How businesses can use branding to drive forwards quality

What are Ingredient Brands?This is the first of a series of articles on ingredient branding. In this first article we introduce the concept of ingredient branding and a model for the understanding the utility of their brand equities for building businesses. In subsequent articles we will discuss how to manage - and avoid pitfalls - in guiding ingredient brands profitably from their early life cycles all the way to their mature stage.

Ingredient Brands are those product components that not only add functional value, their logo on a main branded product or service adds to its own brand power to retain customer loyalty, evoke customer preference, and support premium price points. An ingredient brand not only adds value to a host brand's equity, in mature markets it can also create or enhance differentiation.

Intel® is arguably the most famous of all ingredient brands that has enjoyed a long and continuing life. Others include Microban®, Kevlar® and Goretex®.

How Ingredient Brands Are BornWhen an upstream manufacturer develops a new breakthrough product, they diligently commercialize and promote the brand identity in order to obtain increasing market acceptance of the product. Since it is a breakthrough, the branded product becomes accepted by direct customers and often famous for the benefits it brings to the downstream market. When promoted properly it also becomes desirable to consumers because of the publicity it generates as a source of "new" perceptions for older brand names that incorporate it into their product lines.

The name the manufacturer gave the product is generally intended to both simplify the conversations with specifiers, production managers, and others whose beliefs about its value prompt them to include it in production processes and to assist purchasing agents in requesting the right product. Most often this value is discussed in terms of how it is functionally advantageous. This is a common practice in industry. However, its value as a public indicator of host brand commitment to quality innovation should not be overlooked.

As a new ingredient brand becomes familiar among downstream specifiers the name not only becomes more recognizable, it also develops its own meaning. The ultimate constituency that fosters an iconic meaning for any brand is consumers who assign daily-life significance to it. At that point - when a labeled component of an end product like a computer or a fashionable garment becomes a familiar name that influences consumers' choices - an ingredient brand is born.

Strong brands often hesitate to publicly identify an ingredient brand because of concern about compromising their own strong host brand's perceptions. History has shown however that a powerful ingredient brand, whose provider is committed to maintaining its perceptual equity long term, continue to be enhanced by identifying their investment in publicly recognized quality components. The smart branders take full advantage of the popularity of a famous ingredient brand, further enhancing the equity of their original branding.