One of the most valuable assets a company has is its brands. The English word for brand is "fire" which in turn comes from the word "burn" and is taken out of context with branding your livestock. This is what all well-known and successful brands have succeeded in, burning the positive experiences in the customers' consciousness.
The brand is a manifestation of the intangible asset of a product. It is about a set of notions about a company and its products in people's consciousness. It is not the brand's position in the market but the position in the customer's consciousness that makes the brand the company's most valuable asset.
What companies like Samsung and Apple have in common (in addition to their market orientation) is that they have built up more than one name; they have built a brand. They have given their customers a promise. The promise is linked to products, services, and customer service.
Often the brand's promise can be described by one or two words. These words can be compared with the company's vision. These are words that over a longer period have acquired a greater meaning than the sum of the mutual meanings of the words themselves.
In today's compact world, the differences in the range of the different companies' products and services are not large. Excessive differences can even be a disadvantage for the company or organization.
The very high pace of development has made imitation and copying of popular concepts and positionings in the markets a routine in most marketing strategies.
Strong brands provide emotions.
One way to differentiate your brand from the competition is using various emotional benefits in the brand itself. One way to create emotional benefits is by using existing customers 'and users' experience of the products and services. It is about creating strong bonds, right from the first exposure through an ad, a name, a logo. Bands that cannot be broken until "poetry and emotions" are only a memory.
Every opportunity between meetings is an opportunity to create new and reintroduce old promises to the brand.
This promise that the brand conveys is nothing more than what you want the customer to like about your business. An example is what customers think when they hear the word "Volvo", they think of safety.
With Ford's purchase of Volvo Cars, the concept of brand and brand building took on a face.
For a long time, Volvo had built up the concept of safety linked to its products.
The majority of all car buyers know that Volvo stands for safety. What Ford and the Americans had bought in the deal was the concept of safety from Volvo and really nothing else. What does Ford really stand for in modern society? Through the deal, a less powerful brand had seized one of the world's best (in the automotive industry) brands. Since 2010 the Volvo brand is a part of Chinese Geely cars.
Another example is what customers think when they hear the word "Apple", usually linked to simplicity.
I have a memory from the conference ETRE (European Technology Round Table Exhibition) in Stockholm when I as a young High-tech entrepreneur had the privilege to participate in. For a whole week I could hang out with my idols, several of the world's most famous business leaders of the time. It was the end of 2008 and the economic regression had not yet hit the world market and there were positive winds in technology development.
During the Conference, the journalists conducted many on-stage interviews with these well-known business leaders and my memory is linked to the interview with the CEO of the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia at the time. The interview was very much about how they managed to build their brand and how they worked to create loyalty with the young market and how they saw the future of being perceived as a fun and young mobile company.
At that time, Nokia had only taken the market by storm for a few years with its youthful design in contrast to the more industrial mobiles on the market.
The interview was interesting in many respects for me who worked with Brand Management for many years. Just before the interview was to end, the question arose about the new phone iPhone from Apple and how Nokia saw them as a competitor and a threat to take the young buyers from them. The CEO laughed at the question. To him, Apple was not a threat, he only saw Apple's iPod in front of him and in his eyes, Apple made computers and Mp3 players.
We all know today how wrong he was in rejecting the iPhone and Apple.
Fruit - Utlimate Sin - Iphone
It is known that customers in some cases attribute to brands properties that appear to be able to characterize people as well.
For example, Coca-Cola is associated with trendy, American and real, while Pepsi is associated with young, exciting, and cool. Another soft drink brand, Dr. Pepper, is considered to possess characteristics that are non-conformist, unique and fun (Aaker 1997).
If we change product group, it can be noted that Adidas is attributed characteristics such as professional, technical and controlled. Nike, on the other hand, is perceived as imaginative and flexible (White 1999).
If we change product group again, it can be noted that customers load the properties sophisticated, mature, exotic, and mysterious in Oil of Olay (Plummer 1984). Examples of customers attributing personality traits to brands can also be taken from Fournier & Yao (1997) who studied strong customer-brand relationships.
In that study, it emerged that, among other things, the coffee brand Gevalia gives rise to associations such as "wonderful", "fantastic", "elegant" and "beauty", and that some customers seem to have hard time living without this coffee brand. One of the customers, Sara, for example, has a relationship with Gevalia which means that the brand - her best friend - gives comfort in an incomprehensible world and provides unconditional support in Sara's attempt to identify who she is and what she wants to be.
Customers' ability to attribute personality traits to brands should not really be surprising given that humans have long attributed dead things to human traits. That ability also seems to be universal, that is, we find it in many different human cultures. If one considers such an ability from a functional perspective, one can say that it becomes easier for us to interact with our things if we humanize them (cf. Fournier 1998, p. 334).
From the supplier's perspective, it can be argued that it is becoming increasingly important to differentiate products from competitors.
As developments in many industries move toward less and less purely physical differences between competing products, many companies have experimented with trying to differentiate their products in other ways. One way is to try to "charge" the brand with a personality.
The assumption, in short, is that the brand's personality affects the customer's preferences for the brand - and the customer's use of the brand.
What does the brand's personality mean?
About personality, it can be stated that the area in general is about many different theories, which in turn give rise to a comprehensive enumeration of what can be said to constitute personality traits.
A common denominator, however, is that personality can be described in terms of characteristics - or ways of reacting to the outside world - that are relatively permanent over the individual's life (cf. Kassarijan 1971 and Wilkie 1986). A common term for such properties is "trait".
It is assumed that everyone’s personality can be described as a "portfolio" of traits. When you want to try to determine what personality a person has, you usually try, and because of the portfolio approach, to identify how much the individual has of a number of different traits. In the same way, brand personality is usually defined. David A Aaker gives us in a dissertation (1996) the following definition: Brand personality is defined as "the way in which a consumer perceives the brand on dimensions that typically capture a person's personality". It is thus the customer's perspective that is focused on; the brand's personality refers to reality as perceived by the customer (Plummer 1994, Restall & Gordon 1993).
Keller (1993) has tried to sort out the relationship between the most common concepts surrounding the brand's personality and other concepts used to describe the customer's view of a brand. With the terminology he uses, one can see the brand's personality as a subset of the attribute’s customers believe a brand has.
The attributes are in turn a subset of the types of brand associations that customers make, which is a subset of the brand's image, which in turn is a subset of customers' brand knowledge”. With Keller's approach, the brand's personality is only part of all the knowledge that the customer is expected to have about a brand. A less extensive typology is offered by Plummer (1994). According to him, a brand can be described in terms of three dimensions: physical characteristics (objectively verifiable characteristics), functional characteristics (consequences of the use of the mark) and personality characteristics.
What are the brand's personality traits?
Given that the personality of the brand consists of the human traits associated with a brand, an opportunity opens to attribute to the brand virtually all the qualities that can be attributed to a human being.
Something that is not particularly appealing when it comes to providing general explanations of, for example, the role of the brand's personality in customers' brand choices or brand attitudes.
The reason for this is, of course, that a human being can be characterized by an almost infinite number of characteristics. At the same time, all conceivable characteristics of a human being are hardly relevant to understanding the customer's relationship to the brand. For example, how many times the brand is purchased, the customer's satisfaction with the brand, etc. What is needed are thus theories and models that can provide a basis for which specific personality traits are brands that may be particularly relevant to the marketer.
There are several different approaches to creating models of this kind. One approach is to generate an appropriate number of adjectives and test whether they can add knowledge. Such an approach can be carried out, for example, with so-called “adjective checklists”, of which there are several different ones described in the literature (see Bergkvist 2000 for an overview).
Lists of adjectives are commonly used when marketers study what associations customers make when faced with brands and advertisements. A specific example can be taken from Restall & Gordon (1993) who let customers assess the brand's personality in terms of competition-oriented, social, indulgent, restless. The approach with adjectives is reminiscent of surveys of brand image, which do not have a good reputation with everyone. Blackston believes that brand image has a notorious inability to explain both the customer's historical and future behavior. It has also happened that researchers - under the heading brand personality - have tried to identify brand associations in terms of demographic variables such as age, gender, and social class. With the latter perspective, for example, one can find that Marlboro tends to be perceived as male, Virginia Slims as female, Apple as young and IBM as old (Aaker 1997).
Below is a list of six distinctive steps to building a successful brand.
1. Identify what your brand promises.
Is it credible? Is it sustainable? Is it different? Does it match what you offer, your goal and your ability to deliver what you promise?
2. Evaluate the promise.
Work aggressively to get feedback from your organization's shareholders. Find a general foundation where you can live side by side.
3. Embed emotional benefits in your brand promises.
Highlight the key emotional benefits for customers and employees, not least investors, and management. Then make them part of the promise.
4. Strengthen that promise throughout the organization's touch points.
Think through a strategy for building structurally underlying brands for products, services, and daily service. Use different creative names and emotionally connected slogans (mottos) and logos to divide the different brands.
5. Communicate the brands with the employees and do it daily in everything you do.
Live with the brand.
Do you motivate your employees to live up to the brand? Every employee is an ambassador for your brand.
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