On June 29, the Chair of Marketing Management had the pleasure to welcome Interbrand as a guest in the course Marketing Operations. With more than 45 years of expertise in brand management and offices in 14 cities, Interbrand is a global and leading brand consultancy. During the 90-minutes guest lecture, Fabienne Duschak (Consultant Brand Strategy) and Hiroyuki Suzuki (Senior Creative) offered various insights into their career paths and daily work. 

Ms. Duschak and Mr. Suzuki explained that a brand’s value mainly consists of three components: its financial performance, its role it plays in a purchase decision, and its ten strength dimensions – where especially the latter dimensions help to analyze a brand’s key strengths and areas for future growth.

As people are more informed, connected and demanding than ever before, Ms. Duschak especially emphasized the importance to take “Iconic Moves”. By this, brands should create remarkable customer experiences in order to meet and exceed customers’ expectations.

In addition, Interbrand believes that branding should be less about defining what a company stands for but more about determining where it should go next. Therefore, Interbrand considers a brand through the three lenses of experience, human truth, and economics. So, brands should not only meet customer needs and drive internal commitment but also create exceptional business results.

To illustrate how brand images can be created, Mr. Suzuki presented a recent Interbrand-project for the football club FC Bayern Munich. The project comprised a 360-degrees brand refresh to develop a new brand strategy and to sharpen the brand’s positioning. These initiatives ultimately contributed to expanding FC Bayern Munich to a holistic sports brand still based on its traditional values.

Looking back to the insightful guest lecture, the Chair of Marketing Management thanks Hiroyuki Suzuki and Fabienne Duschak again and is looking forward to keep in touch.