Key principles of branding

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Key points

Here are some key principles of branding:

1. Brands are people. People make friends with people when they have things in common, want to spend time together, and find something special in the relationship. Brands make friends with people in exactly the same way. Brand management is about finding a group of people you can identify with, spending time together, & becoming committed to each other. The more time you spend with your customers the better. This is sometimes referred to as share of mind.

2. Branding is about the totality of a customer's experience. Your brand is about everything you do which impinges on the consciousness of the customer and, more importantly, it is about everything s/he thinks you do. Some experiences carry greater weight than others. Some experiences have been forgotten entirely consciously by your customer, but are nevertheless of paramount importance in the way s/he views you. Customers build brands piecemeal. They build a story about you based upon their experience. They see your products in certain shops. They heard one of your people on the radio. Somebody told them about an experience they had with you - actually, they got the name wrong. Your brand logo reminds them of daffodils. Your customer owns your brand - you do not. Your job is to behave as consistently as possible.

3. There are plenty of branding opportunities in any mass market place, so long as you do not try to copy the market leader. Brand marketing is about niche marketing. Different messages will appeal most to different groups of people. Be different.

4. Brands are best communicated implicitly. Let the customer make the connection. You must try to facilitate that experience.

5. The group of people on whom the brand is focused - the customers of the brand - need not necessarily pay you any money directly.

6. Brands last forever, if managed correctly. The most exciting brands to have are icon brands that represent a certain moment in history. Icon brands grow rapidly, become outdated and decline, and can then bounce back on the next cycle of history. More traditional brands may have less ups and downs, but there will usually be fluctuations in their fortunes. Nevertheless, brands will tend to endure if invested in consistently. Consistency is one of the key underlying themes of branding.

7. Brands win when they create a powerful experience that is totally compelling to the customer, and deliver it better than anyone else. The fewer the people you target with your brand, the more compelling is likely to be your claim in a highly competitive market. The more people you try to capture with your brand, the weaker may be your claim on any given customer, with one exception. In an environment where your customers do not have a relationship with any brands in particular, they will probably be drawn to those they recognise the best. Brands are therefore a bit like light beams. The more concentrated the beam, the more cutting power it will have (as in a laser beam); however, even a diffuse beam, like sunlight, will shed more light and heat than will darkness.

8. As brands are people, they can be analysed like people. There are two psychological theories that are especially relevant to the analysis of brands:

Personal Construct Theory - this theory argues that individuals develop theories (constructs) about how the world works, what values are to be espoused, and how personal success is achieved. These constructs are specific to the individual and bi-polar - they exist along a scale between two points defined by the individual. While one person may contrast hard vs. soft, another may contrast hard vs. squelchy, or hard vs. weak. For some, a construct may be close to the centre of how they assess other people, for others it may be peripheral, or even irrelevant. People generally prefer to discuss peripheral constructs with strangers & acquaintances as they are easily abandoned or adapted. The core constructs, which they hold closest to their hearts, are rarely mentioned. However, by the application of a technique called laddering, a good interviewer can begin to discover individuals' core constructs by starting with their peripheral ones.

Attribution theory - this theory argues that people ascribe characters to the people they meet based on a very few clues around which they spin elaborate stories. So from a gesture, or a turn of phrase, or an intonation of voice, they quickly come to a conclusion as to the sort of person they are dealing with (often within 20 seconds of meeting the person, in fact). These judgements are made not only of people, but also of animals (anthropomorphism), and even of inanimate objects (what human characteristics do you ascribe to your computer when it crashes?). Brands, which function as fictional people, are also ascribed human characteristics.

9. Brands can therefore be analysed along two key dimensions:

• The level of intimacy they have with their customers
• Their level of stature in the world

• The central organising thought of the brand
• The personality of the brand
• The values the brand espouses
• The tastes/dress of the brand, including how it speaks
• The emotional benefits the brand satisfies
• The hard benefits the brand delivers to the customer

There is evidence that measures of stature in particular (such as Total Research's Relative Perceived Quality) have strong correlations with sales, the ability to charge a premium for your products and services, and even stock price.

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