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Brand management of Vietnamese commercial banks - 6


The form and terminology of a brand positioning statement varies from company to company, but it typically includes the following basic elements:

- A brief description of your target customer.


- Reference frame: Is a statement that this brand meets the requirements of the target customers, and identifies relevant competitors within it.

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- Point of difference: Affirms the reasons why this brand is superior to other brands within the same frame of reference.

- Reasons to believe: Evidence supporting claims related to frames of reference and points of difference.

Brand management of Vietnamese commercial banks - 6

Once a brand is positioned for multiple target groups, the salesperson will always have to look for additional targets when the needs of the initial customer group are saturated. In today's era, positioning a brand is no longer a consistent and long-term factor, it is flexible and easily changed. The key issue is the ability to penetrate and occupy the minds of customers, leading to maintaining brand loyalty.

David Aaker's point of view (cited by Nguyen Quoc Thinh & Nguyen Thanh Trung, 2009) emphasizes the implementation of creating a distinct image in the perception of customers through a system of different positioning methods, revolving around the core values ​​that the brand wishes to create. Brand image must be implemented synchronously in all aspects from inside to outside the business, through the media, brand team, leaders, and employees to build and develop customer relationships. Thus, the target of positioning is not only customers but everyone: customers, distributors, and employees in the business.


Brand positioning emphasizes the role of communication in creating awareness of a brand in the minds of customers. Brand positioning also emphasizes the role of the brand team as well as all employees in a business. From interviewing internal employees and external customers to find out the true value of the brand and future expectations, the core value will be expressed through the brand's presentation to customers. When a strong position in the customer's perception of the brand image is established, the positioning process is successful.

For service industries such as banking and finance, where products and services can be imitated very quickly, the most important thing in brand positioning is to create a difference in products and services, specifically the quality of services provided to customers and to be recognized by customers. Banks must demonstrate how to make customers always feel safe, secure, and have good profits when coming to the bank. That is the bank that has succeeded in brand positioning.

Brand personality


Personality represents the emotional characteristics of a brand, partly developed from the core values ​​of the brand. Brand personality must be formed from internal factors. However, brand personality also needs to be relatively simpler than human personality, which is very complex. According to Moore (2009), brand personality should usually only use 3 personality traits to be most effective, these personalities must satisfy certain criteria to create an effective brand identity, including: brand personality must be consistent with the brand's ideal characteristics, brand personality must be consistent with the brand's differentiation strategy, and those personalities must support each other. Brand personality traits are further developed through representatives such as the image of typical users, brand endorsers, and customer-employee relationships. Therefore, it is important that both employees and external brand communications communicate brand personality consistently. Fish


Brand identity is also influenced by brand positioning, so an integrated approach to branding can enhance the synergy between them.

The popular brand personality assessment scale is that of Aaker (1997). Based on human personality components, Aaker proposed five brand personalities and each personality contains many different characteristics:

- Sincerity includes four basic characteristics: honesty, sociability, purity, and practicality.

- Enthusiasm includes four basic characteristics: daring to do, daring to take responsibility, profound, creative, and up-to-date.

- Ability includes three basic characteristics: certainty, intelligence, and success.


- Sophistication: includes two basic characteristics: charm and high class.


- Experience: includes two basic characteristics: worldliness and bravery.


Just like people, the personality or character of a brand depends a lot on the leader, the first teacher who builds, trains the brand team, positions and develops the brand, and the brand team that conveys the message that the brand wants to send to the outside.

Brand relationships and brand performance


Once the brand personality is nurtured, the relationship between the brand and its customers will develop. This is characterized by the values ​​inherent in the brand personality. Through interactions with customers, employees will significantly influence the relationship between the brand and its customers. Consistency in these interactions is important, because the relationship will be constantly evolving and changes in each party can destabilize the other (Foumier and Yao, 1997). The appropriate types of relationships need to be determined from the core values ​​of the


Brands and managers must ensure that their employees understand this. This creates customer loyalty to the company's brand and becomes a valuable asset for the business because it helps the business save on marketing costs, competitive costs and most importantly, develops employee relationships with new customers and thereby develops relationships between the brand and new customers.

The final component of brand identity requires the appropriate style of expression to reflect the brand’s personality in accordance with the customer’s desired image and the customer’s self-image. Customers will respond more positively to brands and businesses that they perceive as consistent with their self-image (Dowling, 1994). Brand meaning also helps consumers understand and express aspects of themselves to others (McCracken, 1993). This is the intangible added value that customers receive from consuming a brand. When they consume a brand, they feel like they are affirming their own personality. The symbolic meaning of a brand is influenced by advertising activities and employee interactions with customers. Therefore, managers need to ensure that advertising and employee behavior are consistent.

1.4.2.2 Building brand reputation


A brand's reputation is a result of a series of past actions and results of that brand, describing the brand's ability to deliver value to customers (Fombrun and Rindova, 1996). Brand image has traditionally been the focus of external evaluations of the brand, and it is the external perception of an organization's identity (van Rekom, 1997). However, brand image often changes as a reflection of consumer perceptions, while brand reputation is often more stable and condensed over time than temporal image (Balmer, 1998). Balmer (1998) argues that reputation is a reflection of history, a cumulative effect


of previously observed identification images and possibly experiences when conducting transactions. Van Riel and Balmer (1997) argue that the objective of corporate identity management is to create a favorable reputation among a firm's customers. Similarly, Baker and Balmer (1997) argue that the purpose of brand identity management is to achieve a positive corporate image, which will lead to a positive reputation for the firm. When competing products are similar and unobservable, reputation is considered to be the most influential factor in influencing customer choice (Balmer, 1998), as is the case with brands in the banking and financial services industry. Many studies have concluded that a good reputation is one of the most important factors that consumers consider in choosing a bank (Balmer, 1998).

There are many studies on the role of brand reputation in brand management. Roberts and Dowling (2002) analyzed the reputation of companies listed in Fortune magazine from 1984 to 1998 and concluded that a good reputation helps maintain high performance over time. Lievens and Moenaert (2000) considered corporate reputation as a non-financial measure of financial product and service performance. Rankin Frost and Cooke (1999) argued that a corporate reputation reflects the nature and experience of an organization and recognized that corporate reputation is essential to achieve business success. Fombrun et al., (1999) analyzed companies listed in Fortune magazine from 1988 to 1997 and concluded that a 5% change in corporate reputation would result in a 3% change in the market value of the companies. In addition, a good reputation can increase consumer expectations of a company's products and services (Yoon, Guffey and Kijewski, 1993), determine employee and customer satisfaction, pride and loyalty, reduce barriers to market entry, allow for high pricing, achieve investor satisfaction, reduce customer risk, etc. (Helm, 2006).


There are many methods for measuring brand reputation. Fortune magazine's annual Most Admired Companies list and the Reputation Institute's Global RepTrack are popular, frequently used lists and data analysis tools. Bromely (2002) compared several other measures of corporate reputation to Fortune's rankings and the Reputation Institute's Reputation Quotient (RQ), and questioned the validity of the psychometric assessments used. The following are some of the survey instruments commonly used to measure corporate reputation:

- Fortune magazine's World's Most Admired Companies (WMAC) list. Beginning in 1983, more than 8,000 people have been interviewed regularly in the AMAC (America's Most Admired Companies) and WMAC projects. In 2007, Fortune used the Hay Group, a private consulting firm, to compile a list of companies in 27 industries with revenues greater than $8 billion and sent surveys to 8,645 executives and managers at companies and analysts. Respondents were asked to rate companies in their industries on nine criteria, on a scale of 0 (poor) to 10 (excellent).

- The UK's Most Admired Companies (BMAC) list. Management Today magazine, in association with Nottingham Business School, interviewed the 10 largest listed companies in 22 industries for its assessment. Participants rated nine competitors in their industry on a scale of 0 (poor) to 10 (excellent).

- Global RepTrak ™ - the world's most desirable companies. Global RepTrak ™ is a project developed by the Reputation Institute to assess the reputation of the world's largest companies and to identify companies with the best reputations. The project interviews online more than 60,000 customers of more than 1,000 companies in 29 countries on six continents. The results in the context of a country, companies in countries that give easy scores are


have lower scores than companies in countries with more difficult assessments.

The above methods are popular, however, these approaches are limited in their empirical design because they do not allow for a free choice of companies to be studied, but only those companies that are included in the data set. Furthermore, the evaluation criteria of organizations are unclear and they do not have a definition or underlying theory, and there is no available meaningful and reliable measurement method.

There are several reputable brand reputation studies based on surveys of customers' understanding of brand identity (Passow, Fehlmann, and Grahlow, 2005). This method has the advantage of being able to compare internal and external assessments of brand identity because the evaluation criteria are the same.

In short: if brand identity comes from internal factors within the business, brand reputation comes from external factors, which are the perception and evaluation of customers, partners and public opinion for the brand. Brand identity represents "who you are" while reputation is "what people think about you". If identity and reputation are consistent, it means the brand is at its peak and the business is managing the brand perfectly. Maybe almost ideally.

The gap between brand identity and brand reputation can arise due to incongruence between the components of the identity, through inconsistent representations of brand characteristics; and can be caused by external factors such as counterfeiting and uncontrolled media (de Chernatony, 1999). For example, Fombrun and van Riel (1997) note that intermediaries, such as market analysts, professional investors, and reporters, can misinform those who rely on secondary and incomplete sources of information.


Similarly, the perceptions of customers, employees and brand management teams are important for corporate brand management (Balmer and Stotvig, 1997). Employees are not only the providers of brand information to customers but also the recipients of customer feedback. Managers need to use employee feedback to improve their understanding of how customers feel about their brand (Ind, 1997). Therefore, it is important in brand management to use employees to bridge the gap between brand identity (internal perceptions) and brand reputation (external perceptions).

To determine the gap between brand reputation and identity, it is necessary to compare the brand perception between internal (employees and brand team) and external (customers). Determine the gap between brand reputation and identity by comparing each subject's evaluation for all components of identity, in which the brand team's evaluation is the identity and the customer's evaluation is the reputation. This method was used by Passow, Fehlmann and Grahlow (2005).

It is from the above issues that this study uses the scale of the gap between brand identity and reputation to measure the effectiveness of brand management, and at the same time analyzes to find influencing factors to build a model of the gap between brand identity and reputation.

1.4.2.3 Brand protection


In addition to creating brand identity and reputation, brand management also includes brand protection. Brands are valuable assets. There are brands with assets up to tens of billions of US dollars such as Microsoft, Apple... Therefore, losing a brand can cause many dire consequences. For example:

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