Just what the hell is a “brand”? It’s such a lovely, thorny, gnarly, ever-so-twisty, I-double-dare-you-to-try-and-answer kind of question. Jeremy Bullmore, that Living Legend of Adland, offers the following quite brilliantly delicious description:
“Brands are fiendishly complicated, elusive, slippery, half-real/half-virtual things. When CEOs try to think about brands, their brains hurt.”
Slippery, elusive, real... and unreal, it’s the kind of description upon which myths, heroes and super villains are born. Brands, they dodge like mercury.... and as for getting them to do what you want... hell, you’d have more luck trying to carpet-bag lightning! Branding – clearly not for the faint-hearted.
Super villains: personal favourites
Mystique-building aside, Bullmore also offers up a number of defining parameters:
“Products are made and owned by companies.
Brands, on the other hand, are made and owned by people… by the public… by consumers.
A brand image belongs not to a brand – but to those who have knowledge of that brand.
The image of a brand is a subjective thing.
No two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view of the same brand.”
I think the above is hugely helpful, but what therefore remains clearly tricky is that even “in their telling”, brands remain elusive, because it’s not about what a brand says or does but how it is perceived. Brands are therefore quite rightly “elusive” because to most intents and purposes, they are... illusory. Jeremy again...
“No two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view”.
So, how to de-stick the wicket when a brand (and the message it conveys) operates within a Theatre of the Mind, where all minds are different, where the Grand Jedi Bullmore’s descriptors wholly apply: owned by people, the sum total of personal knowledge, wholly subjective? Blimey.
The idea that everything is everyone else’s Subjective Solipsistic Reality can... quite simply... turn you crazy. Where does that leave your brand strategy?
There is of course always some kind of common-ground collective (nearly) Objective Truth we can shoot for. And in an effort to hold up the roof before the floor gives beneath our feet (huh?), let’s try this:
A brand is a bundle of Meanings & Values, but as seen and perceived in the eye and the mind of a consumer.
I’ve been using this line for a while. For me, it holds up, keeps me away from the edge and out of trouble. Partly, because it also provides clear "Pass-Go-&-Collect-£200" direction.
Out of perceived (read: Personal & Subjective) meaning, a brand-builder looks to create WANT, to create emotional connection and deep-seated affinity.
Very simply, brand building is about WANT CREATION.
A brand’s success is therefore through effectively communicating a perceived point-of-difference, whereby it evokes some clear and winning sense of distinction.
Where I believe it’s easy for us all to agree and not go for our semantic guns is in the fundamental role of all brands: to realise their use, value and potential.
Any brand’s ultimate potential lies in its power to persuade and prompt action, to trigger behavioural change and personal preference versus any set of alternative purchases.
Put neatly, any brand’s success rests in its ability to strike a chord, to convince in practical and emotional terms, to resonate on rational and irrational levels.
The singular task of the marketeer is simply this: to build brands of “GREATEST APPEAL”.
SP.
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Posted by: Joni Hamper | February 2013 at 01:30 PM