Branding, Internet Marketing for Branding

Branding, or giving something a label of ownership whether it is a name, term, design, or logo, generally tries to take in whatever characteristics and qualities the company utilizing the branding wants to express about itself. Truly successful branding gives anyone looking at the brand expectations of what the company will deliver. Creating and maintaining branding can be referred to as brand management.

Brand recognition, one of the goals of branding, is when a brand becomes widely known in the marketplace. Another important aspect of branding is brand extension. This occurs when a strong, already existing brand name becomes a vehicle for a new or modified product. For example, Adidas, a successful line of gym shoes and athletic wear, extended its brand to personal hygiene products. However, this is not to be confused with line extension. For example, Coca-Cola extending to both Diet and Cherry Coke stays within the original product category. It is not extending the brand onto a new product, but onto a variation of the original one.

Companies with more than one successful product might use multiple branding. In this case, the company uses more than one brand that might seemingly compete with its other brands, though really they are just taking up more of the market. A few good examples of this sort of branding are Ramada using Rodeway as a brand for their cheaper hotel line and Procter & Gamble launching ten different detergent brands in the American marketplace.

Sometimes, cannibalization occurs, which is when a new brand steals business from an old one, though both are owned by the same company. This is acceptable so long as there is an overall net gain in profits.

To protect their branding, to better promote and establish a brand, or just to compete with other brands, many companies register their brands as trademarks. This adds statutory protection to their brands.

Since the Internet has become the main source of new business for many companies, this has changed the world of branding and of marketing itself. Before there were rules and laws overseeing such matters, many computer users registered the names they thought held future value, including almost all dictionary terms and many corporate names as well. In response, some companies bought a domain name matching their brand in the domain aftermarket.

If a company has done an effective job of branding and their brand is powerful and clearly recognizable, then such “domain squatting” doesn’t hurt them. Not all court cases involving these matters are clear-cut though. If a person has registered a name, they might retain ownership of it even if it is a brand. It has to be proven if a user is infringing on a trademark.

The Internet allows the registration of a domain name of a generic term and its use for what it is best suited. For example, a person couldn’t keep “PizzaHut.com,” pizza Hut would not be entitled to Pizza.com.” On the other hand, Dominos Pizza cannot prevent a man named Domino that owns a pizzeria from registering “DominosPizza.com.”

Sometimes, if this type of branding confuses the marketplace, courts rule in favor of the trademark holder. Extensions like .net, .org, .biz, and more only add to the legal ambiguity. It remains a difficult task to decide ownership of branding in the world of Internet marketing and Online Media.