Brand Revolution

Rethinking Brand Identity

M. Sicard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137019493
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Brand Revolution offers a radical new approach to brand management. With big brand case studies including L'Oreal and Jaguar, the author draws on her extensive experience as a marketing consultant to put together this highly engaging and practical book for developing, improving and controlling the identity of your brand.

PART I

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Brand Identity: A Short History

CHAPTER 1

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A Paradoxical Success Story

Every use of the notion of identity begins with a critique of that notion, as Claude Lévi-Strauss used to say. The same holds true for brand identity: the idea lacks reliability because nobody has ever carefully scrutinized its origins and contours. So let’s begin by getting rid of the unnecessary baggage that weighs the concept down: prejudices, illusions, and misunderstandings.

A FUZZY CONCEPT FROM THE START

One of my Italian friends, Ennio Borsieri, used to enjoy telling about a famous debate that took place on French television in the 1970s on the theme “Does God Exist?” The debaters were to be a priest and an atheist, both very well known, and everyone was awaiting the confrontation with great interest. But no sooner had the first made his opening argument than the second responded: “What exactly do you mean when you say ‘God’?” Even after two hours of discussion they couldn’t agree on a basic definition, and so the debate never took place.

At the infinitely more modest scale with which we are concerned here, we could easily fall into the same trap if someone decided to ask: but what exactly do we mean when we speak about brand identity? Marketing thus takes great pains to avoid asking such a question. Remaining faithful to the pragmatist tradition inherited from William James, marketing notes that the concept of brand identity is tremendously useful, and thus uses it, without any unnecessary “soul-searching.”

Pragmatism is not only a quality that marketing likes to boast of possessing, At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the first great current of American thought. In Europe, it has relatively little influence, the intelligentsia having deemed it “philosophy for laymen.” It’s not clear to me why a philosophy for laymen should be considered any less respectable than another, and in any event it often has the merit of being clearer. But whatever its origins, every philosophy must have a minimum of intellectual rigor. And rigor (not soul-searching) means knowing the meaning of the words one uses.

Nobody really knows what identity is.

Several categories of theoreticians (mainly philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists) have looked into the question, and have been doing so for a very long time, without managing to settle on even a partial answer.

Philosophers were the first to address it, and after twenty-five centuries of effort, they admit that they are helpless: according to them, it’s impossible to say what identity is. There have been no lack of attempts, but from Aristotle to Hegel by way of Locke and Hume the question has been raised a thousand times, and with it a dust cloud of ideas that remains hanging in the air, so that we don’t really have a clearer view of the matter than we did in the century of Pericles. Indeed, the closer we get to the modern period, the more hesitant philosophers become to tackle the issue. Nietzsche’s famous “What does it matter who I am?” is echoed a century later by Michel Foucault: “Don’t ask me who I am, and don’t tell me that I must remain the same, that’s a bureaucrat’s mentality.” As a historian, Foucault was in a good position to know that identity, in the legal sense of the word, is a recent concern of Western societies, one that is closely related to the growing need for watching over and controlling populations. Many societies didn’t attach, or still don’t attach, the same importance to this concept as the West does.

As for the sociologists, they are divided on the question of identity. They hesitate to grant it the status of a concept in the strict sense, observe it with a certain wariness, disagree about what the word actually means, and even end up suspecting that it’s simply all of the talk about identity that ends up lending a possibly illusory substance to an otherwise elusive and fleeting reality.

Nobody could be clearer in this regard than Zygmunt Bauman, for whom identity is an irremediably ambiguous idea, one that is always subject to controversy, and whose meaning has been swept away in the shifting tides of what he calls liquid societies. It’s impossible to give identity a stable, fixed meaning. He writes that in a world where we are witnessing “the accelerating liquefaction of social frameworks and institutions,” we must remember that “‘fluids’ are so called because they cannot keep their shape for long.” As a result, “frames, when they are available, should not be expected to last for long.” In such a context, “a cohesive, firmly riveted and solidly constructed identity would be a burden, a constraint, a limitation to the freedom to choose, a recipe for inflexibility.” He concludes that “the frailty and the forever status of identity can no longer be concealed. The secret is out.”¹

Claude Lévi-Strauss arrives at just about the same conclusion:

With regards to our civilization and the current state of knowledge in varied disciplines—mathematics, biology, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, etc.—it has been observed that the content of the notion of identity is in doubt, and is sometimes even the object of very severe critiques.²

This acknowledgment of failure in no way prevents the following from being so:

• We, Westerners of the third millennium, all believe for the moment in the existence of something that we call identity, and to which we attach tremendous importance;
• We think that we have a certain amount of knowledge about how to recognize this identity, about its makeup, and about how it works.

What seems to go without saying for marketing is thus far from being obvious to researchers in the human sciences, and it follows that when we speak about brand identity, we’re on rather shaky ground. Add to this the fact that the various definitions of brand can be quite murky and we end up with a concept, brand identity, that is much less clear than it seemed at first glance, since neither of the two words it brings together has a perfectly clear meaning.

HOW SHOULD WE DEAL WITH SUCH A COMPLEX IDEA?

Marketing doesn’t like complexity, and seeks by any means possible to pretend it doesn’t exist, or to boil it down to something simpler. Brand identity offers the perfect opportunity for such reduction, because from the very first it looks like a concept that is too rich to be directly exploitable. As L. Upshaw notes, a brand isn’t just a name, a logo, or some other symbol, but also the employee who rents you a car at the Avis counter, an overnight delivery truck, or the voice of a spokesperson endorsing a car brand like Ford or Chrysler. It’s the price of a product at Wal-Mart or Costco, a special feature like Clorox’s anti-spill bottle, a warranty, and many other things besides.³ It wouldn’t be hard to find German (or Brazilian, or Japanese) equivalents of these American examples, because whatever is even remotely involved in the brand is part of its identity.

But here we come up against a serious problem: the reductionist temptation. So many elements go into making up brand identity that many professionals, feeling overwhelmed by it all, go about things in the same way: they choose a little piece of the brand continent, outline an area that they know they can deal with, and put up a sign: “Here lies brand identity.”

For some, all identity lies in the brand’s name. For others, it resides entirely in the product. For still others, it is in visual identity, and nowhere else. Or in the advertising image, or in the distribution network, or in the consumer’s mind. When you add to this the fact that each of these approaches correspond to businesses that are frequently in competition with one another (design, innovation, advertising agencies, merchandizing, name-creation consultancies, etc.) and you get some idea of the chaos into which managers are plunged whenever they try to figure out who holds the key to brand identity. It’s a new version of the blind men and the elephant: “I’ve got it!” cries the one who’s grabbed it by the tail. “No, it’s mine!” cries the one who has it by the ears. “Not at all, it’s mine!” says the one who has its trunk. Brand identity is thus pulled in all directions by those who’ve only grasped part of what it is, for lack of a global view.

We thus find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: an entire discipline discusses and manipulates a concept that nobody can pin down. On the one hand, declarations and testimony abound regarding the importance of brand identity and its complexity, and on the other, definitions are lacking or else are so expansive that they lack sharp contours.

How should such a contradiction be interpreted?

By the fact that, at a given moment, marketing needed a concept like brand identity, just as it needed concepts like territory, positioning, target audience, brand image, and just as it will come up with more concepts in the future. Brand identity is a discovery—or an invention—of Western marketing at the turn of the millennium. Nobody talked about it before, and there’s no guarantee that we’ll still be talking about it twenty or thirty years from now. But here and now, the concept seems indispensable, and undeniably real.

In fact, brands do indeed seem to possess something like an identity. Clarins doesn’t resemble Lancôme, or Estée Lauder, Shiseido, or Clinique, and at the same time, Clarins continues to resemble Clarins. But what, then, is its identity? That which distinguishes it from other cosmetics brands? That which makes it stay the same year after year?

Both, and at the same time. Before going any further, let’s keep the following first principle in mind: even if we can’t really define identity, we know at least one thing, which is that it is based entirely on the dialectic of same and different. It can only be grasped with the help of complex thinking, the kind that accepts the fact that something and its opposite can be true at the same time: change and stability, resemblance and difference, longevity and brevity.

Let us then boldly contradict H. Maucher, the eminently respectable president of Nestlé: contrary to what the subtitle of his book⁴ would have us believe, there is no such thing as simple principles for leadership in a complex world. If the world is complex—and who would claim that it isn’t?—then we must accept it as it is, instead of trying to force it into the straitjacket of what is erroneously referred to as “Cartesian” logic. Even the most serious journals are now trying to encourage companies to benefit from complexity rather than struggling against it in vain.⁵

Moreover, brand identity is a good example of the contradictions we must face, whether we like it or not, because we cannot avoid the disconcerting observation that in this case marketing is using a concept that the specialists all deem indefinable, elusive, and unstable.

Is it then the case that the beautiful constructs that some brands create on the basis of their identity are actually founded on quicksand?

IN SEARCH OF A BIRTH DATE

It’s not easy to determine when the notion of brand identity emerged, but we can be sure of at least two things:

• Its emergence is recent;
• It was immediately adopted.

This in itself is an unusual phenomenon. Without any pretense of being exhaustive, a rapid survey of the literature on brands shows that the notion of identity emerged and was fully developed over the course of the 1990s. It is thus barely more than twenty years old. That isn’t much, when you consider that most of the big industrial brands date from the end of the nineteenth century or the first third of the twentieth. What this boils down to is that for most of their history, brands functioned, and functioned well, without any need of a concept like identity.

So why do we need such a concept today?

At first glance, because the environment has changed, because consumers have changed, because the rules of the economic game have changed, and because markets have grown to encompass the entire planet. There is no point in describing the causes and consequences of these changes in detail: they are now common knowledge. This only makes it all the clearer that the emergence of brand identity is linked t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part I Brand Identity: A Short History
• Part II An Analytical Method
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index