Branding Strategies for Digital TV Channels

Introduction

The advent of the new digital technologies and the convergence process within the Information Communication Technology (ICT) are causing progressive hyper-competition which is forcing each single broadcaster as well as digital TV platforms to create strong brand indentities.

Broadcasters are increasingly gaining control over the personality of their networks and on viewers’ perception of underlying brand values.

This chapter aims to analyze the impact of digitalization on marketing strategies through an investigation on the growing importance of the brand as a loyalty-based resource, available to digital television networks to aggregate and make loyalty vis-à-vis television viewers more concrete.

Special attention is being paid to branding policies adopted by digital television networks through a better knowledge of the reasons why brand equity is important in the digital television industry.

The trend towards a progressive worsening of the competition pressure in the television industry results from a number of interconnected causal factors which can generally be reconciled based upon the huge technological and competitive changes in this industry.

The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. First, a brief review of the brand equity and digital TV industry literatures will provide the theoretical background on the use of equity transfer to facilitate TV marketing strategies. Second, we focus on the cognitive process adopted by a viewer when selecting a TV channel. Third we analyze branding strategies and tools that a television network and an iTV portal adopt to communicate values connected with their brand.

The goal of this analysis is to understand how a digital television network may create a channel experience through increasing viewers’ loyalty as the source of the competitive advantage.