Fifteen: Can We Still Be Friends?
It's been said that you learn more about someone at the end of a relationship than at the beginning. This is because when forming relationships, people tend to act in a manner that accommodates the perceived preferences of the other party. In time, they stop acting and settle into their normal patterns of behavior. And at the end, they are often at their worst because they no longer care about making a favorable impression.
Commercial relationships follow much the same pattern: companies put on their best face to appeal to prospects and convert them into first-time buyers. Once a purchase is made, the company settles into "business as usual" and expects the customer to attend to their needs and preferences. And when a customer calls to cancel service, things get ugly.
There's a brief mention of corporate mergers and take-overs, which follow much the same pattern provided that both companies are keen on the idea. The exception is when one company doesn't want the relationship and tries to make itself unappealing - it may make negotiations hostile, or even take a "poison pill" to make the deal seem financially unsuitable.
Along the same lines, the author mentions the bailout of 2009, in which GM and Chrysler claimed to be on the verge of collapse and demanded $16.6 billion in assistance from the federal government. In the end, it cost US taxpayers over $50 billion because neither firm had an effective plan for restructuring and recovering. While they eventually recovered and repaid the aid, it tool far longer than they initially projected.
Brand Messaging Interpretation: Myers-Briggs
The author strays through the components of the Myers-Brigs Personality Type system to consider how personality influences the way people interpret brand messages.
Introversion/Extraversion
Introverts are self-contained thinkers who assess the way in which any new information jibes with that which they already know. They recognize other peoples' opinions as potentially but not necessarily valid until they are verified or dismissed by their own judgment.
Extraverts, meanwhile, are highly susceptible to outside influences - they want to be agree with other people, whether by being dominant and insisting the other party adopt their point of view, or submissively accepting the other person's point of view. To an extravert, the truth is what other people agree upon.
Sense/Intuition
The third factor considers whether an individual relies on granular and concrete sense data (sensing) or considers the broader meaning of perceptions as a whole (intuition) in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
It's said that sensors tend to be less rational than intuitions, in that they take things as they are rather than considering their meaning. However, it is possible (albeit rare) for a sensing person to also think, reasoning based on concrete perceptions.
Thinking/Feeling
This parameter is based on the traditionally accepted dichotomy between thinking (rational) and feeling (emotional). The implication is that a thinker considers the logic of the message when interpreting a brand message, whereas a feeler has a general sense of its overall emotional effect.
(EN: The dichotomy has been questioned in recent decades, as thinking and feeling are interrelated - what we thing determines how we feel, and how we feel influences what we think. But it is still valid to suggest that some people go with their knee-jerk emotional reactions while others pause to consider things rationally.)
Judgment/Perception
The author gives short shrift to the final parameter, and it seems largely identical to what was said about sensing/intuition: people who judge apply their rational minds to interpreting information, whereas people who perceive tend to take things as they are.
Brand Messaging Interpretation: Carl Jung
(EN: The author attempts to correlate brand messaging to Jungian archetypes, but spends far too much time superficially describing the archetypes and has only a few stray remarks about their relation brand messaging - so there's nothing of value here.)
Brand Advocate Roles
The author briefly describes a few roles related to brand, suggesting that companies tend to be strong in some areas and weak in others.
- The traditional approach is to speak boldly of a brand, portraying it as virtuous and desirable to the market. A young brand may seem arrogant and presumptuous by taking this approach, but it is entirely appropriate to established market leaders.
- It is common in competitive markets for a company to speak of its brands in comparison to its rivals rather than standing on its own merits. This often leads to open war in the form of constant smear campaigns among members of an industry.
- A crisis mode is used when there are problems and the brand wishes to reassure the market that it can persevere. This tends to carry over even after the crisis has passed.
- A more technical approach is taken internally, in which the brand is documented and schematized, and it the desired brand image is communicated to those who are needed to create it. Unfortunately, this often becomes the approach to communicating to the market as well.
- Critics of the brand also have their value, and often call attention to areas in which the brand is not living up to the image it wishes to project of itself.
- Authenticators generally respond to the critics by attempting to substantiate the brand's overt claims. Their role is realism - ultimately they cannot defend against a valid attack or uphold a false claim on the part of the brand.
- Finally, there is an oblique approach in which non-functional and irrelevant qualities are used. The brand doesn't speak of the value of its products, but its behavior as an organization in the community (supporting popular charitable causes, for example)
It is possible for a brand to address all of these roles - but in practice, brands tend to gravitate toward one primary role and a few others are done in a slapdash manner.