See your brands through your customers' eyes

Subaru markets an L.L. Bean Cutback station wagon. Dell stamps Microsoft an d Intel logos on its computers. Such interweaving of different companies' b rands is now commonplace. But one of the central tools of brand management- portfolio mapping - has not kept pace with changes in the marketplace. Most conventional brand maps include only those brands owned by a company, arra nged along organizational lines with little regard for how the brands influ ence customer perceptions. In this article, the authors present a new mappi ng tool-the brand portfolio molecule-that reveals the way brands appear to customers. The brand portfolio molecule includes all the brands that factor into a consumer's decision to buy, whether or not the company owns them. The first step in creating a brand portfolio molecule is to determine which brands should or should not be included. The second step is to classify ea ch brand by asking five key questions: 1) How important is this brand to cu stomers' purchase decisions about the brand you're mapping? 2) Is its influ ence positive or negative? 3) What market position does this brand occupy r elative to the other brands in the portfolio? 4) How does this brand connec t to the other brands in the portfolio? 5) How much control do you have ove r this brand? The last step is to map the molecule using a 3-D modeling pro gram or by hand with pen and paper. Individual brands take the form of atom s, and they're clustered in ways that reflect how customers see them. The u sefulness of the tool lies in its ability to show the many forces that infl uence a customer's buying decision - and to provide a powerful new way to t hink about brand strategy.