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| Piyush Kumar, Associate Professor of Marketing, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia |
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| “Over the last decade or so, we have seen the emergence of what could be called a brand-and-source global economy. In this new and still emerging environment, a separation is taking place between brand owners and what we could call product fulfillers.” |
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relationship management, software development, customer service, accounting, and financial portfolio development, there is increasingly less need for holding entities to develop a range of competencies and deploy a variety of assets. Specifically, with regard to processes that require a high intellectual component, it is important for these entities to think beyond knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). Instead, they should think more generally in terms of core knowledge processes (CKPs) and distributed knowledge processes (DKPs). CKPs are those that are strategically important and best performed within the holding entity. On the other hand, DKPs are those that may be reasonably critical for the organisation but can be spun off to entities beyond the organisational boundary. Over time, the holding organisation should evolve into a network where few processes are performed within the organisational entity and most others are spun off to specialist entities located anywhere.
Brand Management as a Distributed Knowledge Process
Traditionally, branding has been viewed as an endowment process whose purpose is to separate competing products or services from one another in order to maintain differentiation and extract a price premium from the marketplace. This has resulted in a product-plus mindset for the conceptualisation, development,
and management of brands. |
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Under this paradigm, a product or service comes first and it is later branded appropriately to achieve certain strategic objectives in the marketplace. As a result of this product-plus mindset, brand management has been largely held within the confines of the holding organisation and has been thought of as a CKP which cannot be easily distributed to external entities.
However, the process of brand management shares many characteristics with other processes that have been successfully distributed or outsourced. It requires a blend or a combination of three core skills: analytics, mathematics, and aesthetics. The analytics pertains to the logic of brand management and the selection of good versus bad strategies. The mathematics pertains to the sizing of brand management problems and the evaluation of the quality of solutions based on data and models. And finally, the aesthetics pertains to elements of creativity as well as the knowledge of product category specific issues such as being able to identify good package designs from bad ones. If we view the brand management process not merely as a creative process but as one requiring these three skills, then it is easy to see that it is ripe for being treated as a reasonable and strategically important DKP. It has all of the following characteristics that have been associated with business processes |
