Brand Romance

Using the Power of High Design to Build a Lifelong Relationship with Your Audience

Y. Kusume, N. Gridley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137369017
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

For brands to succeed in a competitive environment they need to build a 'loving' relationship with their customers. Brands need to construct an emotional engagement with customers so that they feel genuinely connected to it and what it has to offer. Through 15 steps this books reveals how to use High Design principles to build a truly loved brand.

Part 1

Know Who You Are

1

Commitment 1: Think of Your Brand as a Person

Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.

Mahatma Gandhi

Have you ever considered yourself as a brand? If you did, you might ask the following questions:

• What are your values and beliefs?

• Where do they come from?

• Are they specific to you, or do you share them with other family members?

• How do other people perceive your personality?

• Are you perceived the way you want to be?

• Does your behaviour match your values and beliefs?

• Do you behave according to the situations you find yourself in?

• Is your appearance a reflection of your true self?

When people talk about a brand’s identity, the majority tend to limit its scope to no more than a logo design and layout templates. Yet in his book Brand Leadership David Aaker compares a brand to a person (in the chapter “Brand Identity”). And as we suggested in the Introduction – when you compare the steps required to build a truly loved brand to the steps you might go through in finding a partner – it’s fair to accept that a brand closely resembles a human being: it has its own values and beliefs, and they manifest themselves in the brand’s personality and behaviour.

If a brand is like a person, then a brand’s identity must resemble a person’s identity, which implies that it is much more than mere logos and templates. And if that is so, is it possible to go further by identifying the ingredients of a human identity and, by extension, those of a brand?

This chapter discusses what all this means for a brand. It also looks at how, if you want to build a truly loved brand with an emotional engagement with your audience, you must first understand yourself – so you can fully express your values and beliefs to your audience.

PERSONAL IDENTITY

First, we need to determine what constitutes a person’s identity. For the purposes of this book, we’d like to use a simple four layer structure to describe it:

• Factual data

• Beliefs and values

• Personality and character

• Behaviour and appearance

Factual data

This is the basic factual information about any person – such as name, age, place of birth and so on.

Beliefs and values

Beliefs, according to the website Difference Between.net:

are the convictions that we generally hold to be true, usually without actual proof or evidence. They are often, but not always connected to religion.

...

Beliefs are basically assumptions that we make about the world and our values stem from those beliefs. Our values are things that we deem important and can include concepts like equality, honesty, education, effort, perseverance, loyalty, faithfulness, conservation of the environment and many, many other concepts.

This can be summarized as follows:

1. Beliefs are concepts that we hold to be true.

2. Beliefs may become religion, but not always.

3. Values are ideas that we hold to be important.

4. Values govern the way we behave, communicate and interact with others.

5. Beliefs and values determine our attitudes and opinions.

Personality and character

Personality, as defined by one business dictionary, is a “relatively stable, consistent, and distinctive set of mental and emotional characteristics a person exhibits when alone, or when interacting with people and his or her external environment.”

Alex Lickerman however, in his article “Happiness in this World” (Psychology Today, 2011), noted that “We judge people funny, extroverted, energetic, optimistic, confident — as well as overly serious, lazy, negative, and shy.”

We believe personality is something formed by one’s values and beliefs and that it reflects (or perhaps we should say, manifests itself through) one’s behaviour. As a result, a person will be judged by others to be the behaviour they demonstrate: funny, introverted, serious, energetic, pessimistic, confident and so on.

Behaviour and appearance

For the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, behaviour is, “the manner of conducting oneself.” We think it’s fair to say that most of us modify our behaviour and appearance to match the context we find ourselves in. Consider, for example, how you would dress and behave at a funeral or a wedding.

We all know people who care about their appearance and behaviour and try to make a certain impression on others, just as we also know others who seem not to care at all. In either case though, since appearance and then behaviour govern the first impressions we make on others (as we suggested in the Introduction), then they will have a major influence on how others perceive us.

For us, appearance and behaviour very definitely reflect personality, and therefore values and beliefs. (This is examined further in Chapter 9.)

A BRAND’S IDENTITY

As already noted, when a company talks about a brand’s identity, it very often only focuses on logos and templates. It tends to treat a brand’s beliefs and values, as well as its personality, as something separate from its identity. Yet if a brand can be granted the same four layers of identity as a person, the following observations can be offered.

Brand factual data

This is the factual information about a brand: its name (logo or wordmark), the company colour (if applicable), the year of its origin and so on.

Brand beliefs and values

Over the past ten years the Design Council in London has been running a programme to help UK companies harness the power of design. Included in this was a series of master classes, one of which was about branding: “The What, Why and How of Branding”. This pointed out that you need to make your values distinctive by keeping them precise, because most companies draw their values from a similar list of ten values: integrity, openness/transparency, innovation/being first, responsibility, fairness, respect, empowerment/passion, flexibility, teamwork, pride/satisfaction (SDL/The Research Business International, 1999).

Let’s look at just one of these values: innovation. It’s a very common value ... but it’s not specific enough. Why and how you are innovative? How are you different from anyone else? The key is that you have begun from a unique starting point.

In The Corporate Brand, Nicholas Ind noted that, “In small companies it is often the convictions and beliefs of the founder that define the values and consequently the culture of the organization.” Since every company and brand was “small” when it started, we believe every company’s values and beliefs are strongly rooted in their founder’s values and beliefs – you might also say their “purpose” – for the strongest brands are often driven by a leader at the beginning who is on a mission to make a “dent in the universe”, they are the starting point for all companies and brands. Therefore it is important to capture, as precisely as possible, the beliefs and values of your company at its starting point, since most companies and brands often tend to use similar wordings when describing themselves.

Brand beliefs and values quite often manifest themselves in the brand promise of a company. A brand promise is a clear, relevant, authentic commitment that a brand makes to its employees, customers and end-users; one that makes it easy for them to understand what the brand stands for. Its prime purpose is to state what differentiates their products and services (from competitors) by offering superior quality, value or a competitive edge.

Duane E. Knapp defines a brand promise as:

the essence of the benefits (both functional and emotional) that current and potential customers can expect to receive from experiencing a brand’s products and services. The brand promise incorporates the consumer’s point of view and is intended to reflect the heart, soul and spirit of the brand. It’s intended as an internal directive, not as an advertising message, although it should drive an organization’s activities and messages.

...

The brand promise should serve as the “guiding star” for everything an organization does. Its primary purpose is to communicate clearly to every stakeholder associated with an organization (employees, agents, representatives, etc.) what the brand stands for. A promise acts as a compass reading for everyone connected with a brand and also as a constant reality check to evaluate an organization’s activities, performance and priorities.

Duane E. Knapp, The Brand Mindset, 2000

As already mentioned, Simon Sinek says it’s the “why” that builds an emotional engagement with your brand, the sense of purpose that people can get behind and really believe in because, if it is based on your real values and convictions, it has authenticity. Often this is clear and raw with a start up company and as that company grows and takes on more staff this can get diluted, or even forgotten. Especially if the founder of the company moves on – as you grow up it is easy to creep away from why you decided to do what you do in the first place.

From 2001 to 2002, we were fortunate enough to be part of a team searching for the values of Philips. Philips was over 100 years old and the founder had long since left. The team began by investigating all the historical anecdotes they could find, as well as interviewing past and present employees. All the findings were then distilled into core messages designed to provide our internal stakeholders with the answers to several key questions:

• Where do we come from?

• What are we good at?

• How are we different?

• Who do we serve?

• How do we act?

• What do we believe in?

• Why do we do all this?

The answers to these questions then formed the company’s Brand Foundation: the brand value and belief of the company strongly rooted in its founder’s values and beliefs. This was the original sense of purpose which drove the founder to create a great business.

However one thing we noticed when we introduced this “foundation” was that people tended to take it as a new ideology and began asking for training and deployment in it. It was difficult for many of them to understand that what we were offering reflected not the way they should be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part 1 Know Who You Are
• Part 2 Know Your Audience
• Part 3 Know What You Will Bring Your Audience
• Part 4 Know How You Will Bring It to Your Audience
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index