Managing an Ingredient Brand

Accomplishing this is much more complex than managing a consumer brand. Ingredient branders have challenges which must be met in order to fully capitalize on ingredient brand potential for value. They must:

1. Develop organizational understanding of the difference between the product and the brand to multiple constituencies, each with their own mind-set and calculation of interest.

2. Effectively communicate the brand downstream from the direct customer without creating unmanageable friction with that customer, who may perceive the ingredient brand building effort as inevitably reducing their profit margins.

3. Educate their own leadership to the value of creating and maintaining brand equity and the need to market the brand benefits that exist beyond its functional contribution to product features.

4. Educate the main brand's leadership on value of brand equity and the need to market the brand on benefits beyond the product features.

5. Articulate an integrated marketing strategy with a balanced emphasis beyond product performance value to include benefits and emotional brand image that drive differentiation and preference. And implement it consistently over time.

6. Coordinate all management functions to contribute to consistent brand message - to "walk the brand talk" in all decisions.

7. Assure that the internal organization, channel organizations, and customers always use the brand icon and extensions correctly. They must police misuse of the brand by others or risk commoditizing the brand and diminishing its financial value to that of a generic.

8. Capture and retain price premium, avoiding the temptation to trade off long-term premium for short term share.

9. Gain and maintain organizational commitment to improving product performance that is consistent with what the brand means to members of its value chain and end-users.

10. Brands have life cycles that operate somewhat differently than product life cycles. Both product and a business brand lives have youth, maturity, and "old age." Unlike humans, both can be rejuvenated and returned to their youth - usually by renewed relevance accomplished by capitalizing on new end-user trends. The classic example is Maytag whose "dependability" positioning in the 1930's reassured homemakers that the new-fangled electric motor eliminating women's hours at a washboard was going to last. By the 1970's this was irrelevant; Maytag lost consumer attention.