Artful Realist

The Road to and From Memory

Think of memory as a two-way street. First, memory is about storage. Your memory is a place to file away information for later use. Unfortunately, your brain can’t remember everything. If you tried to store every experience, every idea, and every mundane piece of data that you encounter in your life, you would quickly exhaust your supply of brain cells. That’s why your brain is selective. It filters through all the information that streams by you in a day, and it uses clever rules to decide which information is worth storing in memory. To win the memory game, a brand’s first priority is to pass the brain’s fitness test and earn a lease on some memory cells.

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Stake Promises, Not Positions

A brand promise is not the same as a brand position. It is a common nugget of brandlore that the two phrases mean the same thing. They do not, though they are related to each other. A position asserts a line of argument (as in “what position shall we take in this message?”) or it pinpoints a location in perceptual space (as in “which position do we or shall we occupy in the mind of the consumer?”) Positioning thrives on “open space”—perceptual territory that your brand can claim because it is unclaimed by competitors. Imagine you operate a brand in an environment where every competitor uses a red logo. To effectively position your brand, you might choose to make your logo blue because that color is “ownable.” This example is a gross oversimplification of positioning, but it illustrates one reason a position is different from a promise. You position to be different and to stand out. It’s an essential activity, indeed, but it is possible to reposition a brand by focusing on purely cosmetic changes and not deliver any real, incremental value. In contrast, when you make a brand promise, you still stake a position, but you also create a covenant with consumers. You commit to deliver value.

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Wild GOP race an example of questionable brand attachment

After the Tuesday Republican primaries in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, a lot of election watchers are scratching their heads. Is this one of the most unpredictable primaries in history? Do we not have the “right” candidates? Are voters simply more fickle than in years past? All of these questions are being tossed around frenetically by pundits and the talking heads of media. I believe the data tells us we have brand problems afoot. One brand force that wouldn’t surprise a corporate marketer is driving the volatility for politicians: Brand attachment.

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Live or Memorex?

Back in the days of tape decks, Memorex ran a series of advertisements featuring Ella Fitzgerald that asked consumers to judge whether the music they heard was live or Memorex? It was a successful campaign that lasted more than a decade. Today, consumers might instead be asked, “is it real, or is it branded?”

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Epitaph

Five words on your headstone (Cheery. I know). What do they say? Is that your personal brand? Does it tell your story? Five words.

Ignore the Human Element at Your Peril

If you manage a brand, plan to launch a brand, or just wonder what makes great brands work, read this great piece in yesterday’s edition of Advertising Age. The role of trust is underestimated in branding. That’s why I wrote my next book Brand Real. It’s time to stop talking about “unique selling propositions” and “positioning.” You build brands by making a promise and then doing everything in your power to deliver on that promise at every customer touch point.

The Brand Resolution

Attention business managers: Happy New Year! Welcome to 2012.

If somewhere inside your business plan you list building your brand as a critical part of your success then it’s time to make a New Year’s resolution. Unlike the list you may have created for yourself, the resolution you need to make for your brand doesn’t require you to lose weight or cut back on the drinking. It’s actually very simple. It goes something like this:

This year, my brand promises to deliver {insert a valuable benefit} to all of our stakeholders (including customers, employees, investors, etc.). 

See. Told you it was simple. Before you hire that fabulous designer to create a logo or update your website, focus all your energy on fulfilling this one resolution. Make yourself crazy and make everyone in your organization crazy striving to live up to this resolution for a full year. Everything you do should serve this goal—marketing, product development, customer service, hiring, capital investment decisions … everything. Because that’s what makes a real brand.

We’ll talk in 2013 about your next resolution. 

Happy Face by howzey on Flickr.

I was recently asked a question that probably seems painfully obvious to answer. Why do so many serious brands create whimsical brand campaigns? You know the type — the old Washington Mutual Woo-hoo campaign for banking is a good example. The answer is: because they want you to like them.

Favorability is one of the most frequently used measures of brand health. We measure the degree to which a consumer likes or dislikes a brand because it is a somewhat reliable indicator of brand equity. In fact, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that consumers consistently made better judgments about brands when they were in a positive mood. Thus, making a potential customer smile might encourage them to try or buy your brand.

While advertisers often rely on this strategy by delivering humorous campaigns that make us laugh and smile, too many brands forget the lesson when they deliver their brand experience. A great campaign won’t save the day when a customer is waiting for 20 minutes on a phone tree, getting lost in the bad information architecture of your website, or wandering aimlessly through a retail store trying to find your product. Experiences like those—which are so close to the actual moment of choice—often have people frowning. Which begs the real question: what are you doing to put your customers in a good mood when they’re ready to buy?

Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

// Orson Welles

It isn’t what they say about you, it’s what they whisper.

// …Some useful branding advice from Errol Flynn