Gatorade’s new positioning from hydration to sports-nutrition is a high-risk gambit that may end up hurting more than helping the brand. The potential problem is two-fold. First, Gatorade owns sports and fitness hydration in the minds of consumers and retailers alike. An enviable position. What it doesn’t own is “sports nutrition,” an enormous category spanning multiple products and competitors.

n the run up to Christmas, and the mad post-Christmas sales dash that followed, it seemed that the only thing anybody in Cambridge did was shop. There are two malls in Cambridge, the Grand Arcade and the Grafton, and I live almost precisely between these two shopping meccas. In the days before and after Christmas, there must have been a few hundred thousand people coming in and out of Cambridge.

Brand equity is an important issue for those in floor covering. For purposes of this post I’ll define brand equity as the value the brand brings to the seller or owner of the product or service. In other words, the brand brings significant cachet so that a customer will pay more for it.  

Or your products or services, your company or its message. Without a clear program for communication, you just blend in - you become part of the scenery. So you promote, position and advertise. But along the way, communication often gets fragmented. The result is your audiences get inconsistent, sometimes conflicting impressions and information. Or they may miss your message entirely.

Franchises are among the fastest growing business opportunities available. Once the purview only of those who could afford to invest many, many thousands of dollars – often as many as several hundred of thousands – franchise opportunities now exist that will fit almost any budget.

According to Aaker (1991), "For many businesses, the brand name and what it represents are its most important assets—the basis of competitive advantage and of future earnings streams." Traditionally, a brand has been defined as "a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or combination of them which is intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors" (Kotler, 1997, 443). However, in the modern context, "A brand is a name, symbol, design, or mark that enhances the value of a product beyond its functional purpose" (Farquhar 1989).

Businesses want brand loyalty like Homer Simpson wants donuts. No business in the world would turn away a customer that’s coming back for more, since repeat customers are the foundation of any profitable enterprise. Except maybe funeral homes and hospitals, for obvious reasons. Anyway, back to the main question: how do you build brand loyalty?