Month: October 2010

Harley-Davidson is a motorcycle company that sells Harley Experience image along with its heavyweight motorcycle. Harley symbolizes American culture, reflects a prestige lifestyle, and customers appreciate Harley’s value of individuality, freedom, and adventure, and wants a Harley bike as they feel they are connected with Harley in terms of features and lifestyle. There used to be years of waiting list for a Harley bike.

Positioning its motorcycle with a distinctive brand image of Harley Experience, and reinforcing this image though Harley Owners’ Group (HOG), Harley has successful rooted its brand into American’s culture, won customers over, and built a sustainable competitive advantage. Harley also uses the method of building loyal customer base to sustain its advantage over competitors. It retains loyal customers through HOG and outstanding customer service provided by the company and its dealers.

In today’s competitive market, it is extremely important to distinct our product with that of competitors. Often, the physical features are easy to imitate, but things like brand image takes time and money to build. Harley took its advantage of brand equity, succeeded and pioneered the US market. The sustainable competitive advantage derived from clear and distinct image is the most important reason that many motorcycle companies simply buys an existing brand that customers feel connected with when they are trying to enter and explore the India motorcycle market.

However, if Harley wants to approach a different segment with different style preference, their image of representing a certain style may drive those potential customers away. They simply think Harley doesn’t fit before even have a try. So, when deploring the different a segment, Harley may need to create a new brand with a new image, apart from Harley brand, to be competitive.

Unilever and P&G are worldwide well known personal product marketers and own hundreds of brands. Why they develop so many brands?

Take P&G hair products for example, includes brands like Head & Shoulders, Rejoice, Pantene, Herbal Essences, Gillette, and Wella with each brand promotes one specific and unique feature.

Just as different people want to drink different beverages because of different reasons at different times in different places. People want to use hair product with different features under different circumstances. Thus, P&G develops different hair products to fulfill people’s various needs to gain the most market share.

With one brand and one unique feature, P&G successfully wins consumers with different needs. For example, Head & Shoulders is famous for its anti-dandruff feature. Through its market campaign and advertising, people have linked the brand Head & Shoulders with an image of anti-dandruff in their mind. Anytime, they need anti-dandruff, there is a very greater chance, they will choose to buy Head & Shoulders.

Also, owning multiple brands under one category, P&G avoids lots of competition. Whether consumers buy Pantene, Wella, or Head &Shoulders, P&G’s sale figure rises.

Their multi brand strategy (Multi Brand Strategy refers to a marketing strategy under which two or more than two similar products of a firm are marketed under Different Brand names. In most of the cases, these products are competing ones and are marketed under the Brand Names which are completely unrelated) enables P&G to reache the largest amount of consumers.