Marketing and branding, two of the most common used words in the contemporary world, is closely linked to each other without doubts, but the importance of branding to successful marketing is enquired to measure in term of the question. In fact, various people have different ideas on marketing and branding. For most of people, or customers, the two are normally combined in their minds or even equal to each other. For example, people could raise Apple as the answer for both questions of “what is good branding” and “what is successful marketing”. In fact, they are two separate topics on academic, and branding is just one of the numerous marketing activities apparently. However, the perception of consumers might be a good guide to answer the
This sort of perception mainly depends on consumers’ using experiences or the way organizations branded. Well marketed brands would become the indicators of quality or choice making for consumers as they have less or no ideas about the quality of certain goods in some case. As branded of its services, Virgin Atlantic is giving their customers what they want, by offering limousine services, full meal catering, multi-class services, and entertainment consoles on every seat-back. (Stealing Share, 2006) Thus, the perceived brand quality of Virgin aircrafts is quite high; customers probably would consider it firstly or secondly while they are choosing an airline that is good at customer services.

Thirdly, the brand would be more attractive and memorable if it associated with certain lifestyle or other characteristics. Virgin is one of the best choices for illustrating this point. As one of extended brands of Virgin Group, Virgin Atlantic is absolutely under the organizational culture as well, which characterized by Richard Branson, the founder of the company. Virgin’s brand values are really Branson style, which are innovative, competitive challenging, fun and so on and this also embodies in Virgin Atlantic. For instance, Virgin’s design teams always working on challenging new technologies or services, like the design of its upper class suite. (Design Council, 2007) Or,