Brands are 'added value' systems

How can a brand become effective in the capital goods sector?

Manfred Schmidt is speaking at the Zehntscheuer in Köngen on June 13th 2007

A brand is a dynamic energy system! 

Through many years of both research and practice, the Institut für Markentechnik [international business consultancy for strategic and operational brand management] has analysed the processes involved in how we work and view brands. The findings: a brand is much more than the way a company presents itself and its products/services on the market through images and slogans; a brand is a complex energy system consisting of two subsystems and the way in which they interact:

The first subsystem covers the company’s entire service structure (products and lines and the work/expertise they involve such as know-how, development and production, personnel, sales and marketing etc.) including monitoring preliminary and subsequent stages in the value creation process.

Customers are the second subsystem, which is where the company builds up brand energy over a long period of time through transferring services; the customers in turn finance the entire value creation chain: they are the brand system’s financial backers.

The two subsystems are linked through all brand-specific symbols and characteristics which create brand recognition (name, logo, colour coding etc.); they are the way in which the public remembers and stores its knowledge of the company’s entire service structure (customer base, sector, public opinion etc.).

VITA Manfred Schmidt

1970  Manager of Sales/Marketing at ITT Consumer Electronics Austria 1975  Manager
          of the ITT CE marketing companies in Germany
1979  Manager of the TV/Video division of Telefunken
1981  Manager Marketing/Sales
1985  Chairman of the Management Board
1985  General Manager, Thomson Germany;
          Brands: Telefunken, Saba, Nordmende
1988  Senior Executive Vice President of Nokia Consumer Electronics  
          Europe
1993  Founding of the Institut für Markentechnik in Geneva

Impressions of event with Manfred Schmidt