Branding Strategy

Assignment

Critically review the article

Branding for services

Submitted To:Sir Khurram Hamid*Assistant Prof at UCP Business School

Submitted By:M. Usman AsifL1s14mbam1087

Submission date: 18-4-2015

University of Central Punjab, LahoreCritically Review the articleThe strengths of the article are given as Following Strengths:Brand is a pull not a push because people buy the products of services just because of mental association they have with the brand and brand really reduces the risk of consumer while making purchase decision. Brands create good perception about the product in the mind of customer that customers will get the value added quality product or service and will satisfy the customers and also make them loyal towards the products or services that has delivered or rendered respectively. Consumers are ready to pay premium prices of product or services for the brand name of the product or service they want to buy. Brands or strong brands serve as source of competitive advantage over competitors as it distinguishes from other competitors products or services in the market. The brand name of Coca cola and Apple has more power or value than the brand name of Pepsi and Samsung respectively. Price was also considered pre-purchase indicator of quality of service. The higher the price, higher will be the quality of the branded product or service.In service firms the name of organization or firm is usually the brand name of that respective organization or firm as four stat cable network, CN, Disney, Master card, Visa, South west Airlines, Shouldice Hospital for Hernia Patients, HBL, NBP, Yasir broast, Ufone, OCS, LUMS and UCP Business School. The brand name can be the name of place as well like Lahore broast, Karachi biryani, sindhi biryani. The caution is also mentioned in the article by the author regarding merger and acquisition of brand name of other (un-reputed) firms which may ultimately let your good brand image also suffer or affected. As brand reputation provides key to quality and buying criteria.Tangible cues are used and helps the consumers to buy the quality oriented branded products and services that will in result satisfy the customers.As far as the weakness of this article is concerned are mentioned below.

Weaknesses:The author considered the literature review of branding regarding the products perspective more rather than services perspective as two third of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is being contributed towards the economy of the world.Another weakness is that there is stated in the article that marketers use goods-based marketing principles for services indiscriminately and ignoring the extended ps of services marketing i.e people, process and physical evidence.Heuristics is used in services to make purchase decision because of experience and credence attributes. For example we will not know the services of Southwest Airlines until and unless we travel and buy or avail their services. This is called experience attribute. While credence attribute means the customers could not judge that the services rendered or delivered to them are correct or not. As in Shouldice Hospital of Hernia operation done by surgeons, patients dont know whether they will be operated will or not. Similar is the case with the General Hospital Lahore where neurosurgeons operate the brain patients. Patients could not judge whether they will be operated well or not even after the operation is done.Another weakness in this article, that the author also included the statement of another author and that statement has totally contradiction to reality. The statement is A name cannot make or break the product or company. Actually A name can make the product or the company. For instance, Bundu khan is the brand name of the restaurant which was delivering their services in sindh region of Pakistan since years and the owner has not registered his brand name but was selling with the name of Bundu Khan.Another guy opened the restaurant Bundu Khan with the same brand name in other region of Pakistan. And he registered the brand Bundu Khanat his name. So lawsuit was made and case was in favor of that person who owned the brand name by registering it under intellectual property rights.In result the older or actual restaurant owner of Bundu Khan has to face a lot of problems just because he had not registered his brand name Bundu khan at his name.There was also conflict between two construction companies named Izhar group and Bannu Mukhtar. Both the firms are owned by the same family but by different brothers. Izhar group is the old one and has good reputation or brand image in the mind of people. The Brother who got the brand name of Izhar group got competitive edge over the other who created new brand name Banuu Mukhtar.The author neither talked about the brand elements that make the brand stronger among the customers nor did he talk about the brand extension in a services context. Actually he did not contributed in the article as much in this article that his name will be used by another authors in the literature review in their future research work. He just picked up the work that has already done by the a lot of other researchers.Following are the recommendations about the articleRecommendations:As the article was written by the author named J. Charlene Davis and published in journal Innovative marketing volume 3 issued in year 2007. The literature review that he has taken in the article in not updated. It means he took the literature review of ninetys and only one literature review is taken of year 2001 of author Chernatony and Segal Horn which is also more than five years old than the date of issue of this article. So as you know that world is changing so rapidly so this article is not valid because of all the above mentioned reasons. The author must focus on current scenarios and changing the services more rapidly because of revolution of technology in the world.(1000 words)