Companies Make Products, but They Sell Brands
In many companies, the number-one marketing priority is to create customers. As management consultant Peter Drucker explained many decades ago, when this effort succeeds, the company is rewarded by making sales. According to Drucker, building customer relationships—a series of interactions between customers and a company over time—will produce more sales and profits than will focusing on sales transactions alone. This is why more companies are placing greater emphasis on retaining customers.
IMC is a process; it is a means to an end. That end is brands and stakeholder relationships. IMC seeks to maximize the positive messages and minimize the negative messages that are communicated about a brand, with the objective of creating and sustaining brand relationships. But that's only one reason why companies practice IMC. When used to build long-term relationships, IMC also builds and strengthens the brand itself. The stronger a brand is, the more value it has. Positive brand relationships generate profits.
Understanding how brands are built and managed requires an understanding of how relationship-building communications are created and managed. This chapter explains what a brand is, describes how brands are created, and looks at the characteristics of brand-customer relationships.
