1. Owner or company manager responsibility system

The so-called owner or company manager responsibility system means that the decision-making activities of trademark (or product level) and even many organizational implementation activities are all controlled by the owner. Or a highly centralized trademark management system in which company managers and senior leaders of the company are responsible, and only low-level specific activities are authorized to be carried out by subordinates. Under this system, issues related to product or trademark development, such as product, promotion, channel selection, etc., all require the participation and decision-making of the company's senior leaders before they can be implemented. The biggest advantage of the owner or company manager responsibility system is rapid decision-making and strong coordination ability. At the same time, it can inject the entrepreneurial spirit of the owner, thereby providing a strong driving force for trademark development. It is generally suitable for small-scale enterprises with relatively few products and trademarks. When an enterprise has many businesses, or there are multiple trademarks under the same business, this organizational method will show its weaknesses. This is because senior leaders must pay close attention to trademark management and must be overwhelmed; moreover, when the business scale is large, enterprises have to deal with various organizations and institutions, which requires a lot of professional knowledge and skills. No matter how knowledgeable and experienced a business leader is, it is impossible for him to combine all these knowledge and skills. Therefore, in this case, appropriate decentralization or the development of new organizational forms for trademark management has become an inevitable trend.

Before the 1920s, the owner or company manager responsibility system was the dominant trademark management organizational form in Western enterprises. For example, in order to create the Heinz brand, H.J. Heinz spent most of his time on product improvement and planning of major promotional activities. Asa Candler, the owner and general manager of the Coca-Cola Company, used an almost religious passion to build a national distribution network from 1891 to 1916, and personally participated in activities such as selecting advertising agencies. The first chairman of United Biscuit Industry was committed to the development and launch of a biscuit called Uneeda. In short, at that time, the senior leaders of the company assumed the trademark management functions that are now mainly performed by the middle and lower-level managers of the company. There are two main reasons for this situation:

First, before the 1920s, trademark management was a relatively new field and full of opportunities. Therefore, company owners and managers attached great importance to it. Second, consumer goods manufacturing companies have encountered resistance from both inside and outside the company in the process of developing their trademarks. Eliminating these resistances objectively requires the participation of the highest-level authority in the company. For example, Procter, the CEO of Procter & Gamble, had to spend a lot of time dealing with and persuading company partners to promote Ivory soap in the 1980s and 1990s. Because at that time, many partners did not understand and strongly opposed the company's huge investment in advertising. From the naming of trademarks, the selection of advertising agencies and media, to the arrangement of various large-scale promotional activities, all are planned by corporate leaders. Although this highly centralized trademark management system has the advantages mentioned above, it also has disadvantages. To mobilize the enthusiasm and creativity of subordinates, there are tendencies and limitations to rely on experience and subjective will. For large and medium-sized enterprises and enterprises with multiple trademarks, adopting this management system will not be conducive to the development of trademark assets in the long run. At present, many companies in our country are still using this form of trademark management.

2. Functional management system

Functional management system means that under the unified leadership and coordination of the company, trademark management responsibilities are mainly shared by the company's functional departments, and each functional department has its own rights and responsibilities. A trademark management system for exercising rights and assuming obligations within the scope. This system was relatively popular in the West from the 1920s to the 1950s, and is still used by some Western companies today. There are currently quite a few companies in our country that adopt this form of trademark management.

The main advantage of the functional management system is that specially trained professional managers are responsible for the management of trademarks. On the one hand, it allows company leaders to get rid of many specific matters and concentrate on thinking and solving problems for enterprise development. on the other hand, it can also transform trademark management from traditional intuition and experience-based management to knowledge-based scientific management, thereby improving management levels. In the United States, by 1914, most industries had established a corporate organizational form dominated by functional systems. Companies hired many professional managers to supervise and coordinate various business units. These managers have received specialized functional training and adopted a rational approach to doing things. Their thinking and work style are completely different from those of previous owners and company managers. Under a functional management system, policies and plans are formulated not by one person but by a group of managers. The value emphasized in this system is mutual cooperation among managers, aiming to fully utilize the knowledge and skills of professionals in various functional departments. Functional departments such as advertising, sales, and product development work together and share trademark management responsibilities. This is indeed an improvement compared to the management method under the owner or company manager system. Because by clarifying the division of labor and clarifying responsibilities, work efficiency can be greatly improved. Take personal selling as an example. Before the functional system was adopted, salespeople basically sold based on experience. Few people in the company asked whether these sales activities were beneficial to the company or trademark image. After establishing functional departments, the company accordingly established a complete system for the selection, training, and assessment of sales personnel, ranging from which sales methods and techniques sales personnel use, how to write visit reports, how to determine the list of potential customers, to how sales personnel dress. Functional departments will provide help and guidance on dressing up and how to display products. In this way, the marketing work can be promoted to a standardized and scientific track, and the marketing efficiency can also be greatly improved. The functional management system also helps enterprises seek management services from outside, thereby further promoting the deepening of functional division of labor, which in turn can promote the improvement of trademark management levels.

However, in the mid-2020s, the functional system began to expose some problems that it was not compatible with the new requirements of trademark management. The two most prominent ones are: first, how to effectively communicate and coordinate between functional departments; second, when a company has multiple trademarks, especially when it has multiple similar products or trademarks, who should be responsible for the development of each trademark? Take primary responsibility. The former problem is intrinsic and inherent in the functional management system, because trademark management responsibilities are divided among several functional departments, and these functional departments are parallel institutions. Contradictions, conflicts and mutual blame between them are inevitable. . Advocates and supporters of the functional management system are not unaware of this, but believe that negative impacts can be minimized through mutual cooperation and communication between functional managers. The reality is that mutual distrust and conflicts between functional managers, especially advertising managers and sales managers, often occur, which leads to the inability to form a clear understanding of how to develop trademarks within the enterprise. There may even be situations where the efforts of one department are offset by the negative forces of another department. The fate of General Miller's Wheaties cereal trademark illustrates this point. In 1926, when the company launched Wheaties cereal, the company's sales staff had a very negative attitude towards its development. As a result, for three years after it was launched, the brand's sales continued to be sluggish and it was on the verge of withdrawal. It wasn't until 1929, when a manager of the company's advertising department took over the sale of the trademark, that sales of Wheaties cereal turned around, and the trademark became a huge success in the 1930s and 1940s.

The latter issue, that is, who is responsible for the development of a single trademark, is gradually emerging as the number of trademarks within the same enterprise increases. When a company has relatively few trademarks, the company's upper management has greater control over the development of each trademark. The responsibility for operating trademarks is shared by the company's marketing director and various functional departments, which generally does not cause too many problems.

When the company's business gradually expands and the number of trademarks continues to increase, especially when several different trademarks have been developed within the same business, the company has to delegate more and more decision-making powers. At this time, let the parallel functions All departments jointly bear the responsibility for trademark management, but in fact no one will bear the responsibility. In 1926, when Procter & Alkali Company launched Camay soap, some managers of the company had begun to realize the necessity of concentrating business decision-making power on a single brand and improving or transforming the original "functional system" . At that time, the "Camry" trademark was mainly launched for competing brands such as "Lux", but the company's senior management believed that the advertisements for "Camry" had too much "Ivory" (Procter & Gamble's famous soap brand) thinking color. As a result, while competing for the territory of competing brands, it also cannibalized the "ivory" market. Therefore, the company decided to find a new advertising agency for "Jiamay" and develop a completely different advertising strategy from the "Ivory" trademark. Although P&G's approach did not have an impact on other companies at the time, it actually gave birth to the embryo of the brand manager system described below.

3. Brand manager system

The so-called brand manager system means that the company assigns a manager with high organizational skills to each brand of product or product line, so that he can be responsible for the brand. He is responsible for all product development (including product concept, price and cost, material requirements, packaging requirements, time to market, etc.), product sales, and product gross profit margin, and he will specifically coordinate the work of the product development department, production department, and sales department. , responsible for the entire process of brand management. The brand manager system is believed to have been pioneered by Procter & Gamble. After Richard Deupree was appointed president of Procter & Gamble in 1930, he strongly encouraged employees to innovate. Neil Mcelroy, who was in charge of the "Cammy" trademark advertising business at the time, was sent to England to be responsible for the development of the Oxydol brand. Mcelroy found that the competition efficiency of P&G's soap business in Europe was very low. After returning to the United States, he submitted a report to the company recommending the establishment of a manager and a group of assistants for each trademark, who would be solely responsible for the brand's advertising and marketing activities. Mai's suggestion was adopted by the company in May 1931. From then on, the brand management system was officially born. P&G's practice of establishing a brand manager system did not have much impact on other companies for a long time. The reason may be that brand management is a new thing, and it needs a process to be understood and accepted by society like other innovative things. After World War II, things took a turn for the better. Many consumer goods manufacturers, especially those producing non-durable consumer goods, have adopted this trademark management system. In the United States, by 1967, 84% of major durable goods manufacturers had adopted the brand manager system. Dietz pointed out in 1975 that "the brand management system has been so widely adopted in the United States that it is considered the normative organizational form for consumer goods companies operating in multiple varieties."

The brand manager system was widely accepted and adopted by many companies after World War II, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. This is not only related to the fact that this system can more effectively adapt to the requirements of trademark management, but also to the market during this period. There is a close relationship between the widespread dissemination of marketing concepts in the corporate world. In a sense, the brand manager system combines the advantages of the owner responsibility system and the functional management system, and abandons their limitations and shortcomings to a large extent. First of all, the brand manager system shifts the focus of trademarks from the company level to each specific brand, which is of particular importance in companies with a large number of brands. When faced with numerous product businesses and trademarks, it is impossible for the company leaders responsible for marketing to be familiar with the market and demand characteristics of all these products, nor do they have the time and energy to be precise and thorough in the planning of each trademark. Therefore, objectively, Request that their trademark management responsibilities be decentralized. However, the adoption of functional management systems is not an ideal approach because they still require marketing managers to coordinate various functional activities company-wide. At the same time, instead of considering the problem from the overall perspective of a single brand, each functional department often emphasizes only A certain aspect of trademark development may result in trademark development failing to achieve overall optimization.

The brand manager system plays a unique role in alleviating the coordination tasks of the company's marketing managers and strengthening the overall nature of brand operations. Secondly, related to the above point, the brand management system can make the trademark positioning goal easier to achieve and help to personalize the trademark. The resource allocation ability of the brand manager system enables it to use professionals from all aspects of the company to serve the trademark development it is responsible for, while avoiding the phenomenon of procrastination under the functional management system, thereby ensuring the effective completion of the trademark positioning task . Thirdly, the brand management system makes enterprises more responsive to market demand. Since the brand manager is responsible for the sales and gross profit margin of this brand of goods, this can prompt the brand manager to better care about market changes and consumer needs. It is in this sense that many scholars directly link the brand management system with the marketing concept, believing that it is the "backbone" of marketing and the "perfect embodiment" of the marketing concept. In short, brand managers are known as "little owners" and "little general managers". The brand manager system is considered to be an effective management system that breaks the narrow functional division of labor and "functional closure" and injects "entrepreneurial wisdom" into a huge enterprise. .

However, the role of brand managers is conditional, and not every company should adopt this system without reservation or discrimination. In fact, some well-known companies, such as Pepsi-Cola and Heinz, gave up adopting this system in the 1970s. Moreover, in order to adapt to changes in the environment, the brand management system itself is constantly developing and improving. For example, in order to reduce competition between brands within the company and coordinate the relationship between brands and retailers, Procter & Gamble set up the function of product category managers in 1987; Campbell Company set up brand managers by region in 1986 to ensure that brands Can better adapt to the needs of consumers in different regions.