Brand is
Coca-cola is the most valuable brand in the world, with the name alone worth billions of dollars. But why? What is a brand?
Brand management is a total approach to managing brands that is sometimes extended, by those who understand the power of brands, to cover the whole approach to managing the company.
A brand is a promise
First and foremost, a brand is a promise. It says 'you know the name, you can trust the promise'. As all promises, it is trusted only as far as those promises are met. Trust is a critical first step and brands aim to accelerate that step by leveraging the implied promise of the brand.
A brand is an associated image
Most brands have a logo which acts as a short-cut to remind us of the brand promise. The logo uses color, shape, letters and images to create a distinctive image that is designed both to catch our eye and to guide our thoughts in the right direction. The brand may also be associated with tunes, celebrities, catchphrases and so on.
All parts of the brand image works as a psychological trigger or stimulus that causes an association to all other thoughts we have about the brand.
Everything and everyone is a brand
If you get down to the detail, everything is a brand, because we build our understanding of the world by creating associations about everything. A tree has an implied promise of beauty and shade. Even words are brands. When I say 'speed', you will conjure up images of fast cars, etc.
People are brands, too. When people see you, or even hear your name, they will recall the image they have of you, (which is something you can actively manage or 'let happen'). In a company where people are visible to customers, such as a service business, the people are very much a part the brand.
Brand management is
The total approach
Brand management starts with understanding what ' brand' really means. This starts with the leaders of the company who define the brand and control its management. It also reaches all the way down the company and especially to the people who interface with customers or who create the products which customers use.
Brand management performed to its full extent means starting and ending the management of the whole company through the brand. It is simply far too important to leave to the marketing department. The CEO should be (and, in fact, always is) the brand leader of the company.
Creating the promise
Creating the promise means defining the brand. A good brand promise is memorable and desirable. It cannot be effective if nobody remembers it, and is no good either if nobody wants it!
A good brand promise evokes feelings, because feelings drive actions. Volvo offers feelings of safety. Mustang offers feelings of excitement.
The promise must be unique and identified with you alone. Within an industry, promises can be very close, but if you want any hope of success, you must stake out the very specific territory of your promise and know clearly how it is different from the promises of other firms.
The right promise is not just something you make up on a Friday afternoon. It comes through a deep understanding of your marketplace and your customers. It also comes from a deep understanding of the capabilities and motivations of the people in your company. Creating a promise you cannot consistently keep, year after year, is plain suicide.
Making the promise
Once you have created the promise, the next (and not so trivial) step is to somehow inject it into the minds of your customers, your staff and everyone who receives anything from you or has any impact on what you deliver.
This is where marketing people come into their own. Although it is still not their sole preserve, a large part of marketing, which includes advertising and PR, is about positioning the company and its products in the minds of customers and against your competitors.
Keeping the promise
Ah, now. Creating and making the right promise is one thing, but then you have to keep it. If you do not, you brand will still exist, but now the promise will be of slipshod products and inconsistent delivery.
Keeping promises means managing capability. It means consistent processes that are capable of delivering what is required. It means technology and systems which are reliable and usable. It means motivated people who are willing and able to deliver the goods.
The Pathway to Reputation
Brand reputation does not happen ‘just like that’. There is a yellow brick road that is more or less paved, leading from brand professionals thinking about the subject, right down to the reputation being formed.
Intent
Brand management aims to create brand by intentional action. Deliberate decisions are made about brand personality,brand values, brand positioning, brand logos, etc. Attention is paid to customers and competitors. Done smartly, the whole strategy and culture of the company are lined up behind the brand to deliver on the intent.
And yet none of this is the brand. It may be intended to be the brand, but brand itself is still far away.
Enactment
Despite best intent, there’s many a slip and the enactment of brand-oriented plans will never come off perfectly. Even when people start with a perfect intent, they have to formulate their action based on their inner world of understanding.
Unfortunately, as Korzybski pointed out, the map is not the territory. But we constantly act as if it is. We take our inner maps that we have built to help us understand the world around us and then formulate actions that will perfectly achieve our intent. But the plan is already flawed because nobody has the right map. Our inner maps are gross simplifications of a massively complex outer reality.
And as if this was bad enough, even putting the perfect plan into action is doomed as our actions are secretly twisted by our inner biases, goals and deeper needs.
Enactment is still not the brand. However it is getting closer than the intent. It is the difference between Argyris’Espoused Theory and Theory In Use. You are what you do, not what you say. Company values is the totality of what their people do, not a neat list of values on the website.
Like a bullet fired, the enactment of the brand has no meaning until it reaches its destination. And even then it has far to go before a reputation is formed.
Perception
When the brand messages in all their glorious forms reach the people standing in their way, the brand itself is starting to form. This happens in the perception that is created in the heads of both intended customers and innocent bystanders. It is as perceived by everyone who touches the brand in any way, whether from a lifetime’s experience or a brief third-hand mention from a passing stranger.
Perception does not come clean and pre-packaged. We take direct experience and infer meaning by passing it through a set of highly-biased perceptual filters. First we classify, using broad mental models and unique memories. Then we assess for immediate threats. Then we test against expectations and goals, re-predict the future and compare against our values. To complicate things further, all of this is biased by our current emotional state.
The eventual perception we infer is thus far from the sensory inputs we receive. Even after the original perception, we continue to ponder, muse and reflect on our experiences, changing their meaning even further.
Perception is the brand as experienced. Perception is not reputation, but reputation is perception.
Transmission
When I buy something from a company or otherwise experience the brand, I am getting a first-hand snapshot of what the brand really delivers. From this I directly develop my perception of the brand. On the other hand, if I listen to what others say then I am getting a second-hand version of events. I get their perception, which I then modify via my perceptual process. And if that transmission is third-hand, fourth-hand or more, then the effect is multiplied further.
Communicated perception is reputation, but from a single person it is just a single data-point. If I am inclined to believe that person and act on their perception, then for me, that is all the reputation I need. But many people do not just go on the say-so of a single point of authority. They listen to others and think for themselves, too.
Communication
We not only listen to other people when they talk about brands—we also talk back, asking them questions and offering our own perceptions. Out of the conversation a shared meaning (or as much as this can happen) arises. Thus brand reputation may be viewed as being socially constructed.
Thus reputation is not created in individual perception, nor even in a second-hand, unidirectional transmission, but in the dynamics of real communication between two or more individuals.
True communication is communing, the joining of minds as is sought in open inquiry or dialogue. However this nirvana seldom happens. It is more like a battleground of ideas and wills, where evolution occurs in real-time. Discussions go around and about and eventually the loudest voice or the clearest idea takes root as an unspoken, tacit agreement.
In many ways, the birth or change of a brand reputation is tied up with the brand reputation of the people doing the arguing. People with strong reputations, who command attention and trust, have the greatest potential to forge the actual reputation of the brand under discussion.
Diffusion
Beyond the local conversations whereby I get a personal sense of brand reputation, there are thousands of such conversations that travel across the unbroken network of human relationships. This is where the total reputation of the brand is built. There are many factors that affect diffusion, as identified by Everett Rogers and others.
Some people know more people and talk more than others. Some people are listened to more carefully than others. The brand perception as received by these people will thus travel further than from others.
But people belong to groups, and almost by definition converse more with in-group people and have different attitudes toward them than towards out-group others. Reputation is thus likely to grow differently within each group. Brand ideas will jump between groups like a forest blaze leaping a fire break only when there is sufficient heat and sufficient connection.
And at any one time, reputation reaches as far across groups as the fire has spread. In some it may be fixed and established, whilst to other it may still be novel and a subject of heated debate.
Decision
In the final analysis, the value of a brand comes in the simplification that it brings to decision-making. The inferred promise of a brand enables us to short-cut the evaluative part of the decision process. In our inner construction of the brand we have already done this, mapping out a simplified meaning.
When we choose between brands, rather than guess or choose on tangible aspects such as price, we compare the brand values that we have inferred and hence rapidly make what we assume will be a wise and safe decision.
The reputation of a brand includes an element of reliability. The psychology of judgment under uncertainty rears its head here, and our perceptions of 100% reliable are very different from even a 99% perception. This explains at least in part the fragility of reputation. The psychology of betrayal and retributive justice is another minefield for the unwary.(From :changingminds.org)
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