Handbook of Media Branding

This piece examines recent changes and emerging trends in the media industry, their implications for branding, and specific research ideas that address these changes in the context of media branding. An overview of the characteristics and challenges facing today’s media brands is introduced, followed by an analysis of recent changes and how they might re-shape the parameters of media branding strategies. Next, a list of factors that are expected to affect media branding practices into the future and potential research topics addressing the new media branding 3.0 environment are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the research output on media brands and media branding over the past 20 years. A meta-analysis was conducted to detect publications and investigate the structure, the theoretical approaches, as well as utilized methods and analyses of research output published in German and English. Thus, a broad overview on the developing area of media branding within the field of media economics and management is provided. Overall the meta-analysis revealed a prevalence of empirical studies and on TV as the dominant medium investigated. Furthermore, management and strategy is shown to be the primary theoretical research focus.

Powerful media branding has historically facilitated successful international expansion on the part of magazine and other content forms including film and TV formats. Multi-platform expansion is now increasingly central to the strategies of media companies and, as this chapter argues, effective use of branding in order to engage audiences effectively and to secure a prominent presence across digital platforms forms a core part of this. Drawing on original research into the experience of UK media companies, this chapter highlights some of the key economic, management and socio-cultural issues raised by the ever-increasing role of brands and branding in the strategies of international and multi-platform expansion that are increasingly commonplace across media.

Due to their properties and market structures media products and services depend on trusted brands and good reputation for their success, the more so since the arrival of interactive multi-media platforms. While not fully encompassing the wide body of literature from management or marketing, media management and economics research has also neglected business-to-business settings. Management and marketing research are equally unconcerned with using media as a special case for complex branding issues in highly volatile multi-tier market environments with diverse stakeholder settings. This chapter thus explores the specifics of media brand management and organization compared to settings proposed in the branding literature. Based on these results it discusses implications for both media management practice and media management and economics research.

International sales and operations are becoming increasingly important to many media companies. Being able to utilize an internationally well-known brand facilitates entry into foreign markets. When operating internationally, the question of whether to localize or to standardize brand communication and content across markets is crucial. After discussing the benefits of an approach of standardization and a possible audience for globally standardized brands, this chapter introduces reasons why companies may, however, choose to localize. Furthermore, it discusses possible areas of localization as well as strategic options for foreign market entry through media brands. This chapter concludes with a call for further research on international branding that takes into account the special characteristics of media products and markets.

Because of the changes in the media industry over the last years, brand management has become a key issue. Media brands fulfill important functions to compensate media product characteristics, one of those being the need to address the audience as well as the advertising market. Accordingly, branding strategies have to be developed from the brand identity for both groups of customers while being considerate about the match of the evolving images. This approach offers benefits not only in the audience market, but to media companies and advertisers alike. Through laying emphasis on a brand’s exceptional contents, audiences and services, media companies can build up brand equity and differentiate themselves from competitors. Advertisers on the other hand profit from media brand activation and context leading to involvement of a distinct target group with the advertisement. Associations with the media brand are transferred to the commercial message, making it more credible and effective.

When glamour can sell candidates and cruises, roadsters and real estate, when glamour describes stocks (so called glam stocks vs. value stocks) and rock (glam rock vs. progressive rock) and when football seasons are full of glam transfers: why should the brands of publishing houses, social media platforms, TV series or magazines not also profit from a glam component? As the re-entry (Spencer-Brown, 1972) of magic into brand management, glamour helps media companies to break free from the classical brand engineering concept and offers an aestheticization that might add value—and allure. But it also asks for a reinterpretation of some cherished concepts as glamorous brands are defined through a punctum, an extra, a rainbow-moment—and those are difficult to plan, predict, and produce. Certainties might fade away, but in return (media) brands could stand out.

This study examines adopters and non-adopters of pure play distribution across, print, audio, video, and gaming platforms through the lens of the Consumer Based Brand Equity (CBBE) model’s seven dimensions of perceived quality. It attempts to mobilize brand management scholarship to better predict the likelihood of a consumer engaging in a pure play distribution transaction, and addresses the unique considerations associated with pure play media branding. Pure play products refer to media content sold as digital files and while the appeal for a media firm to engage in pure play distribution stems from economic efficiency, the increase in choice and availability offered to audiences has not produced a consistent level of consumer acceptance across all media platforms.

In the context of production, it is sometimes claimed that content development and creation could and should learn from branding. I will argue that essentially it is the other way round. When content creation has been made more standardized the content becomes “brandable”. Subsequently, branding handbooks and marketers are adopting simplified concepts of storytelling. In this sense, branding can be regarded as the commercialized version of standardized storytelling. Changes in the value chain of media production and distribution lead to the question of who shall be responsible for branding. Drawing from a study with audiovisual producers in Europe, it is illustrated that producers are reluctant to accept the branding of content as part of their changing job role. Thus, it is concluded that actually the content should not be branded at all, but rather that the distribution should be.

The present article aims to shed light on the broader paradigm change that has led to native advertising as a revenue model for the publishing business recently. The early emergence of native advertising is thus described in the light of branded content and brand culture strategies, a set of marketing practices that modify firms’ branding through a fresh editorial approach. The development of the native advertising concept is further problematized as a manifestation of the intertwined and blurring lines between communication and information, i.e., between marketing and journalism practices. We finally discuss potential implications of this type of sponsored content and some managerial recommendations.

Television formats form a major cultural export and yet, there is no protection under copyright law. Format copycats or imitators freely develop game, reality and talent shows based on successful format ideas. Despite this, the format industry has developed an ingenious and complex suite of market based practices that are allowing a thriving format industry to appear. This chapter discusses how TV format makers use brand management practices, in the absence of any legal solutions, to innovate and trade in their products. These include a number of practices such as: developing and managing the format brand identity, developing localized brand extensions and leveraging the producers brand reputation.

In this chapter we acknowledge the branding process as an interplay between brand owners, consumers, popular culture, and other stakeholders. This interdependence between management practices and the external environment is becoming increasingly evident, not the least in the field of media. In a world of social and participatory media, consumers are given more and more opportunities to interact with, and through, their favorite brands. On the one hand these interactions may be signs of deep and sincere appreciation, while at the same time making brands more and more difficult to control or direct from a managerial point of view. This has led brand managers and researchers to identify a need for new insights into the cultures of brands. The research on consumer culture that has evolved over the past decades has the power to provide guidance. This chapter offers an introduction to researching and theorizing how consumers engage in the social construction of media brands and points out a handful of promising research areas.

Marketing literature provides a wide range of recommendations on how to do marketing communication. However these cannot be adopted on a one-to-one basis by media brands. This article gives a literature review on what has been written on the communication of media brands. It is focused on communication goals, media messages, media platforms and selected instruments of communication. Because it is in these aspects that media brand communication differs most from any other brand communication.

The aim of this study is to investigate how news magazine brands use social media communication. It will be further examined how social media activities affect user engagement. A closer look is taken at both extant literature as well as leading European and U.S. news magazine brands. We give a detailed investigation into which types of content and which communication styles actually drive user engagement on social media by analyzing the social media activities of Time magazine and Spiegel Online. The present study thus aims to provide important insights into key success factors for news magazines’ social media communication.

This chapter deals with the idea that a target group evaluates the media on the basis of their respective users. It is important for the recipients to know about their fellows. They want to identify with them; they do not want a possibly negative user image to reflect on themselves. Thus, users become an integral part of a media brand. This assumption is based on three theoretical approaches: social distinction, impression management and social identity. A literature overview shows that media use represents a means of social distinction and that other persons are judged on the basis of their media use. These results in the following implications for media branding: Media companies should try to control their audience’s image of their media brands. A marketing strategy that is very blatantly focused on a large range may be risky because it endangers the exclusivity of the media brand and its potential for distinction.

In an audience perspective a media brand can be understood as a construct carrying all the connotations of (potential) recipients comprising cognitive, emotional, conscious or unconscious associations towards specific media formats, personae, genres, channels etc. Audience-centered media brand study has successfully stimulated research, but is largely isolated from communication science and other related disciplines. The aim of this article is to review and structure audience-centered research on media brands and to uncover ‘white spaces’ in this field of interest. In applying a multi-level approach of audiences, the chapter not only considers extant theoretical and methodological approaches in audience theory, but also presents a flexible framework for different interpretations of media brands’ functions and effects.

Media brands are the result of the interplay between the marketing strategies of media companies directed at children, and children’s practices related to these strategies and the respective media offers. After an outline of recent theoretical work on children as part of consumer culture, this paper sheds light on central aspects of marketing strategies that set out to establish media brands in the everyday lives of children. With regard to the other side of the interplay, children use media brands in order to gain orientation in the confusing world of products and services, to position themselves within their peer group, to distinguish themselves from other groups, and to acquire resources for coping with the challenges of their everyday lives. Against this background the article discusses media brands as an issue of societal concern.

This chapter discusses the question of whether audience members become loyal toward a media brand when sharing, liking or commenting on online media content—or are loyal readers more inclined to write comments on online articles or to like and share them? The aim is to answer this chicken-egg causality dilemma of the audience integration-loyalty relationship on a theoretical basis. Therefore, the concept of attitude-behavior consistency, the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior, involvement theory, uses and gratifications theory, and current research are reviewed. In conclusion, audience integration can be defined as behavioral dimension of loyalty and affects gratifications obtained that determine satisfaction, which in turn determines loyalty and future gratifications sought.

Marketing managers of traditional media brands are facing a challenging communication reality today. Reaching magazine brand users has become more complex since the number of communication platforms and channels is ever-rising. In this environment one of the oldest communication techniques, word of mouth (WOM), has been revived and is leading media brands to highly benefit from the concept of amplified WOM, also known as buzz marketing. The opportunities of buzz marketing extended with the increasing dissemination of social network sites (SNS). This study examines how media managers can use SNS, in particular Facebook fanpages, to generate positive WOM about traditional media brands. Using the example of four magazine brands in the German market the author explores the value of buzz marketing and brand fans for media brand communication and sheds light on the main drivers generating online and offline WOM.

This contribution analyzes why media companies are “late bloomers” in the field of branding and marketing. Thereafter, it focuses on different instruments of media branding and media marketing and the ethical conflicts which may arise between branding (as a long term strategy to create and to improve brand value and to preserve journalistic values) and “trial and error” marketing efforts which may—particularly in the “upper quality segment” of media markets—work at short term but endanger journalistic credibility, and thus, brand value. The major research question for this article is: how can the branding perspective within media support professional and ethical journalistic values, and do some marketing efforts conflict with a branding strategy?

According to New Institutional Economics, media brands are not only a means of differentiation and valuable resources, but also institutional arrangements that allow media companies to profit from the production of high quality journalism. From this perspective, media brands promise journalism of high quality, and media brand reputation provides an economic incentive to produce it. However, it remains unclear whether a gap between the promise of quality from media brands and the product would be recognized and whether the possible reactions of the audience would be threatening to media management. According to Neoinstitutionalism, a media brands’ promise of quality might be a way to cope with both market and societal expectations in order to achieve legitimacy. From this perspective, it is highly probable that media brands are only giving the appearance of high quality journalism.

Information economics suggests that there are fundamental quality dilemmas which affect media markets. This chapter examines whether the hypothesis that media branding can overcome these dilemmas by establishing quality reputation mechanisms can be supported by the economic theory of reputation. Building on this examination this chapter presents a basic economic theory of media brands. Above that it provides insights into the economics of media product bundling, as well as into the very special economics of journalism. However, unlike the standard economic theory of reputation, which is solely based on information economics and game theory, the economic theory of media brands must also take institutional economics into account. The chapter closes with an application of the outlined theory to the question of how the development of the internet affects journalistic media brands.

Facing increased competition and changing user behavior news media outlets increasingly have to pursue branding strategies to stay successful in the market. But the role of traditional news media as democratic institutions and the associated expectations impede branding measures as well as reservations against branding on the journalist’s side. This contribution is an attempt to further investigate news media branding. Referring to existing models it suggests the integration of societal functions as well as journalistic quality in the brand identity of news media brands. The production of contents should reflect these values in order to achieve successful branding to create a strong news brand. Expert interviews, audience survey and content analysis have been conducted to investigate the performance of news media brands regarding the fulfillment of societal functions and the journalistic quality.