Copenhagen Business School

IMM International Marketing Management

BRAND M AN A GEME N T P R OC ES S
APPENDIX

Uriel Alvarado Cancino

Frederik Güldner Kolenda
Advisor: Richard Jones
Secondary Advisor: Larry Light
November 2007
 TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

1. History of the Financial Service Industry 3

2. Historical Background of Marketing and Brand Management 3
The Origin of Branding ................................................................................ 3

Branding during the Industrial Economy .................................................. 5

The Origin of Brand Advertising ................................................................. 6

The Origin of Brand Management ............................................................... 8

The Origin of the Marketing Concept ....................................................... 10

Marketing Communication, Positioning and Differentiation .................. 12

The 80s-90s and Brand Equity .................................................................. 15

3. Interview List 20
4. Case Material - Saxo Bank 21
4.1 Saxo Bank Annual Report ................................................................... 21

4.2 Engagement Survey .............................................................................21

 1. History of the Financial Service Industry

Banks in general are as such a very old phenomenon, that dates back to the ancient world, where
gold in shape of plates were stored in temples, as these were believed to be the safest place to
store valuable goods at a time around the 18th century BC. This was the first known evidence of
the activity that is today better known as banking. Further evidence of trading dates back to the
ancient Greece, where financial transactions like money exchange and even credit were con-
ducted. In return for money a moneylender would write a credit note in one port and the client
could then cash it in another port, saving the client the danger of traveling with coins. The an-
cient Rome adopted and improved on this financial system by introducing greater administration
as well as charging interest on loan and paying interest to the moneylenders. Along with the fall
of the Roman Empire, collapsed the trading, making bankers less necessary than before. The
Christian church hastened their demise by its hostility towards the charging of interests. The
church prohibited this kind of usury as it was seen as immoral. However as the economic activity
expanded, and the Christian Church´s power increased, the papacy were the first to insist that
interest should be paid on loans related to a risk. Following this shift in the Churchs policy re-
garding usury, it became more acceptable to be a financier and the development of the financial
system took pace17.

2. Historical Background of Marketing and Brand Management

The Origin of Branding

Branding started in Sweden in the middle age (476-1492) when the ruling economy was the
agrarian and commodities were extracted from the natural world: animal, mineral, vegetables,
etc. A brand was the action of burning a symbol into the flesh of a Norse in order to signify own-
ership of the animal1 . Entomology tells us that the word “brand” is a degenerate of the old Norse
word “brandr”. The Vikings may have spread the word “brandr” in England, where it was even-

1 Larry Light meeting Connecticut 2006 [Origin: bef. 950; ME, OE: burning, a burning piece of wood, torch, sword;
c. D brand, G Brand, ON brandr; akin to burn1]
tually incorporated into daily language2. Similarly this action was adopted in the late twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries, through the practice of abjuration. The practice of abjuration meant
rejecting or exiling a criminal from England forever. To communicate the status of the exiled
person to the world-at-large and in order to identify them as not trustworthy, abjurers’ thumbs
were branded with an “A.”3

In trade law, the term trademark is used instead of the word “brand”. Patents and Trademarks
were legally recognized for the first time with the establishment of the Venetian Patent law in
1474.4 The meaning of a brand was later registered in the dictionary in 1552 as “identifying mark
made by a hot iron” 5 . It was in between the mid 16th century and the beginning of the 19th that
the word “brand” began to be related to trade, emotions and trust. A trademark was a symbol that
would differentiate the goods between manufacturers.

The oldest brands which exist today were introduced into the market in the 18th century and are
from the alcoholic drinks sector. This is due to the fact that these products are non-perishable
(because they are alcohol based) and thus needed a distinguishing name/symbol so that they
could be marketed over a wider area and during a longer time period. Some examples of the old-
est brands include “Twining 1706”, “Schweppes 1798” and “Ballantine’s 1809” 6.

Even though the first brands had been launched, it was not legally possible to patent something
in the U.S. until after the establishment of the Constitution in 1790 and in France with the estab-
lishment of the patent law one year later in 1791.

3http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/crcl/vol38_2/logan.php#fn41 Norman Maclaren Trenholme, The Right

of Sanctuary in England: A Study in Institutional History 4 (1903).
4 http://www.jpo.go.jp/seido_e/rekishi_e/nenpyoe.htm
5 Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
6 Rik Riezebos, Brand Management a Theoretical and Practical Approach (2003) pg., 3
In the pre-industrial era (1760-1830), agriculture still formed the foremost source of income and
employment and most “consumers” produced their own food products. By the end of this era, in
1827, the word brand was broadened and registered in a dictionary as “a particular make of
goods”7.

Branding during the Industrial Economy

During the Industrial Revolution (1830-70) a clear shift was seen with the arrival of brands such
as C&A 1841 and Levi’s 1850 (clothing sector); Tabasco 1868 and Heinz 1869 (fast moving con-
sumer goods FMCG sector)8. However, in those days the power of the distribution chain was in
the hands of the wholesale traders and as a result most producers made articles without brand
names, for which little or no advertising was done (King and Bullmore 1974; Chernatony and
McDonald 1992) 9.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the construction of railways and sea routes were im-
portant impulses for the development of the manufacturer-owned brand. The consumer was now
given a choice between different alternatives: locally manufactured products vs. products im-
ported via railways and waterways. At the same time there was an increasing demand for pre-
packaged articles which guaranteed a certain constant price and quality. This increasing supply
of goods and consumer demand, made it increasingly necessary to give manufactured goods a
brand name, so that one manufacturer’s products could be distinguished from those of other
manufacturers (Murphy 1990).

By the end of the nineteenth century the manufacturer-owned brand started to blossom as the
power in the distribution chain shifted more and more in the direction of the producer. This is
reflected on the arrival of brands from the FMCG sector such as Lever’s “Pure Honey Soap”

7 Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper

8 Rik Riezebos, Brand Management a Theoretical and Practical Approach (2003) pg., 3
9 Rik Riezebos, Brand Management a Theoretical and Practical Approach (2003) pg., 3
1874 (today Unilever) and Procter’s “Ivory Soap” 1879 (today Procter and Gamble P&G)10 ;
Coca-Cola 1886 and Pepsi-Cola 1898 (soft drinks sector); Kodak 1887 and Philips 1891 (con-
sumer electronics sector)11.

From this brief background, we can conclude that “Branding” surged as a need to distinguish a
product and make it identifiable to a consumer through the use of a name or symbol. Following a
trademark was created as a legal mechanism to protect the right of a company to claim owner-
ship of a product name and symbol. Finally as more brands appeared it was necessary to adver-
tise them and describe their unique characteristics.

The Origin of Brand Advertising

In the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, manufacturers started mak-
ing use of advertising and representatives in order to avoid the power of the wholesale traders 12.
One of the first advertising agencies was founded in New York in 1864 as Carlton and Smith, an
advertising broker buying and selling space in the popular religious journals of the nineteenth
century, the firm was purchased and renamed by James Walter Thompson in 187813.

It is said that as early as 1874 William Hesketh Lever, one of the founders of Unilever, began
advertising and selling a soap called Lever’s Pure Honey in Europe14. Similarly in the US five
years later (1879), Harley Procter, one of the founders of Procter and Gamble (P&G), branded a
white soap with the name “ivory”. Ivory’s ad from 1881 is one of the earliest copy ads identified
today. This ad from P&G highlighted the attributes and functional benefits of the product. Stating
that the “ivory soap” “floated” and that it was “99 44/100% pure,” a dual claim which today is
one of the oldest and most famous ad slogans ever 15.

10 Wally Olins, On Brand, Wally Ollins (2003) pg., 53 and David A. Aaker, Managing Brand Equity (1991) pg., 1
11 Rik Riezebos, Brand Management a Theoretical and Practical Approach (2003) pg., 3
12 Rik Riezebos, Brand Management a Theoretical and Practical Approach (2003) pg., 3

13 http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/hartman/guides/jwt-history.html

14 Wally Olins, On Brand, Wally Ollins (2003) pg., 54

15 David A. Aaker, Managing Brand Equity (1991) pg., 1

Another good example of one of the first copy ads ever is the first Coca-Cola ad from around
1886:
COCA-COLA SYRUP AND EXTRACT For Soda Water and other Carbonated Beverages. This Intellectual Beverage
and Temperance Drink contains the valuable Tonic and Nerve Stimulant properties of the Coca plant and cola (or
Kola) nuts, and makes not only a delicious, exhilarating, refreshing and invigorating Beverage (dispensed from the
soda water fountain or in other carbonated beverages), but a valuable Brain Tonic and cure for all nerve affections-
Sick Head-Ache, Neuralgia, Hysteria, Melancholy, etc. The peculiar flavor of COCA-COLA delights every palate.

This early ad already attempts to identify Coca-Cola with a personality: “Intellectual Beverage”;
with emotions “Temperance Drink”; functions “delicious, refreshing, brain tonic and cure for all
nerve affections” and emotional benefits “exhilarating, invigorating beverage”.
Through this example we can see that “branding” was ahead in the business world compared to
its academic development already from before the 20th century. However this is a very innova-
tive example for that period. At that time most of “branding” was based on basic advertising
strategies which included the name of a product and a description of the product’s characteristics.
In this way, by 1911 Coca-Cola became the largest single advertiser in the US with a budget of
1$ million per year16.

This is basically how “brand advertising” surged in the business world, as a development of writ-
ing copy and placing advertisements in journals and magazines. Furthermore, this services were
generally outsourced and done by agencies and representatives which meant that there was little
or no strategic management involved.

In the beginning of the 20th century, James Walter Thompson published a house ad explaining
trademark advertising, in an early commercial description of what branding meant 17. During the
following three decades one of the best known advertising copywriters was Claude C. Hopkins.
His work was based on direct response and “Scientific Advertising” (counting the number of

16 Wally Olins, On Brand, Wally Ollins (2003) pg., 51

17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Walter_Thompson
sales orders generated by a coupon in a print advertising and quantifying the cost per order)18.
Advertisements written by Hopkins were full of copy, giving rich detail of “why” the reader
should buy a brand.

Another important evolution came in the early 1920s when Bruce Barton turned General Motors
(GM) into a metaphor for the American family, “something personal, warm and human,” while
for him, “GE” was not so much the name of the faceless General Electric Company (GE) but
rather “the initials of a friend.” In 1923 Barton said to the GM president Pierre du Pont “I like to
think of advertising as something big, something splendid, something which goes deep down
into an institution and gets hold of the soul of it 19.”

In other words, Barton’s work meant analyzing and understanding an organization’s “soul” to
then communicating its personality and characteristics externally through ads. This example
shows the early evolutions which lead to the leap from pure advertising to a more management
lead activity.

The Origin of Brand Management

Soon after these evolutions, as more brands appeared within same market sectors while competi-
tion within categories increased, managing the creation of ads and resulting images was not
enough. It is said that in 1931, Neil McElroy changed marketing forever when he wrote the clas-
sic memo at Procter and Gamble (P&G), which lead to the creation of the discipline of brand
management (Aaker, Joachimsthaler, 2000; Larry Light, 2004; et al).

In this memo McElroy said that in addition to having a person in charge of the advertising of
each brand, there should be a substantial team of people devoted to thinking about every aspect
of marketing it. This dedicated group should attend to only one brand. The new unit should in-
clude a brand assistant, several "check-up people," and others with very specific tasks 20.

The concern of these managers would be the brand, which would be marketed as if it were a
separate business. In this way it would be possible to solve “sales problems” by analyzing sales

18 John Philip Jones 2002, The ultimate secrets of Advertising, Sage Publications pg., 3

19 Naomi Klein 2000, No Logo, Harper Perennial, pg., 7

20 David A. Aaker & Erich Joachimsthaler, Brand Leadership, Free Press Business, 2000, pg., 3
and profits for each market area in order to identify problem markets21. Moreover, through brand
management, the features and benefits of every brand would be distinguished from those of
every other22.

This evolution came from McElroy’s identified need of focusing and coordinating the marketing
efforts for Camay soap. McElroy’s idea was that a brand management team would be responsible
for creating a brand’s marketing program and coordinating it with sales and manufacturing. The
process of managing a brand meant dealing with a complex system - often involving R&D,
manufacturing, and logistics in addition to advertising, promotion, and distribution-channel is-
sues. A brand management team had to include planners, doers, and motivators; while successful
brand managers needed to have exceptional coordination and motivational skills. According to
Aaker, the classic brand management system was usually limited to a relevant market within a
single country and the brand manager tended to be tactical and reactive, observing competitor
and channel activity as well as sales and margin trends. Under this model Strategy was often
delegated to an agency or simply ignored 23 . From McElroy’s description, we can see that brand
management began as a process responding to the need, identified by middle management, for a
multidisciplinary, multifunctional team to manage a brand.

In the academic world brand management attracted the interest of numerous scholars from a
wide variety of disciplines as psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and strategy. In
this way, two decades after McElroy’s important contribution to brand management, during the
1950s, Roose Reeves developed the idea of the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and described
it in a widely selling book “Reality in Advertising” published in 1960. Also at around that time,
David Ogilvy, introduced the concepts that we know today as brand image and personality in
1955: Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market-
place... Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which

21 David A. Aaker & Erich Joachimsthaler, Brand Leadership, Free Press Business, 2000, pg., 3

22 Larry Light, Brand Design, Corporate Manuscript, Arcature June 28, 2006
23 David A. Aaker & Erich Joachimsthaler, Brand Leadership, Free Press Business, 2000, pg., 3
is the brand image24. Thus, even-though McElroy had already introduced a management based
branding process; during the 1960s, the predominant and most widely used strategy was based
on advertising the product advantages through “unique selling propositions” (USPs)25. As more
products and brands focused on advertising their USPs, it became increasingly difficult to distin-
guish the unique characteristics of the offering.

The Origin of the Marketing Concept

After the second world war, in 1950, the service economy first employed more than 50 percent
of the US population. Marketing’s modern origins as a normative management discipline
emerged in the 1950s (Baker, 1999)26. Baker (1974, 1991) presented a broad treatment of mar-
keting definitions which positions marketing as a hybrid management field intertwined from mi-
croeconomics, statistical mathematics and psychology. Brand Management has been couched by
marketing management to a great extent.

In 1960 the American marketing Association (AMA) proposed a definition of a brand stressing
primarily its logo and visual aspects with the main purpose of identification and differentiation.
“A name, term sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods
or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.”

In the marketing world, a clear distinction appeared in the 60s between those who based their
strategies in purely advertising and promotional techniques and those who believed as Theodore
Levitt, that “marketing should be tied more closely to the inner orbit of business policy”. In this
way in 1960, Levitt who was then a lecturer in business administration at the Harvard Business
School, former editor of the Harvard Business Review and who later became head of the Market-
ing Area at Harvard, wrote the now classic article “Marketing Myopia”.

24David Ogilvy, 1955 speech to AAAA, quoted by Roman, K (2004) “David Ogilvy: The most famous advertising
man in the world.” www.gandalf.it/m/ogilvy2.htm c.f. John Grant (2006) “Brand Innovation Manifesto” p.g., 18
25 Rik Riezebos, Brand Management a Theoretical and Practical Approach (2003) pg., 4

26 Chris Hackley, Marketing and Social Construction (2001) Routledge London pg., 67
In this article Levitt claims that “Management must think of itself not as producing products but
as providing custom-creating value satisfactions." Levitt claims that firms that define their busi-
ness myopically in product terms can stagnate even though the basic customer need they serve is
enjoying healthy growth. His key contribution was based on defining the business in terms of the
basic customer need rather than the product.
We believe that this contribution was very important, as in this way a company would inherently
increase internal creativity and encourage the continuous creation of new strategic options. Or in
Levitt’s words “what survival always entails, that is, changing.”

Already at that time, Levitt claimed that “what usually gets emphasized is selling”, while market-
ing “a more sophisticated and complex PROCESS, gets ignored.” and would often receive a
“step child treatment”. This is one of the few contributions from that period not centered solely
on advertising and communication as for him “the view that an industry is a customer-satisfying
process, not a goods-producing process, is vital for all businessmen to understand... the entire
corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer-satisfying organism.

In a retrospective commentary published 15 years later, Levitt recognized that Peter Ferdinan
Drucker, in “The concept of the corporation, 1946” and “The practice of management, 1954”,
originally provided him with a great deal of insight. In his 1954 work Drucker placed marketing
at the centre of the organization and proposed what became widely known as a marketing phi-
losophy of business. The following quote has been reproduced in hundreds of marketing texts
and articles including Kotler, 1994; Doyle, 1995; Deshpande, 1999; etc. “Marketing is not only
much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It is the whole business seen
from... the customer’s point of view (Drucker, 1954, pp. 35-6).

Hence, already by 1960, the need for a marketing process based on satisfying consumer needs
rather than on selling a product, had already been identified. This was following the management
and corporation concepts introduced by Peter Ferdinan Drucker in the mid 50s.
In line with this emerging “normative marketing ideology” 27 , various marketing tools, concepts
and frameworks were proposed in the following decades. These include the “Product Life Cycle
(PLC) Theory” (Patten, 1959; Cox, 1967; Smallwood, 1973), Market Segmentation (Wendell R.
Smith, 1956; Russel I. Haley, 1968; Plummer J.T., 1974) and the marketing mix which was first
coined by Bordern, 1964 (McCarthy, 1981; Baker, 1995) and among various formulations of the
marketing mix model the “Four Ps” (product, price, promotion, place) became widely utilized
and popular for its simplicity.

Finally, in 1967, Philip Kotler, today recognized as one of the most influential authors in the
field, published the now classic book: “Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Con-
trol.” In this book Kotler claims that “the marketing concept is a business philosophy that arose
to challenge the previous concept (production and sales concepts). Although it has a long history,
its central tenets did not fully crystallize until the mid 1950s’ (Kotler, 1967, p. 17). He further
defined marketing management as a “process” which consists of analyzing marketing opportuni-
ties, researching and selecting target markets, designing marketing strategies, planning marketing
programmes, and organizing, implementing, and controlling the marketing effort.

Marketing Communication, Positioning and Differentiation

All the various marketing management contributions of the 60s based on Druckerian Manage-
ment philosophy, did not stop those who believed that the emphasis was to be put on advertising
and selling. In this way, Other general models and frameworks about marketing communications
were presented and evolved from the 60s. These include models such as the hierarchy of effects
approach, the AIDA (attention, interest, decision, action) (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961; Barry and
Howard, 1990), etc.

27 Chris Hackley, Marketing and Social Construction (2001) Routledge London pg., 67
In the early 70s in a series of Advertising Age articles published in 1972, two marketing consult-
ants, Jack Trout and Al Ries, recognized the need of positioning a product as a response to what
they called the “over-communicated society”.

Their concept was simple: the success of a new product depended on how consumers thought
about that product or, in their own words, how the product was positioned in the consumer’s
mind. In 1980 Trout and Ries published their thoughts in the classic book “Positioning: The Bat-
tle for Your Mind”, where in addition to the concept of positioning they urged companies to look
not only at their strengths but also at the competitor’s weaknesses 28. The concept of positioning
as defined by the authors in the 20th anniversary edition of the book “starts with the product...
but it is not what you do to the product... but what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is,
you position the product in the mind of the prospect.29”

As more media channels and strategies for communicating a company’s products raised, in the
early 1980s Don E. Shultz, proposed the concept of Integrated Marketing communications
(IMC)30. This concept meant that all components of a brand’s communication should follow a
common strategy and be planned to work cooperatively. The main communication elements that
should be integrated in the common plan were to be “highly selective” advertising, direct mar-
keting, public relations, selling to the retail trade, sales promotions directed to the consumer, in-
store activities, packaging, influencing opinion leaders and word-of-mouth. This evolution meant
a broader analysis and a need for a strategy to coordinate different medias and advertising possi-
bilities. At around that time too, large communication conglomerates surged with the objective to
provide a “one-stop shopping” solution to coordinate the different communication activities.

28 Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind By Al Ries, Jack Trout 1980, 1985, 2001, etc pg., 5

29 Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind By Al Ries, Jack Trout 1980, 1985, 2001, etc pg., 2, 3

30Don E. Schultz, Stanley J. Tannenbaum, and Robert F. Lauterborn, Integrated Marketing Communications (Chi-
cago: NTC Business Books, 1993)
During the early 80s while the IMC was the latest development in marketing communications,
the corporate world began to shift the focus from producing products to images of their brands.
The focus was no longer in manufacturing but rather on marketing and more specifically on ad-
vertising.

Most of the concepts presented until then are part of the evolution of the advertising and com-
munication functions (Scientific Advertising, 1920s; USPs, 50-60s; AIDA, 1961; Positioning,
mid 70s; IMC, 1980). These concepts however, had little or no emphasis on the economic value
or strategic management of brands. Furthermore, this approach created a gap between the prom-
ise of the offering, communicated through advertising and other mechanisms, and the reality de-
livered.

In 1972 and 1973 in the midst of the service economy, Levitt published two titles related to serv-
ice marketing: Production-line approach to service and the industrialization of service. Also in
1973, at a time when advertising was still the driving force of marketing, Drucker presented the
notion of the importance of marketing and innovation to satisfy genuine consumer needs.

“because it is the purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two-and only two-basic functions: mar-
keting and innovation... There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to
know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing
should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then, is to make the product or service
available.” Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (by Peter Drucker 1973)

In the beginning of the 80s and throughout the 90s Michael Porter contributions to Strategic
Management had a great influence in Marketing. With his various models including the five
forces, the value chain, generic strategies of cost leadership, product differentiation and segmen-
tation, the market positioning strategies of variety based, needs based, and access based market
positions, etc. These various contributions helped with the development of the academic field
dealing with “strategy content”, in other words the “what” of strategy (De Wit & Meyer, 2003)
and hence the “what or content” of strategic marketing.
At a time when most companies where focused on selling and communicating differences, also
in 1980, Ted Levitt published the article “Marketing success through differentiation of anything”.
In this article Levitt introduces the importance of the services, intangible aspects and behavior
involved closely related to an offering.

We believe that some of these industry insights presented by Levitt, combined with increased
competition across industries, improved technologies and increased consumer sophistication,
were early signs of what would lead to what today is widely recognized as the experience econ-
omy 31.
The 80s-90s and Brand Equity

It is not clear who invented the expression of brand equity, but few uses of it have been traced
before the mid-eighties (Ambler & Styles 1995)32. In the mid 80s academics such as Kevin Lane
Keller, began studying the effects and importance of memory factors in advertising and its rela-
tion with consumer brand evaluations in the moment of purchase, “Memory Factors in Advertis-
ing: the effect of advertising Retrieval Cues on Brand Evaluations, 1987”. In this article Keller
was already studying the importance of having memorable brand associations that could improve
the performance of advertising, these were some of the early foundations of the concept of
“brand equity”.

Soon the value of a brand image became more evident in the management world, as some of the
most important events in the history of brand management occurred in 1988 with a series of
brand acquisitions including when Philip Morris purchased Kraft for $12.6 billion - six times its
book value. The price difference between balance sheet valuations and the price paid was attrib-
uted to the value of the word and images related to “Kraft”. This meant that for the first time a

31 Levitt, T. (1972), "Production-line approach to service", Harvard Business Review, Vol. 50 No.5, pp.20-31.

Levitt, T. (1976), "The industrialisation of service", Harvard Business Review, Vol. 54 No.5, pp.32-43.

32Paul Feldwick, What is brand equity anyway, and how do you measure it? Best Paper Award, Market Research
Society Conference 1996
big monetary value had been assigned to something that had previously been abstract and un-
quantifiable: a brand name.

One year after this and other similar incidents, Abratt, R. presented a model aiming at integrating
the external and internal marketing approaches in his article “A new approach to the corporate
image management process, 1989”. In this article he argues that there must be a fit between the
corporate brand identity, the employees’ view of the identity (the internal culture), the marketing
communication, and stake-holders (the external environment).

In the early 90s David A. Aaker and Keller published articles such as “Consumer Evaluations of
Brand Extensions” 1990; and Managing Brand Equity: The Impact of Multiple Extensions”
1990”. These two articles were followed by the now classic book Managing Brand Equity by
David A. Aaker 1991. In this book Aaker presented the concept of brand equity accompanied by
various historical examples and cases. The model of brand equity was presented by Aaker fol-
lowing the need to manage brands strategically by creating, developing and exploiting each of
the five assets that would create value; namely: Brand Loyalty, Brand Awareness, Perceived
Quality, Brand Associations and other proprietary brand assets. This model would finally come
to clarify for managers exactly how brand equity contributes to value.
In the first page of his classic book, David Aaker quoted Larry Light, who was then described as
a prominent advertising research professional; and who today is CEO of Arcature a brand man-
agement consultancy company and former McDonalds Chief Marketing Officer 2002-2005
(CMO, Im lovin’ it campaign).

“Larry was asked by the editor of the Journal of Advertising Research for his perspective on
marketing three decades into the future. Light’s analysis was instructive:
The marketing battle will be a battle of brands, a competition for brand dominance. Businesses and investors will
recognize brands as the company’s most valuable assets. This is a critical concept. It is a vision about how to de-
velop, strengthen, defend, and manage a business... It will be more important to own markets than to own factories.
The only way to own markets is to own market dominant brands.” 33

33 Also quoted by Leslie de Chernatony, Categorizing Brands, Journal of Marketing Management, 1993 pg., 173
Today we believe that Larry was right, in fact following the publication of the Aaker’s classic
book managing brand equity, this concept became one of the most widely discussed topics both
in the managerial and academic marketing world. In America, the Coalition for Brand Equity
chaired by Larry Light was founded in 199134 35 . Following in 1992 Jean Noel Kapferer pub-
lished another influential book “Strategic Brand Management - Creating and sustaining brand
equity long term, where the concept of brand identity was first conceptualized. Since then, there
have been a numerous amount of publications on branding, definitions, approaches, models and
strategies.

Some of the most influential perspectives, introduced throughout the 90s include brand as a legal
instrument: Crainer (1995); differentiating device: Aaker (1991), Kotler et al (1996); Company/
Corporate: Diefenback (1992), Aaker (1996); Identity System: Kapferer (1992), Aaker (1996);
Image: Keeble (1991); Relationship: Woodward (1991), Arnold (1992), Blackston (1992); Add-
ing value: de Chernatony and McDonald (1994); Evolving entity: Goodyear (1996), etc36.

Also in the mid nineties, in 1994, the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Prop-

erty Rights (TRIPS) broadened the legal definition of trademark to encompass "any
sign...capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one undertaking from those of other un-
dertakings". This means that if a company can prove that its consumers are able to perceive a
certain sign as a distinguishing factor for their offering, this can be legally protected. In the legal
world of brands (trademarks), after an enhanced distinctiveness through use has been proven, in
the US and Europe, today it is possible to register colors, holograms (picture sequence), shapes,

34Paul Feldwick, What is brand equity anyway, and how do you measure it? Best Paper Award, Market Research
Society Conference 1996

35 Raymond Perrier, Brand Valuation, Interbrand Group plc, premier books second edition 1991 pg.,8

36Leslie de Chernatony and Francesca Dall’ Olmo Riley, Brand consultants’ perspectives on the concept of “the
brand” Marketing and Research Today 1997
sounds (e.g. MGM lion’s roar, Pentium Processor, McDonald’s 5 tone logo “Dabadabada” Im
lovin’ it, etc) and even smell.

Academically speaking, today there are as many brand management books as there are brands
and as many branding definitions as there are managers. In an effort to reduce confusion among
executives and academics L. de Chernatony has categorized brands into thirteen main purposes:
as logo (symbol/design/name), legal instrument, as company (corporate branding), as shorthand
(simplifying decision making process by facilitating the processing of large amount of informa-
tion), as risk reducer (decision based on least perceived risk), as positioning device (brand asso-
ciation with a particular category), as personality (functional and emotional values related to a
person’s traits)37.

37 Leslie de Chernatony, Categorizing Brands, Journal of Marketing Management, 1993 pg., 173 From Brand Vision
to Brand Evaluation 2001, 2006. pg., 28-41
Table 1.1 source: Own
 3. Interview List

Please see Interview Folder with audio files

Below the interviews conducted in the three levels are outlined

Management Level Industry Level Company Level

3.1 Dr. Larry Light, Brand Man- 3.4 Kontrapunkt Jasmi Bonnén, 3.8 Rabbe Ekholm Chief Commer-
agement Expert Practitioner Senior Strategy Consultant; Marie cial Officer (CCO)
Andersen, Communication Con-
sultant

3.2 Dr. David Aaker, Brand Man- 3.5 Hello Group Bo Damgaard, 3.9 Kasper Grønnegaard, Director
agement Expert Academic Marketing Consultant; Martin Lin- of global marketing
degaard, Senior Consultant

3.3 Margo Georgiadis, Executive 3.6 Jyske Bank Frank Pedersen, 3.10 Birgitte Juel Christensen,
Vice President and CMO, Discover Director of Marketing and Com- Head of Corporate Brand
Financial Services LLC munications

3.7 E*Trade Christian Mørk 3.11 Ulrik Branner, Director of

Lauridsen, Senior Retail Sales global business development
Manager

3.12 Morten Skov, Human Re-

sources manager

3.13 Kim Fournais, CEO and Co-

owner

3.14 American Marketing Association Marketing Strategy Forum General Interviews

 4. Case Material - Saxo Bank

4.1 Saxo Bank Annual Report

4.2 Engagement Survey