Building an ingredient brand involves creating brand equity for materials, components, and parts that are necessarily used as inputs for other branded products. These preferred inputs not only enjoy enormous equity and preference, but also make the customer blatantly refuse the product if it does not contain the preferred inputs. The ingredient becomes a more promising selling proposition than the host brand itself.

Wow, it's got this inside", is sometimes the kind of response that marketers want to elicit from the customers. This "wow factor" is the power of an ingredient brand. A walk through at supermarket, departmental store, electronic appliance store, or any other specialty store will bring to your cognizance a plethora of "Ingredient Brands".

An ingredient brand means that an ingredient or component used as an input in the brand enjoys a special brand identity and transfers the same to the host brand. The partnering ingredient brand renders a more compelling value proposition to the customer than the host brand left alone and makes the end product worth purchasing. It's a case of parts becoming greater than the whole and adding equity to the end producta strategy of communicating the benefits and strengths of an ingredient to increase the perceived value of the host brand.

Head and Shoulders with ZPTO, Computers with Intel Inside, Chevron gasoline with Techron, Diet Colas with Nutra sweet, Music systems with Dolby noise reduction, Non stick cookware with Teflon coating are the well-known examples of ingredient brands.

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