Marketing is a complicated area and difficult to be defined.As an important part of marketing, brands can be seen everywhere and changing our life.Buyers tend to be especially loyal to the brand they trust. The value of a brand should be measured by customers’ loyalty. Brands are of substantially economic importance to both brand owners and brand equity.Brand loyalty and brand equity are indivisible. Generally speaking, the brand loyalty of customer is often the core of brand equity.
For the purpose of this essay, the areas of brand loyalty, brand equity, the relationship between brand loyalty and brand equity and the importance of brand will be discussed.
Brand is one of the important factors demonstrating a countries' soft power. In the modern society, brand is essential to the business. If own the brand, it means own both the market and profit. Brand can also produce added values to the owners. However, there exist misunderstandings within some proprietors of brand. Most owners do not clearly recognize how to build a brand. It is falsely believed that building a brand needs to have more advertising to increase consumers’ awareness instead of improving the quality of products. In order to make it clear, it is important to define what is brand and explain why brand is important. To begin with, brand is a part of marketing and hard to define. Brands are products that are famous for diverse reasons, such as good service, perceived quality and long-time reputation. Brand which is unique can’t be copied and a good brand is timeless. Ellwood(2002)points out that the core of successful brand are good products and service. Other commentators(Doyle(1998))argue that“a brand can be defined as a specific name,symbol or design which is used to distinguish a particular seller’s product.”(p.166) Further more,he also point out understanding brand’s core and style helps make brand timeless.Kotler(2006)suggests that brand is an important part of all cultures across the planet as well as in the business world.Brand helps people make decisions whether small ones or big ones.Brands are also the idea,perception,expectation and brief. In this way, it can be seen that brand plays a most significant role in our life and impresses us deeply to buy the products.Brands become more and more important in both our life and the market.
Establishing loyalty of customers to the brand is also of great importance.Consumers’ behaviours are largely determined by their loyalty. Brand loyalty is an important strategy that enterprises can adopt to attract more customers.The effect of brand loyalty can’t be ignored The great world marketing master Milton Kotle said:brand value does not consist in price or the long history of the enterprises but in the quality of products and deeply emotional communication with customers.For example,consumers do not really know about Nike.However,they form emotional connection between a celebrity and the brand through advertisings.customer who wear Nike feel they will become the person like those celebrities.The core concept of a brand is the symbol of the pursuit of success. It also represents a kind of social status.If companies want to let the consumers have a good attitude towards enterprises, they need to set up a kind of emotional value between products and consumers.Another example is that Starbucks creates good environment and atmosphere for young customers.The value of Starbucks exceeds drinking coffee itself.Kotler(2009) suggests that“An existing base of loyal customers provides enormous sustainable competitive advantage.”(P.159) According to Burgers(2008),when your brand cannot give you advantage, your customers can give you advantage. Building brands around the requirement of particular customer segment can bring about the biggest value of the companies.(Rust, Lemon, Zeithaml (2001)).