Providing Value to Customers

Companies can adopt one of three major strategies for branding a product:

1. With private branding (or private labeling), a company makes a product and sells it to a retailer who in turn resells it under its own name. A soft-drink maker, for example, might make cola for Wal-Mart to sell as its Sam's Choice Cola house brand.
2. With generic branding, the maker attaches no branding information to a product except a description of its contents. Customers are often given a choice between a brand-name prescription drug or a cheaper generic drug with a similar chemical makeup.
3. With manufacturer branding, a company sells one or more products under its own brand names. Adopting a multiproduct-branding approach, it sells all its products under one brand name (generally the company name). Using a multibranding approach, it will assign different brand names to different products. Campbell's Soup, which markets all its soups under the company's name, uses the multiproduct-branding approach. Automakers generally use multibranding. Toyota, for example, markets to a wide range of potential customers by offering cars under various brand names (Toyota, Lexus, and Scion).