9: Aligning Your Brand to the Same Fantasy
For decades, perhaps even a century or so, the focus in business has been on operational efficiencies - cutting costs to keep prices low and increase profitability. This was all good and well in noncompetitive markets, but in the present day there are several brands for any given product, and only one can command the low-cost/low-quality space. For others, there is a need to distinguish and differentiate the brand in order to find a sustainable market segment that is not being served by competitors.
The author takes the example of Zappos, a popular online shoe store that distinguishes itself by providing attentive service. There are no lack of shoe stores, and no lack of places to buy shoes online, but what has traditionally been lacking is customer service. The websites of most online retailers are sterile catalogs and phone service is either scripted or entirely automated - it's rare to call a company and speak to a human being who earnestly wants to help. Most customer service seems designed to make the customer go away without receiving service, the emotional consequences of which are never good.
Back to the point, every company wants to be known for its service, and many companies make claims to providing a level of service they don't actually deliver. If service is the brand, it has to be supported by the entire company and not just the marketing department. The brand is built on every encounter a customer has with the firm, which means that every employee who delivers service (or impacts service) must be engaged in delivering the brand. "Everything you do as a company is branding."
He goes back to the notion that concepts in the mind exist as associations and every contact with your brand is an association. The strength of an association depends on frequency: what you say once in an advertisement is weaker than what a person hears multiple times from other sources. Real-world experiences also yield associations, so the way they are treated in the store is more memorable than the promises made in the advertisement. And moreover, people are attuned to discrepancies and trust is diminished by inconsistency - if their experience of the product does not match what they were led to expect by your sales pitch, you've lost credibility and they will not believe anything you say.
Typically, your brand begins as an empty bucket - a meaningless word that a person has just heard for the first time. Then, it becomes loaded with expectations as they hear about it from others (your advertising, news stories, word of mouth from others). Eventually, there are direct impressions as they consider the product and use it. For the brand associations to be strong and credible, their associations must be consistent. Not perfectly consistent, but not so disjointed that the associations are not formed or are called into question.
He goes back to the commoditization of products. There's really no significant difference between a flight on one airline or another, between one brand of dish soap and another, between one television set or another. All accomplish their core purpose, and have very similar sets of features with few differences. Even the prices are generally not much different. It is the way people feel about the brand that leads them to decide which to buy and whether to stick with one they have used or try a different solution. A person is more likely to buy and rebuy a functionally inferior product if the brand experience is consistent than a marginally superior one whose brand lacks integrity.
The name of a brand is the first encounter most people have with it. He considers movie villains - Darth Vader is a great name, because even if you know nothing of the film he simply "sounds" like an evil and intimidating character. "Zappos" sounds like a fun and playful brand. "Cascade" sounds refreshing and clean. From a single word, people begin to form associations, regardless of the brand name is a real word or a nonsense one. The same can be said of logos - even a wordless shape creates an impression on the customer. Even colors have specific meanings that must be aligned to the brand.
There's a brief consideration of the context of consumption. Most retail stores and restaurants are very careful about their ambiance, but the associations are even made from incidental context. Starbucks is a great example, as they ave attempted to create trendy and sophisticated environments in which people are pleased to spend far too much on a cup of coffee. A person who enjoys a specific drink at a vacation resort will attach his memories of the vacation to that drink, which gives him a more pleasant feeling toward the brand that may cause him to purchase it when he returns home - to remind him of the feeling. This is also the reason that luxury brands shun the notion of being sold in discount warehouses.
There's another consideration of packaging. In many instances, a product remains in its original packaging, and this can be used to a brand's advantage. Method soap is specifically mentioned as the brand that broke from convention by providing an elegant bottle that looks pleasant beside the sink. There is also a certain expectation of the packaging of quality wine - the labels may have become a bit whimsical in the low-end market for wine, but the expensive stuff still comes in a very impressive looking bottle. And, of course, there is the clever packaging of Apple products that creates excitement in the "unboxing" process that contributes to the impression that the product is cleverly designed.
There is also an association between a product and its price. It has been demonstrated many times that a person tends to think an expensive product is better than a less expensive one. A study using MRI to measure brain activity shows that people even experience greater pleasure when consuming something they believe to be expensive.
And finally, there is the matter of integrity. What you do speaks louder than what you say, and where there are any discrepancies between word and action, people believe the action. Particularly in the present culture of cynicism, people are looking for inconsistencies between word and deed and are quick to remove trust - so a brand must live up to its claims, and even live up to the impressions it has made.