What Is a Brand, Anyway?
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard these lines or similar ones during my career… well, my career would be over because I’d be living the good life on a small, remote island somewhere in the Pacific.
“We need to focus on being true to our brand.”
“Our strategy is all about brand-building.”
“Is that brand-right?”
Allow me to translate, from my personal experience:
“We need to focus on being true to our brand.”
(translation: we know what consumers want from us better than they do.)
“Our strategy is all about brand-building.”
(translation: we don’t know what consumers want from us.)
“Is that brand-right?”
(translation: we don’t like what consumers are asking us to do.)
The DNA of a Brand
Companies often confuse what it means to be a brand. It makes some sense, because how a brand comes to be defined has evolved over the past decade and continues to change at a rapid pace.
Let’s just get this out of the way — a brand is not whatever the company defines it to be. A brand lives inside a person’s heart and mind. Brands are ideas that we aspire to attain in our lives. In short, brands make us feel good.
Brands can make us feel good in a variety of ways:
Image: the brand projects a worldview that we aspire to have in our own lives. Nike is a good example.
Service: the brand provides a superior customer experience. Amazon is the prime example here (pun sort’ve intended).
Values: the brand shares a set of values that we hold important in our lives. TOMS is well-known for its values-based brand.
The best brands harness all three of these ideas — image, service, values — and develop a unique perspective that appeals to people emotionally and rationally. Apple is brilliant at this.
The Past, Present and Future of Brands
The truth is, most companies are not brands. The definition of the term has become completely unmoored from its origin. People are brands now, and the term gets tossed around like a frisbee at the dog park.
In the 18th century a brand was a mark, typically used in industries like cattle ranching to mark property. Over time, companies began to use brands to help their products stand out on shelves. If you were shopping for say, a soda, Coca-Cola and Pepsi wanted you to see their labels standing apart from the competition on your grocer’s shelves.
So in essence, a brand is a mark that signifies a product. That’s not what it means to people, though. A true brand signifies much more. A brand is what someone feels when seeing your logo, what someone thinks when hearing your brand name or products and services.
Your brand is alive, it lives in the hearts and minds of people.
“You have to decide what image you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the marketplace.” — David Ogvily
Times have changed since Mr. Ogivly offered this insight, but the crux of it remains true today. Brands are living breathing entities because they live inside living, breathing people. Yet too often companies treat their brand as a fixed position, something that cannot or must not change.
This philosophy is foolish in today’s media and commercial environments.
As humans, we’re taught to never stop learning and growing. We constantly seek to elevate ourselves, to adapt to our world and the experiences we have within it. If brands are living entities, why should they not evolve and grow alongside us?
Brands must learn to be flexible and to take a consumer-centric worldview of themselves, or they will risk increasingly swift decline in business. A brand can grow just like a person:
Nutrition: data, research, customer feedback
Exercise: marketing and advertising tests, new services and products
Study: analysis, agile developement (test and scale)
Rest: precise planning (i.e. knowing when to step back / shut up)
This is not an insurmountable challenge. It just requires a re-wiring of marketer’s brains. We need to stop thinking like marketers and start thinking like customers. We need to understand how and why we ourselves are engaged with brands in our daily lives, then apply those principles to brand strategy at our place of work.
Marketers need to focus on tapping into a person’s limbic system. This is the part of the brain that controls emotion, behavior, motivation and long-term memory — all things that are essential for brand-building.
Three steps can make this happen:
- Get people to FEEL something about your brand
- Get people to THINK about what your brand is offering
- Reinforce #1 and #2
Develop Empathy
Empathy builds an understanding of another’s perspective. Know an audience not by statistics but by their identities. A person is not the sum of his or her demographic information. He or she is the sum of their life experiences, and the impact of that collective experience on how they behave. A brand with images, services and values that intersect with the core identity of an audience will have much higher potential to become embedded.
Reduce Friction
People are delighted by experiences that are intuitive and seamless. It creates a rush of endorphins. Why does Amazon offer free same-day or two-day shipping through Prime? Because they know the chemical reaction that occurs knowing you click BUY and your item arrives ASAP is powerful. The more intuitive any experience is for consumers with a brand, the more powerful the connection they will share with it.
The Marriage of Art and Science
Oftentimes there’s a sharp divide in today’s marketing communities about where the focus should be placed — the art of creativity or the science of data. This is a simple, unimaginative view of the two principles. Art without strategy is just that — pretty pictures or videos, signifying nothing. Data isn’t valuable because of the numbers themselves, it’s value lies in the story numbers tell about people’s perceptions and behaviors. Science can lead to great art in marketing, and that art should be constantly, critically evaluated.
Companies no longer have control of their brand. Consumers do. That’s a good thing, if you’re willing to listen and learn from them. Remember, we’re all consumers in one respect or another so ask yourself — what do you believe about the brand you work for?
