6: A New Way of Thinking About Brands
Whatever the product or the market, people select a product that meets their needs, but a brand that embodies "something they want to be a part of." This is as true of business products as it is of consumer products: a teenager wants a given brand of sunglasses because he wants to seem cool (to belong to the group of people who purchase that brand), but a purchasing executive chooses a given brand of copier toner because he wants to seem fiscally responsible (a different species of "cool," but still an aspiration to be perceived as something better than he is). Brand is social posturing: the use of a given brand declares membership of one social group and distance from another.
The author has surveyed the various literature on brands and has found a number of models, but most of them are simply different ways to consider the same basic information about a brand:
- Product Attributes - What the market believes the product is, its features and characteristics
- Functional Benefits - What need the market believes the product serves on a basic and functional level
- Emotional Benefit - The way that customers feel (and prospects expect to feel) after interacting with the brand
- Differentiations - How the product is different to competing products
- Target Market - The kind of person to whom the brand wants to appeal
- Cultural Insight - The kind of person to whom the brand actually appeals
- Conflicts - The negative beliefs that the market holds about the brand
- Vision - The brand's core beliefs and values
- Personality - The characteristics of the brand
His concern is that these models focus almost exclusively on the conscious side of brands. Even when these brand profiles speak of emotions, they tend to focus on conscious emotions - and more, the brand managers speak to the emotions they wish customers to feel about their brand, which may be significantly different than the way people actually do feel about their product. Emotions are also treated as being "peripheral and secondary" to the more rational evaluations of the benefits of the brand whereas emotion is often the main motivation to the buyer and rationalization happens after the choice is made.
Another concern the author voices is in the one-dimensional consideration of brand, as if a brand means only one thing to all prospects and customers. There are many instances in which a brand was taken by surprise by a market that valued it for things the brand manager never imagined - and tragedy that ensues when he tries to inform the market that the brand means something other than they already think. Whereas brands often want to own a very specific space in the customer's mind (our brand is the safest one), the customer ultimately chooses the quality they associate to the brand - and in any argument, the customer ultimately wins.
Also, most brands attempt to describe themselves in a structured, organized, and tidy manner whereas the human mind is an absolute chaos. Going back to the notion of schema, our mental model of a thing is not compartmentalized. Everything in memory is associated to other memories: so we do not see a brand as being thrifty, but we connect the brand to ideas and experiences involving the theme of thrift, and it is the number and relative strength of those connections that determine whether we agree that the adjective suits the brand.
Finally, brands attempt to define themselves in a fixed and permanent manner and resist the notion that their brand will change unless they choose to change it. Nothing is indelible in the human mind and all of our ideas exist as working documents that are never final. What we believe about a brand is called into question with every encounter, direct or indirect. The connections that cause us to have a given idea about a brand are constantly being strengthened and weakened - such that whatever we believe is subject to change.
In this sense, the author believes the way we relate to brands is similar to the way we relate to people: we have certain assumptions that we form at our very first encounter, and are always testing those assumptions. We accept that people change, such that their most defining feature may be dethroned and replaced with something else. Each time we see them acting in a way that is inconsistent with our beliefs, we question our beliefs about them. So our notion of brand is never set in stone and is always evolving.
Another similarity is that we remain dubious about what people say about themselves, are more trusting of what others say about them, but ultimately accept that actions speak louder than words. Thus considered, most advertising is taken as bragging - the things a person or brand says about itself are posturing, and we recognize that they are trying to create a positive impression on us regardless of whether it is actually true. Sometimes this direct approach seems to work, but more often it works because the information is absorbed indirectly - the advertisement may be playing in the periphery of our attention, or someone else may be repeating something that the brand said about itself, and the author believes that these are instances where the strongest associations are built and reinforced.