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.
Qualities of a great person, and a great brand. Consider some of the qualities you might recognize in a successful person.
First, a
successful person knows how to meet and make contact with others in friendly ways. They’re reliable and consistent: people trust them. They have a well-focused clear vision in life; something vital propels them and outsiders see it. Beyond making contact, they have a knack for truly connecting their world and with others on an intellectual, emotional, or physical plane. Lastly, an effective person picks a spot to demonstrate leadership by motivating, teaching, or coalescing followers in some important way. Any person, regardless of station in life, can demonstrate leadership. The Five Qualities of Great Brands It’s these same essential human qualities that make a successful brand. As I’ve looked, researched, and analyzed brands – the great, the good, and the ugly– these five traits appear time and again to distinguish great brands from others. 1. Contact – Great brands make and maintain contact by effectively communicating via advertising and personal selling. 2. Consistency – Great brands create a consistent experience for customers time after time. Consistency builds trust, reliability, and loyalty. 3. Concentration – Great brands concentrate their energy on doing a few things well. Customers clearly know what it’s about. Customers are not confused. 4. Connection – Great brands make connection on a person-to-person level that customers relate to and remember.
The connection is made in a way that makes the customer feel
they are more than a member of a market segment. Brand advocates appear as the connection grows. 5. Leadership – A great brand establishes leadership somewhere, somehow. It becomes recognized for this leadership by having followers. Its recognition may come from a unique product design, the way it talks to the market, or some other quality of its name, voice, or message.
Knowing and Guiding Your Brand How does this view – brand as a person -- help managers who are “in charge” of a brand? Here are some tips for using the “brand as person” analogy to thinking about and manage your brand: 1. While the mind of the brand – executives and managers – guide and nurture the value proposition of the brand, and its tangible delivery to customers; it is a much larger team, perhaps your entire organization, that delivers the heart of the brand, and keeps the brand promise. In your efforts to manage your brand, then, recognize that you may have hundreds or thousands of people on your “brand team”. 2. Just as the health of a person has three dimensions and is examined on each: mind, emotions, physical; so too for a brand: all three dimensions must be monitored when assessing brand health, or brand equity.
This means focusing
separately on 1. The Value Bundle, 2. The Brand Promise, and 3. The Brand Picture.
How is the brand performing, maintaining, and growing in each?
3. To measure its performance, use the Five Qualities of a Great Brand as the core barometers of how your brand is doing.
Use internal and external brand equity
research metrics to gauge how your brand makes contact, its consistency – from product quality to its message; the quality of its connection to people in the marketplace; its concentration of purpose and focus; and its perceived and tangible leadership. In the day-to-day work of building and nurturing your brand, seek out new ways to think and see your brand. Try on the idea of seeing your brand as a person, the qualities of a great brand, and how it relates to its world. By Thomas R. Brown Senior Consultant Power Decisions Group San Francisco, CA Tom@powerdecisions.com 415.339.0498