Brand Management Literature Review

This section of the project has the purpose to elucidate the meaning of the concepts and keywords (specifically brand and museum or art gallery) encountered during this study, through the support of the body of literature related to the subject. The definitions obtained will be then used as a guidance for the interviews and the survey.

Brand, definition and related theories

The following first section of the review aims at providing the definition of brand and related theories of brand management. Branding is a very discussed tool; indeed, articles and frameworks are published daily because of the difficult understanding on how to approach it in order to find the “holy grail of brand management” (Heding et al., 2009, p. 3). A review of the

This definition includes the dual aspect of brand, explicitly referred by Kotler and Keller (2012) as brand’s tangible dimension (functional, rationale) related to the performance of the brand itself and brand’s intangible dimension (symbolic, emotional) related to what the brand represents. This double aspect, especially the intangible one according to Dunn and Davis (2004), makes the brand a rather unconventional asset for an organization and brand management far from being an exact science (Hill, 2005). Despite this, organizations whose CEOs recognized the importance of brand as a strategic asset and implemented brand-driven activities, have proven to be successful (Dunn & Davis, 2004). To cite one, Dunn and Davis (2004, p. 5) refer to Prophet’s 2002 Best Practices Study about Amazon, whose customer service costs were too high and the fastest solution was to reduce the number of customer service representatives or shut down one call center. However, these were short term solutions damaging Amazon's brand promise "to provide a friendly, accessible, reliable and personalised access to product at a fair price". Thus, the issues with customer service requests were investigated; the confirmation

The assumption is that all brand activities should be integrated and adopted at a corporate level. In this approach, brand value is created by answering in a unique way to the questions “Who we are? What do we stand for? What do we become?” (2009, p. 50). As Heding et al. state (2009), brand receivers are not only consumers, but the totality of stakeholders involved, in order to create an unshakable identity, clear to everyone and easier to communicate. The picture below shows the process of the identity approach that will be principally used to conduct this