Brand definition

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Question - why do you need to define your brand?

Answer:

1. to ensure that you have a fresh, compelling and competitive proposition
2. to ensure that your brand works strongly at an emotional as well as at a rational level
3. to ensure that your brand can be delivered consistently and in full by all its stakeholders

Key Action Points

Your brand should be defined according to the following dimensions:

1. Its central organising thought – defining it for internal & stakeholder use in one sentence
2. Its slogan - defining it for use with customers in one sentence
3. Its personality – what would it be like if it were a human being?
4. Its values – what does it stand for/against?
5. Its tastes/appearance - what does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it like and dislike?
6. Its stories - what are the stories you tell about how it all came about/what sort of brand it is?
7. Its emotional benefits – how it avoids/reduces pain or increases pleasure
8. Its hard benefits – the “pencil sell”

In more detail.....

Brands need to provide customers with a consistent, compelling experience in order not to confuse them, as confusion leads to doubt.

Everyone associated with the brand must understand its key dimensions in order to deliver this consistent experience, and it helps if customers can be given a short slogan which encapsulates the essence of the brand.

Central organising thought

How are you going to describe the essence of the brand to your colleagues and business partners in one short, memorable, and motivating sentence? What makes it special?

This is the last and hardest stage of the brand definition process. Try to create images of what the brand does, and preferably link it to an eternal value such as friendship, status, belonging, realising your true self (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs could be useful here).

The central organising thought is not the same as the slogan. The central organising thought addresses a core customer value whose articulation may make customers uncomfortable or perplexed. The slogan refers to this core customer value but in terms the customer is happy to acknowledge and discuss.

Examples of central organising thoughts would be:

• BMW: competitive achievement
• Chrysler: cars that dare to stand out
• Coca-Cola: refreshing the mind, body and spirit
• Federal Express: guaranteed, trackable, delivery on time
• Mercedes: technical innovation
• Virgin: more fun, more value

Slogan

How are you going to describe the essence of the brand to your customers in one short, memorable, and motivating sentence? This should hint at the central organising thought, without necessarily stating it.

As an example, the central organising thought of the BMW brand is "competitive achievement", but the slogan is "the ultimate driving machine".

Other slogans include:

• Coca-Cola – “The real thing”
• GM – “Everything we do is driven by you”
• Philips: “Crystal clear visions of the future”
• Vodafone: “How are you?” and “Welcome to the world’s largest mobile community ™”

The personality of the brand

If the brand were indeed human, what sort of person would it be - jovial, serious, sporty, aristocratic, cunning?

Some brands have real personalities attached to them, e.g. Richard Branson of Virgin, and Anita Roddick of The Bodyshop. Some of these personalities could be dead, or long off the scene (e.g. Bill and Dave of H-P; Jack Welch of GE).

Others do it by endorsement and association, such as Accenture with Tiger Woods and golf.

Yet others just seem to have personality emerge from their essence, such as Apple, Post-it Notes and Louis Vuitton.

The values of the brand

What does the brand stand for? What does it believe in? What would it make a stand on?

For instance, The Bodyshop has been one of the few brands willing to associate itself with Amnesty International and human rights. Bennetton provoked debate on awkward social issues. Ikea and Kodak evangelise family values. Many big brands now play the “ethical card”, especially after the Enron, Tyco and Worldcom scandals. Gap recently came clean on child exploitation, playing the "honesty" card, which is a little differnt from the ethical one, but safer.

Tastes/appearance

What does the brand like? What does it look like? What does it wear? How does it speak?

This will include the iconography of the brand - the icons, the symbols, the trade dress, the typeface, the look and feel, the smell, and the sonic signature.

Many brands seek to establish an attitude with their appearance, from the “go get” of primary colors (Ikea, McDonalds, Yellow Pages), to the “class” of Mercedes-Benz and Louis Vuitton.

Many elements of taste and appearance work subconsciously. The NLP (neuro linguistic programming) psychological school points out that most of our motivations are driven by visual, auditory and kinaesthetic cues, rather than by verbal/rational ones.

Stories

All great brands have stories about them. Some are favorable, some are less favorable, but all of them work to explain what the brand is all about.

Telling stories about the brand is one of the strongest ways of communicating its essence

• 3M has the story of the Post-it Note that was nearly withdrawn for lack of sales until the team handed out free samples to all major offices in a city, and started to get repeat orders coming in just after the factory was ordered to shut
• H-P tells the story of Bill and Dave and the factory in the garden shed where the door was always open (if there ever was one)
• IBM describes the time when a senior manager was summoned to meet Watson, the driving CEO of IBM, for losing the corporation millions of dollars. “I suppose you are going to sack me”, he observed to Watson, apprehensively. “Sack you?!”, roared Watson. “I have just spent ten million dollars training you!”

Emotional benefits

What does the brand do for its customers emotionally?

These can usually be classified into:

• Avoids pain
• Reduces pain
• Gives pleasure

The stature/respect/authority aspects of a brand normally address the first two – it is such an established, quality, brand that you can trust it to get things right first time (at best), to put things right if they go wrong (somewhere in the middle), to look like you were making an understandable and serious choice (even if the worst happens).

Major management consultancies are often hired on this basis. They may not offer any more than a consultancy at half the price, but you will not look an idiot, whatever happens. Famously, “no-one ever got sacked for hiring IBM”.

Appealing to the pleasure principle is often a more difficult task, but an essential one in crowded markets with lots of established and trusted quality brands.

Of course, it helps if the category has some sort of inherent excitement to it, such as cars. Failing that, you can hitch your brand to a topic that does – sports would be a classic example, or animals (Andrex), romance or lust (sex sells).

Hard benefits

What does the brand offer its customers in tangible, quantifiable terms?

These are the benefits as in "Features, Advantages and Benefits".

The old belief was that in most countries, emotional benefits sold better than hard, rational benefits. But there is now a school of thought that argues that consumers are now too sophisticated to fall for advertising “puff”, and that it is the hard-nosed value proposition that counts.

The truth is probably that the two have to be balanced off, as has always been understood in pricing. Just because you are a premium brand does not mean that you can charge anything you like. An element of trade-off applies under most circumstances.

Equally, it could be argued that brands cannot be all image over substance. Over 60% of brands on supermarkets shelves in Western Europe are retailer, not manufacturer, brands. It was once thought that the premium branded manufacturer also made the retailer-branded product, so you might as well buy the cheaper one. It is now thought that some company you have never heard of makes both.

Nonetheless, if all propositions are equal, you are probably going to buy the brand you most associate with (which might be the retailer brand). Products and services are bought on perceptions, and perceptions are biased by emotions. Focus entirely on hard, rational benefits and you will end up in a price war (the low cost airline industry would be such an example).

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