The Store - The Physical Place of Branding

Abstract The market of consumer goods has become saturated and in the superfluous range of goods it is necessary to be able to differentiate your products from the competitors’. To facilitate this, many products and services are attributed with additional qualities, such as feelings, status and personality traits. These attributes are included in the abstract concept of a brand. A brand is an essential medium of communication to the customers, transmitting the special characteristics which will differentiate the product or the service from others. The stores are the actual spot where the brand can be perceived and experienced in real life. The store will by its concrete and non-concrete means transmit feelings the customers will relate to the brand, and the store personnel are important as well as active messengers of the brand. Some of the most well-known companies today are multinational companies which sell retail products and have succeeded to create a world known brand, one of them is Apple. Apple has a renowned brand intended to represent quality, design and innovative thinking. They value and are conscious about their brand and thus care to maintain its good reputation. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how Apple’s brand concept is transferred to their premium reseller stores, namely Macoteket, and also to discuss whether and how the brand is seen in the stores. The study has been conducted through studying material and theories relevant to brand transfer, and then visiting Apple’s office and three Macoteket stores and carrying out several interviews with people involved in the transfer of the brand. The results show that when transferring a brand to a store, the transfer strategy needs to be adjusted to fit the different kinds of knowledge that the brand consists of. The processes Apple use to transfer their brand to Macoteket indicate an excessively codified strategy, partly due to the fact that the deeper understanding of what needs to be said and done should be taught personally, and consequently not by instructions in texts and e-mails