品牌定位市场营销外文文献翻译2014年译文3000多字(2)

through a thorough and organization-wide understanding of customer needs that a company can develop effective product, pricing, promotion and distribution strategies leading to improved long term performance. Harrison-Walker (2001) empirically demonstrated that customer orientation has a significant and positive impact on balanced scorecard measures of business performance.

In Figure 1, branding is included as one of the many product strategy decisions, along with decisions such as product design, packaging, product warranties, etc. In non-brand oriented firms, the brand is simply as one of many resources within the firm and there is no discussion about the importance of basing the firm's approach on the brand as a specific resource (c.f. Collins &Montgomery, 1995; Peteraf, 1993; Prahalad &Hamel, 1990). Even within product strategy, it is more likely the product and its functional advantages receive far greater attention than the brand (Urde, 1999, p.l 19). The problem is that functional advantages can generally be imitated (Urde, 1999, p.l 19).

The question then becomes whether a market oriented firm can also be brand oriented and, if so, where brand orientation comes into the picture. Certainly, an organization cannot focus on a brand without meeting customer needs. Customer needs must remain at the core. This does not mean that the customer is king; it means that it is imperative for the company to have a thorough understanding of customer needs in order to design an effective marketing strategy. So in our revised figure, customer needs remain at the core. For a proper adaptation of our model in Figure 1, we are provided direction by Wong and Merrilees (2007, p.388) who explain that "If each element of a marketing mix aligns to the brand, then consequently they will be aligned to each other and produce a more consistent and robust performance." In order for the brand to function as the basis of the organization's responses (Gromark &Melin, 2005), we need to add a second concentric circle around the core (see Figure 2). The second concentric circle is the brand strategy. This makes absolute sense from a marketing strategy perspective when one considers that critical branding decisions, such as positioning, are depended upon in designing the marketing mix. That is, strategic positioning involves designing the product and the marketing mix to fit a unique position in the consumer's mind. Therefore, once consumer information is collected and processed, the positioning strategy is formulated and the marketing mix is developed to communicate the brand's unique position.