The Reality of Brands:

Abstract

he ontology of marketing, particularly the question of what products and brands are, is still largely unexplored. The ontological status of brands hinges on their relationship with products. Idealists about brands see perceptual or cognitive acts of consumers grouped under the heading brand awarencess' or ‘brand image’ as constitutive for the existence of brands so that, in their view, tools of the marketing mix can influence relevant mental dispositions and attitudes. Brand realists, on the other hand reject the view of brands as mere marks or names and interpret them as emergent products with properties that afford branding in the sense of Gibson's ecological psychology. Brand strength is a function of the degree to which brands occupy defensible niches in product space. Branding as a process involves changing external or internal boundaries of products. Several arguments are proposed in favor of brand realism. The fragments of an ontology of marketing are developed in a broadly Aristotelian framework. Brand realism has significant implications for a new understanding of issues ranging from the effects of advertising to financial brand valuation, the nature of trademarks, and marketing strategy in general. It permits one to treat brand equity as a real phenomenon not dependent on associations, attitudinal states such as brand loyalty, or spurious constructs such as brand character or personality.

The influence of social media and brand equity on business-to-business marketing

“…3.1 Cognitive maps and structure of the research Doylea and Ford (1999( , apud Barreto, 2015, in the late 1970s, came up with the term cognitive map, whose aim was to map the vision of a particular individual, or a set of individuals, to the detriment of attitude generation. Cognitive mapping would lead to identifying constructs related to a particular object of study and their relationships with each other (Barreto, 2015).…”

“…A gap found in literature refers to the lack of understanding of brand definitions by B2B executives and the key components to create a successful approach (Pecot, Merchant, Valette-Florence, & De Barnier, 2018). The worth of a brand cannot be reduced to goods and service values or an added value resulting from the brand alone because as the brand overlaps, it cannot be separated from the product (Grassl, 1999; Leek & Christodoulides, 2011). Another gap identified is the need to define the importance of digital processes in B2B, which is already widely used by retail marketing (Kavisekera & Abeysekera, 2016).…”

A comunicação de imagem. Um estudo de caso

“…A esta visao ciassica e idealista da marca op6em alguns autores (como King, 1970;Cooper, 1979;Cegarra, 1991;Kapferer, 1992;Semprini, 1995;Hanby, 1999;ou Grassi, 1999) uma visao rea/ista (Grassi, 1999), surgida das tendencias relativistas e do p6s-modernismo do inicio dos anos 80, como paradigmas centrados nas «multiplas realidades do mundo experimental» (Hanby, 1999, p. 8). Ao considerar a visao ciassica redutora, orientada para o proprietario e assente apenas em considera~6es econ6micas (Hanby, 1999), esta nova tendencia prop6e uma visao mais alargada do conceito de marca, em consequencia, dizem, de uma observa~ao mais atenta ao mundo real.…”

“…Na verdade, as duas posi<;oes nao sao incompativeis. 0 realismo continua a aceitar que e 0 produto aumentado, pela aplicac,:ao de nomes, simbolos e publicidade, que conduz it marca, mas acrescenta que, nao obstante isso, ha uma dependencia unidirecccional da marca em relac,:ao ao produto (Grassi, 1999). Para os realistas, a marca nao e algo que existe apenas num espac,:o conceptual, mas tern de existir igualmente num dominic objectivo, isto e, no dominic do produto.…”