Think of Your Brand as A Person – A way to guide and nurture your brand. By Thomas R. Brown, Senior Consultant, Power Decisions Group, Inc., San Francisco, USA. Here’s a fresh outlook for anyone who creates, manages or nurtures brands to success. The challenge is to become a more astute brand-thinker and decision-maker by seeing your brand or your company with new eyes, of one having very personal qualities. Your brand as a person. Think of your brand as a person. Not human, but clearly a person. When you, as a brand decision-maker, take this viewpoint, you will begin to think differently about your brand. You will think more about nurturing it, rather than managing it.
You will think more about
having it fulfill its potential and finding its unique place rather than beating the competition. When you see of your brand as a person, you’ll be more about letting your brand be itself and finding a community of loyal friends, rather than showing off and spending money to ‘buy friends.’
You want it to grow up, become educated, learn how to move in the world
and have character. Of course, if all goes well, like a fond Aunt or Uncle, you want it to be successful, be prosperous financially and, maybe, have a family. What are the core elements of a person?
Human make-up has three parts: mind,
emotions, and physical. It’s the same for a brand. At my firm, Power Decisions Group, we call them: 1. Value bundle (the ‘mind’ of the brand): the benefits delivered to customers 2. Brand promise (the emotions or ‘heart’ of the brand): this is the promise the brand makes to customers; it’s how it connects to what customers need 3. Brand picture (physical): things we see such as products, logos, and ads Just as humans gain insight by understanding their make-up, when you separate the elements of your brand into these parts, it points the way to assessing how your brand is performing in the marketplace.