Branding to Differ

The Brand Building Handbook for Business Leaders.

Jean-Luc Ambrosi

• Publisher: Liberum Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780992293611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

In Branding to Differ, Jean-Luc Ambrosi provides a practical and comprehensive look at best practice branding for those requiring a real understanding of brand development and management. Ambrosi demonstrates that the brand is fundamentally a promise, that it impacts both the emotional and rationale mind, and that ultimately good branding is about expressing a difference. He shows concisely how to approach brand managementholistically throughout the organisation and emphasises which key elements truly impact a brand's success. His argument about the need to differentiate is compelling and provides the reader with a step by step approach on how to build a powerful brand. Written from both a strategic and practical perspective it is a road map on how to manage brands beyond the text book concepts and popular clichés. A must read for any senior executive.

A fun brand with a grumpy service operative is not a fun brand – it’s a grumpy brand.”

CH A P T E R 1

Living the dream

Branding is by far the most talked about subject in marketing. It is also a subject about which everyone shares an opinion: marketers and non-marketers, consumers, business leaders, passers-by. We love some brands and love to hate others. We trust some and distrust others. We emulate the behaviours they affirm. We relate to them, we have opinions and … we have feelings about them.

What is generating such enthusiasm when, in essence, branding is mostly conceptual? I must admit that for many years the brand concept eluded my comprehension. Of course, I could articulate brand generalities like any marketing graduate, even sound knowledgeable. But the essence, the fundamental understanding of what is a brand, somehow eluded me. To really comprehend what a brand is and where its true power resides I had to approach the concept in two ways. The first was to look at the effect of brands in terms of their relationship to consumer perceptions, purchase behaviours and consumer responses; how these are linked to brands. It was obvious that the perception of the benefits associated with a brand affects consumer behaviour in many ways, sometimes far beyond the direct product benefits. Brands are affecting the way people interact, purchase, remain loyal, talk about and promote products. Brands are also able to drive pricing differentials.

A second insight came from my psychology background. I began to realise that while brands have a measurable effect on consumer behaviour, they merely represent a symptom of something more important. This led me to develop a specific conceptual framework, which I call the Brand Projection Framework. Brands are really a perception, or what psychologists call a ‘projection’ – a projection of a personal expectation, feeling or dream about an object. If things go well for the brand, it will become an object of desire. Psychology defines this as the unconscious attribution of a personal thought, feeling, or impulse to somebody else, or something else. In reality, the brand does not exist. It is only a representation, with both a rational and an emotional component that has strong links to personal desires, needs, wants, fears and aspirations. Yet it can be potent when it meets our aspirations, or satisfies our wants and dreams. The rational component is the promise of a concrete output: ‘a reliable car’ for example. The emotional component is the link to our aspirations: ‘a car which will make me look successful’. To manage their brands, therefore, organisations need to understand not only the intrinsic value of the products they carry and how they meet concrete expectations. They also need to know what the products represent in the customers’ minds, what expectations or dreams they fulfil – and must keep fulfilling.

Today, the word “brand” has evolved to encompass uniqueness; it defines the individuality of a product, a company or a service. It drives an array of perceptions and feelings. It can, in turn, speak about immediate and achievable benefits (such as consuming fast moving consumer goods products for example) or unachievable dreams such as winning the lottery.

While the foundation of a brand remains the same, the added value it can bring to organisations has taken on proportions never seen before. According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a company’s intangible assets, including its brand, can represent up to 80 percent of its corporate value¹. This signifies that brands themselves can become drivers of financial value for corporations expanding their balance sheets and moving total value beyond simple book value.

1 2011 World Intellectual Property report. The changing face of innovation. WIPO Economics & Statistics Series. World Intellectual Property Organisation.

Mixing of art and science is often the way great brands are built.”

C H A P T E R 2

Ten seconds of history

Brands were initially developed for a very specific purpose. Originally they were created to mark cattle with a hot iron to determine to whom the cattle belonged. The cattle were ‘branded’ with a name or initials, ‘the logo’. The purpose was to differentiate one cow from another for ownership and management purposes. Such differentiation was necessary because most cattle looked like, well, cattle.

While the earliest forms of branding can be traced to ancient societies’ use of symbols or characters to distinguish ownership of goods, branding did not really take on its full significance until the 19th century. The rise of corporate entities, which made products available to growing groups of middle class individuals, meant that trademarking and branding was brought to the masses. With industrialisation, the emergence of widely recognised brands in packaged goods and other manufactured products started to appear. From then on, the role of branding would develop beyond signifying ownership, it became an indicator of meanings and added benefits.

Branding has evolved since those early days but the initial idea has prevailed. It is a way to differentiate a product, or a group of products, from other products with similar characteristics or from a similar category. A brand is one of the tools used to be a key differentiator. A brand promises to meet expectations and provide benefits that are different from the other products or brands in one way or another.

It is thus important to tread with caution when managing a brand, its components and its image. Brands must be managed strategically. ’Airy fairy’ marketing habits, uninformed managers, personal opinions and the application of ‘creative juices’ out of context are no longer acceptable. Branding is part of the business strategy – not the strategy department but the true business strategy embraced by the organisation. Above all, it reflects the business vision. At that point, and that point only, does the creativity of managing the brand come in. So it is up to marketing managers or business managers to set the vision, the foundation of the brand. Later will come the time for ideas, creativity and logos.

A great brand is a brand that allows your sales people to open prospects’ doors, to add the convincing touch to a pitch, to convince prospects that the pricing premium is justified.

That is, to reinforce the entire sales process. It is the ultimate enabler of sales which will always raise the challenge of mixing short term sales objectives with longer term brand sustainability.”

C H A P T E R 3

What is Branding?

It is important not to confuse the mechanisms used to develop a brand and the concept of branding itself. To be clear: branding is not advertising. Advertising is a mechanism to support a branding effort. It may or may not be used to develop brand awareness. It is simply a medium used for promoting the brand, its products or its services. In the same fashion a logo, or ‘look & feel’ are just identifiers. They are a quick image that helps customers recognise everything the brand stands for. Again, it is not branding per se but a support mechanism whose purpose, in this instance, is to identify the brand.

One can define branding in many way but we need to be clear about what the meaning of branding is. I would like to propose this definition:

Branding is a succinct articulation of a meaningful

promise to customers that is clear and different

to what your competitors provide.

What this implies is that by being the articulation or expression of a promise, a brand is just a psychological concept. It is the driver of a perception, whether based in fact or fiction.

Conceptually the brand is built on two pillars. The first concerns the values that the brand conveys and the second is the promise to the end user.

These two essential components are necessary to build the brand image because they carry both the rational and emotional components needed for the brand to be accepted by the end user. The values aspect relates to what or who is the brand. What does it stand for, how is it characterised, and what feelings or emotions does it generate? The promise relates to what the brand aims to deliver to its customers. Not only from a product delivery point of view but also in terms of its overall suggestiveness. This is something that is far more encompassing. What will this brand deliver to me, the customer? What expectations will it fulfil, how will it make me feel? If I purchase a very expensive shirt from a renowned brand, for example, what I will get is not just a shirt, but potentially the promise to look great, to be recognised for my good taste, or to be seen as a successful individual, able to get the best that life has to offer. This is the promise, a point at which the rational mind may get taken over by emotion. The brand promise is at a minimum about fulfilling our needs and desires. It can also be about fulfilling our intimate wishes and dreams. The more the brand is about dreams, the more ‘ethereal’ the brand construction and promise of delivery will be. The high end world of fashion is very much about delivering dreams. It is reflected in all aspects of the brand approach: from the star status of fashion designers, to the fabulous store experience, to the high end media exposure, to the glossiness of the advertising, to the vocabulary used to describe the brand or its products. As we see, this goes far beyond (and sometimes doesn’t even include) a logo or advertising. The entire brand experience is kept consistent. Extreme care is being taken to ensure that all outputs are developed to support the brand image and the dream it evokes.

Brand personality

While on the subject of psychological concepts, many marketers and psychologists also like to use the term brand personality to define brands. I must mention it here as it is widely discussed but seldom mastered. This concept is roughly based on ‘The Big-Five Model’ of human personality defined by a number of psychologists (with Lewis R. Goldberg as one of the most cited²). Simply put a brand personality is just a set of characteristics defining the brand that have human like traits. The theory behind this is that people relate better to personalities similar to them. This concept is useful to help define brand direction and can be a great tool to drive people from different areas and backgrounds throughout an organisation as it is very easy to understand. But it also difficult to master as the psychology research has been oversimplified or even ‘bastardised’ when applied to brand, with different research studies showing that these oversimplified models rarely work. As psychologists defined the Big Five: Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness; Brand ‘experts’ created: Excitement, Sincerity, Ruggedness, Competence and Sophistication. Perhaps something to do with the fact that branding people are often extroverts and think they are exciting..? Of course great brands go beyond the personality concept and when necessary create their own personality models if they find it useful as a tool. What is important to remember is that the use of the brand personality concept is only useful if it facilitates the introduction of the Values and the Promise throughout the organisation as a tool.

2 (Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative “Description of personality”: The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1216-1229)

If you stand for ‘something’, your decisions are guided by this ‘something’. What you do, what you offer, how you behave must be congruent with this ‘something.”

C H A P T E R 4

Characteristics of organisations with successful branding

Best practice? We often hear the term best practice used when referring to brand management. But is there really such a thing, and if there is, how do we define it?

More often than not the term best practice will refer to one aspect of brand management such as the vision, strategy, strategic process, the implementation framework or particular aspects of the implementation and output generation. Do not get distracted by this use of best practice to describe a process. Best practice, from a positioning, vision and strategy point of view, requires the creation of a clear point of difference. To achieve a clear point of difference for the organisation it is not a bad idea to do things differently from th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedications
• Walter Landor
• Contents
• Quotation - Chapter 1
• Chapter 1
• Quotation - Chapter 2
• Chapter 2
• Quotation - Chapter 3
• Chapter 3
• Brand personality
• Quotation - Chapter 4
• Chapter 4
• Quotation - Chapter 5
• Chapter 5
• Quotation - Chapter 6
• Chapter 6
• Quotation - Chapter 7
• Chapter 7
• Quotation - Chapter 8
• Chapter 8
• Quotation - Chapter 9
• Chapter 9
• Quotation - Chapter 10
• Chapter 10
• Quotation - Chapter 11
• Chapter 11
• Index