Marketing Communications

64 CHAPTER 2 BRANDING

Further reading

Aaker, D. (2011), Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant. New York: Wiley.

Davis, J.A. (2010), Competitive Success: How Branding Adds Value. Chichester: Wiley.

Keller, K.L., Aperia, T. and Georgson, M. (2012), Strategic Brand Management: A European

Perspective , 2nd edition. Harlow: Financial Times Press.

Kumar, N. and Steenkamp, J.B. (2007), Private Label Strategy. Harvard, MA: Harvard

Business School Press.

Laforet, S. (2010), Managing Brands: A Contemporary Perspective. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.

Journal of Brand Management , http://www.palgrave-journals.com/bm/index.html.

Journal of Product and Brand Management , http://www.emeraldinsight.com.

CASE 2:

Barco, projecting the magic

Barco was founded in Belgium in 1934 by Lucien De Puydt,

who specialised in the assembly of radios with American

components. He called the company ‘ The Belgian-

American Radio Corporation’, or Barco. In the 1940s,

Barco picked up with an innovation in communication tech-

nology, namely television. From the 1960s onwards, Barco

started to diversify into different industries. Today, Barco

is a world leader concerning visualisation solutions for a

variety of selected professional markets, such as control

rooms, defence and aerospace, digital cinema, health care,

media and entertainment, and simulation and virtual reality.

These markets are served by Barco’s four main divisions:

Entertainment, Healthcare, Control Rooms & Simulation,

and Defence & Aerospace. Worldwide, Barco has about

3500 employees and its sales amounted to about €1.041

billion in 2011. The latter denotes a sharp increase of €400

million in just two years.

Barco is present in more than 90 countries and is visible

almost everywhere: screens at pop concerts and sports

events, screens in aircraft, projectors in movie theatres,

screens in hospitals, screens for company presentations,

screens to monitor industry processes, etc. For example,

U2, Madonna and Bon Jovi all use Barco screens for their

concert tours, Barco’s screens are used for the Eurovision

Song Contest; six times in a row Barco has been the exclu-

sive partner of the Berlin International Film Festival; Barco

was omnipresent at the Shanghai World Expo; China uses

Barco to help monitor the country’s electricity network;

Barco ensures the safety of a million travellers on the Sao

Paulo metro; Delhi’s police surveillance centre relies on

Barco; major hospitals all around the world use Barco

equipment. However, since Barco is active in business-

to-business markets, hardly any consumer knows the

company. Consequently, Barco is one of the world’s best-

kept secrets.

To become more visible and to build a stronger brand,

Barco adopted a corporate branding strategy in 2010,

which has clearly paid off as its recent success in digital

cinema shows. In the following paragraphs, we describe

Barco’s strategic and branding orientation of the past and

at present and how this brand focus helped it to gain

leadership in digital cinema.

The Barco brand: past and present

Barco used to adhere to a product orientation, firmly believ-

ing that high-quality products and technologies would

automatically result in market success. Concerning brand

identity, the following elements were considered as core

building blocks: quality, reliability, technological advantage,

performance and being the category reference. As many of

Barco’s employees are engineers, such a product orientation

was largely supported by managers and personnel alike.

Moreover, since Barco’s products had easily ‘sold them-

selves’ in the past, Barco was convinced that customers’

perceptions matched its own beliefs. Although high-quality

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