Branding and Promotion Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Branding and Promotion - Assignment Example It is the value a customer places on the brand which results in a long term association of the company and the customer. It generates both tangible and intangible benefits for the company that a brand adds to a product/service. A positive brand equity in traditional workstation markets such as research, engineering, and entertainment. The brand has been associated in this field with favorable qualities like innovation, vision, fun, and customer orientation. An image of being a company dealing with high end users. This image got further boost with the taking over of Cray Research Inc. another super computer company. Its target markets comprised of scientists, engineers, animators and graphics professionals. It is quite apparent that Silicon Graphics Inc. has not given due consideration so far to gain access to the mindset of existing and prospective customers a prerequisite for establishing the brand name. Advertising plays a critical role in building brand equity. It helps customers to differentiate a brand from competitors a brand from competitors on dimensions which are important to consumers. This Brand equity helps in stimulating growth in many parity products. SGI has long been associated with high end 'Hollywood like' products. That's indeed a big asset for SGI. But for long term sustenance the company will have to diversify to fulfill the requirements of other customers as well. SGI did try to enter this space as well, but without making any conscious efforts towards establishing a 'common man' user friendly image. Consistent and suitable media campaigns and visibility is required towards sustaining any brand equity. Ans 2: SGI realized the painful way in the year 1996-97 that everything is not fine with its business operations and brand imaging, when it started incurring losses. So the company started t take note and then accordingly set in a motion a number of short-term and long-term measures. The acquition of Cray also proved to be non-productive and company realized that the liabilities are on the rise after its acquisition. This led to parting of ways by SGI from most of the Cray business and the Cray brand to by handing over this business to Tera Computer Company on March 31, 2000. One of SGI's most glaring brand deficiencies was the under-leveraged master brand. For example the name Coca-Cola, is associated with cold-drinks, though there are over 400 products that the company produces in over 200 countries, yet the consumers measure up every product with Coca-Cola, the 'quality cold drink' at the back of their minds. Reason for the deficiency in SGI branding is the trend of ignoring the importan ce of brand equity, or perhaps this could be because of sheer overconfidence on the part of management. Otherwise how can we explain the absence of the Silicon Graphics typeface and its