Brandname: Neil Pryde
Company Name: Neil Pryde Ltd
 
Management Function Analysis

The company's excellence in design ideas and technology has enabled it to become a quality leader, while the continuous building of the brand equity has made it a price and sales leader.

The company's success in building a strong brand equity yields a number of marketing advantages and in the main, it affects a more ready and favorable response by consumers to the company's various marketing activities. A brand is thought to have positive equity to the extent that consumers respond more favorably to marketing activities when the brand is identified, compared to when it is not.

Brand leaders like the company enjoy high brand credibility. The company can therefore decreases the price sensitivity of their target customers and can command greater price differences than its competitors. In a competitive sense, brand leaders draw a disproportionate amount of share from smaller share competitors. This explains why the company can stay as the price and sales leader in its industry. In fact, the more loyal the customers become, the lower will be the price sensitivity.
 
Implications for SMEs
SMEs should take note of the different stages of consumer behavior in relations to product image. The stages are attention and learning, interpretation and evaluation, and choice. In the information-gathering stage, a new consumer may pay more attention to, and learn more about, a brand with which they are familiar. While interpreting and evaluating information, brand knowledge in many cases could have both "direct" and "indirect" effects brand-related information could be input directly into the decision process or may influence impressions of other information that is input into the decision process in various ways. A brand's strength will be completely employed during the choice process if a new consumer skips a thorough examination and simply relies on brand name familiarity as a choice heuristic. Lastly, having finally purchased the product consumers may be more loyal to the brand and have higher evaluations for future brand extensions.

Knowing the stages of consumer behavior would help directing SMEs' attention to planning their marketing activities and the need to provide product/service knowledge, and project a positive product/service/corporate image to their target customers.