such a broad and interesting topic but the students were given an excellent introduction to this exciting topic (which the students will no doubt learn more about in some of marketing courses). The students are also looking forward to more lectures from top professors as part of the MBA lecture series. (Provided by Ena Hewitt, MBA 2006)