Brands help people choose. Between coffees, holidays, cars, schools, partners or politics. Be it a product, a personality or political party, brands attempt to guide choice – and the number of choices are increasing. Today more than ever we are bombarded with the noise that emanates from the ‘anyone and anything’ intent on getting us to buy or do ‘something’.
The purpose of your brand is to work as hard as it can ensure that, as far as it can, you are the automatic choice in the mind of your key audience(s). It is the unseen, at times unmanaged and imperceptible and when working well, the most valuable member of your sales team, the most effective part of your marketing mix.
The success of a business depends mostly on the positive or negative reactions that customers have to it. And the role of your brand will differ on whether we are talking about customers you have, and have experienced your business (the brand experience), or customers you want, but who are have not used your product or experienced your service (the brand promise).
In the first scenario the role of your brand can be indistinct or even irrelevant to customers and the brand may not affect the business’ bottom line. In the second there is now incontrovertible evidence of the link between a well conceived, managed and applied brand to business performance.
The brand experience
Customers experience the clearest reactions to a business from the direct interactions they have with it. Put simply if they have used your product or service before and it didn’t go well, there is little a brand can do to alleviate a bad product or service experience.
No amount of investment by Apple (an obvious case study for this area) in image/tone, advertising, product and environment design and positioning would atone for the launch of a product called the iphone that simply didn’t work. How many restaurants have you returned to where the service was appalling?
However, the implications of a positive product or service experience are clear in terms of customer (brand) loyalty and there is much fertile ground to exploit for a brand that follows a positive customer experience. This is positive reinforcement and is part brand management and part customer relationship building. This topic is for another day.
The brand promise
Let us assume we are concerned with winning the hearts of a new customers.
This is in reality the first key role of a brand – to put our product or service in the right place in the mind of potential customers. A potential customers reaction to a business they have thus far not experienced will be based largely on the perception they have of your brand, how relevant it is to them and how positive the difference is from other brands in the same area.
This is achieved through positioning and through placement.
Positioning, of an idea, a sense, association, an ideal, an image, a group to be part of. Owning a certain type of car, phone or computer will say something about me because of what it stands for.
And then placement – putting those messages, senses and associations in the right place. Advertising in the right publication, sponsorship of the right event, endorsement by the right celebrity or sportsman.
This is the promise you are willing to make and to keep to your customer and the promise that will create the positive emotional trigger in your target customer. This is the start of the sell. And this is where brand has its most valuable role.
Done well, your brand will become the most effective and hard working sales resource you will ever have. And because in this sense it is manifest as an emotional response, a feeling – created and stored in the mind of our potential customer, by our potential customer – it never stops working. Once there it is not only the most effective sales resource we can have but also the cost effective.