How To Create A Consumer Brand

By Wyatt Galt, 22 Jan 22:07

What do Fortune 500 Companies pay Madison Avenue Advertising Firms Millions for?

Is your business too small for you to be concerned about branding? When should you concern yourself with your brand? Isn't branding something companies deal with when they are advertising on television?

You are never too small. You should focus on your brand right now.

First, let's discuss what a brand is and what it is not. Name recognition is not a brand. What I mean by that is that any company with a large advertising budget can gain name recognition. If they advertise enough, they will gain name recognition.

Implementing marketing techniques will get you traffic, and as you refine your online sales mechanism, you will make more and more sales, but branding is another issue.

But is name recognition enough? To separate yourself from the pack, you need to understand what a real brand is. You can start to develop your own brand right now. It starts with your mindset.

Branding is deeper and more elusive than corporate name recognition

Branding your company should start during the design and strategy stage because it sets the foundation for everything you're building and should be foremost in the minds of all team members. You do not want to recruit and hire someone that does not share your branding mindset.

What is a real brand?

This is a key question and often debated in marketing circles. From my perspective, a real brand is:

A commercial entity (entity as defined in the broadest sense which could be a company, product or person) whose symbol or message when communicated to the consumer, triggers a deep emotional response and creates intense customer loyalty.

That is a brand, not just a product. Intel has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create their "brand". What is their slogan? "Intel Inside". Simple enough you might say. But what does it mean? The emotional response they are striving for is that "Intel Inside" means performance, stability and reliability. These are pretty important issues when it comes to computing. They are drilling into us that unless there is Intel Inside, you are at peril. They are speaking to our emotions and they have created a brand.

Let's break this down and simplify the components of branding:

1. Commercial Entity
The commercial entity could be a company like Nike. It could be a product like Marlboro cigarettes. It could be a person such as Madonna. Are these real brands? Absolutely. What emotions or feelings do these brands evoke in us? Just do it as in being victorious, a strong independent macho cowboy and sex.

Great marketers do not sell products. They evoke emotion.

2. Communication of a Symbol or Message
How is the branding message communicated? It is communicated in one of five ways or combinations of any or all of them.

Visual (Images and Words)
The symbol or message can be visual (pictures or print) such as television, print or online ads. If you see the picture of a cowboy, what is it selling?

Auditory (Sound)
The message can be heard such as on television or radio ads or online wave files. "How do you spell relief?" "The Pepsi Generation." "Things go better with Coke."

Kinesthetic (Touch)
The message can be delivered by having us touch something, like a product display in a store. The kinetic experience with a product can be reinforced with a branding message such as "Soft to the touch." "Gentle on your skin."

Olfactory (Smell)
The message can be communicated by a smell, such as a fragrance or a household product. Do you recognize the smell of Lysol? Does it evoke a sense of cleansing or freshness? That is what they are trying to do.

Gustatory (Taste)
The taste of a food product can trigger the emotional response. Take the Pepsi challenge. At least Pepsi is trying to convince us that their taste is different and if you drink Pepsi you will be "in" the Pepsi generation.

3. Evokes an Emotional Response
The key to branding is the triggering of a deep emotional response. This deep emotional response is often the key benefit of using the product that the marketer wants to program into us.

What is your winning sales proposition, or to put it another way, what is the key benefit of using your product? What problem are you solving for your customer? This is a good place to start.
Many times this deep emotional response has nothing to do with the product. What is important is that the desired emotion gets linked to the product.

Let me explain. Have you ever heard or read this commercial message? "You've come a long way, baby." If you have, did it trigger an image? Maybe a tall beautiful woman ... holding a cigarette. This advertisement was communicated in print and on television to sell a brand of cigarettes. What does this image have to do with cigarettes? Nothing directly. The woman in the ad is not telling you that the cigarette is scientifically better than the competition. What she is communicating to you is that you can be like her if you smoke that brand.

What is the message that is really being sold here? If you (women in their twenties and thirties) buy these cigarettes than you will be this beautiful woman, who has come a long way on her own and is now this self actualized, self reliant, strong gorgeous babe. Wow, what's in those cigarettes anyway?

It is about the Trigger

Companies that have built great brands do this all the time. Nike and Tiger Woods. Pepsi and Britney Spears.

If you drink Pepsi, you will be like Britney Spears (targeting young women) or you will attract someone like Britney (targeting young men and Bob Dole). Does Britney drink Pepsi? Who knows. Pepsi is linking their product to a known trigger (Britney) that evokes a consistent emotion in the desired demographic. After you see the association enough times, Britney becomes less important such that Pepsi by itself will trigger the emotion that was originally created by watching Britney. Here is how it works:

Pepsi = Britney = Strong Positive Emotion

Drill this into the audience time and time again and pretty soon you have:

Pepsi = Strong Positive Emotion

Therefore you buy Pepsi to obtain the emotion. After a while that may fade so what does Pepsi do? They hire the next hot trigger that speaks to their target market and they link their product to him or her.

Years ago Pepsi hired Michael Jackson to do a television commercial even though he stated publicly that he did not drink Pepsi. It did not matter because the image of Michael Jackson evoked a positive emotional response in the demographic that Pepsi wanted to reach. Pepsi linked their product with Michael to get to the emotion he evoked in viewers.

4. Creating Intense Customer Loyalty
Think about Harley Davidson. They have been attempting to trademark their sound, which became a complex legal argument for the courts. The sound of a Harley roaring by triggers the feeling of freedom and independence in their target market. Does it work? You have to wait months to get a new Harley due to the demand. Is Harley a real brand? You bet.

"I would rather fight than switch." Have you heard this one? This was drilled into the American public years ago by another tobacco company. They know how to create loyalty. In fact, they were attempting to program us to beat people up before we would switch brands. (I am not promoting smoking by the way, but big tobacco is a master at branding)

This is how real brands are built. Of course the products and services have to be world class for brands to thrive over the long term, but the key to branding is creating an emotion in your customers.

Is Apple a brand? By now, you should be able to answer this one on your own.

How does this apply to your small business?
Let's say you are selling a cosmetic product. The key benefit might be that the skin cream reduces wrinkles. Reducing wrinkles is a great benefit. The emotional response you may want to strive for is looking and feeling younger. This is powerful stuff. Do we really care how the cream works? Most of us don't. But all of us want to look like or be with the woman you will have pictured with your product.

So to "brand" your skin cream product we want to associate the product with a feeling, time and time again so that the product itself triggers the desired emotion in the customer.

Look around and you will see marketing pros delivering triggers to you all the time. How about if you use such and such long distance service, your mother will be happy? Phone service is tied to the happiness of your mother! This is a real stretch, but you can now see the strategy in action.

Real brands create tremendous product loyalty, because once you are programmed the right way, you do not want to give up that good feeling and you will pay to keep it.

Obtain a "Branding" Mindset
It does not cost you anything to transform your mindset. Once you understand the key behind successful branding, you can rewrite your headlines, slogans, copy, change your banner ads and many other things that do not cost you money. Many large companies spend millions of dollars on "institutional" advertising that is not effective. How ever large your audience is, whatever your budget is, if you grasp the key to branding and change your approach to communicate benefits tied to strong emotion, your audience will most assuredly grow.

So here's How-To start your new branding action plan:

How to Create Your Own Brand
Re-identify your target market. Do you know exactly who you are going after? Establish this first. You can not hit a target you can not see.

Survey your existing customers to find out why they actually purchased your product. Find out what turned them on and find out what turns them off. You may be surprised.

Make a list of the key benefits of your product as perceived by your target market. (Ex: reduces wrinkles) You want to "sell them what they are buying."

Develop your winning sales proposition (key benefit) and state it in a single sentence. If you met a potential customer in person and you had to some-up your product in one sentence, what would it be? Write this down.

Make a list of the emotions and states you want to create. Ex: Look younger, feel younger, be sexier, be independent, be victorious, be surrounded by members of the opposite sex etc. This is the million dollar secret. What person can your customer become or what person do they want to become by using your product? If you can communicate this to the subconscious of your customer, you will be very successful. Most of your competitors think name recognition. You now think about branding. Big advantage for you.

Rethink your slogans, logos, ads, headlines and copy. Create a new slogan and a few possible headlines using this new approach.

Test the ads and headlines.

Apply what works in your marketing campaigns and create a new branded culture within your company.
Use all your marketing weapons to repeatedly communicate your emotionally packed message to evoke a positive feeling in your customer. Maybe you can't hire Britney Spears but what is your girl friend or boyfriend doing this evening?

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Tags: Brand marketing branding