The New Emerging Market Multinationals: Four Strategies for Disrupting Markets and Building Brands

7Global Brand Associations and Architecture

As mentioned in Chapter 4, a key element of building a brand’s strength is to create strategically correct mental associations for it in the target consumer’s mind. And each of the many brands in a company’s portfolio needs to be both distinguished from and yet also linked to other brands of that company to leverage economies of scale and still go after different target segments. In this chapter, we first examine the process of strategically targeting and then building desired brand associations. We then examine the needs and trade-offs for different types of brand architecture (brand portfolios) and the options for how to best manage these trade-offs.

Brand Associations

Brand associations are a crucial ...