By James Aitchison

According to conventional wisdom, brand owners defined their brands through skilfully crafted advertising messages, delivered daily to billions of consumers through the mass media.  Nowadays, the game has changed.  The media is no longer mass, and brand owners no longer own their own brands — consumers do.

Heresy?

Once a brand was a trademark.  Today, being a brand is what separates you from being just a plain commodity.  A brand could be described as a bundle of functional and emotional benefits, attributes, usage experiences, icons and symbols — the company’s link to the likes, wants and needs of its customers.  Brands are seen as increasingly intangible: they only exist in the minds of the users.  The people who use the brand own the brand.

Arguably, the best definition of a brand comes from New York advertising agency Kirshenbaum & Bond: a brand is a community of users — a brand community attracts individuals who share similar beliefs and aspirations, and who buy into what the brand stands for.

Apple, for example, is a distinct community of users; Apple purists would never switch to a PC.  Nor would members of the BMW community normally switch to Mercedes-Benz, or vice-versa.  Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola drinkers dwell in two distinct communities of users, while Harley-Davidson is a blood brotherhood of users.

But what happens when the brand breaks trust with its community?  Nike disappointed its community of users over its use of cheap Asian sweatshop labour.  Elon Musk’s Tesla brand has suffered sharply as a result of his politics.

Building a successful brand recognises substance over froth and bubble.  A brand is a trust mark.  The product must be always up to standard.  Even if a product isn’t unique, it might be more efficient, or cheaper, or faster, or more convenient.  Great brands never underestimate the market.  Constant tracking of brand performance and consumer perceptions should never cease.   

Great brands have consistency in their product, service, and consumer experience.  All great brands are never ambiguous.  And they never shout at consumers. 

How can brand values be communicated?

Great brands always have conversations with their audience.

Australia’s renowned social researcher Hugh Mackay developed the Cage Metaphor to explain the way advertising works.  “We’re engaged in a lifelong process of constructing personal ‘cages’ around ourselves.  The bars of our cages are all the things that life has taught us: our knowledge, our attitudes, our values, our beliefs, our convictions.  As the cage becomes stronger and more complex, we feel increasingly comfortable inside it and increasingly confident in our ability to cope with the world beyond the cage.”

Mackay believes the cage is the most important element in the communication process.  Its bars act as a filter in the process of interpretation.  Because we look at the world through the bars of the cage, the bars impose their own pattern on what we see.

Cage building never ends.  New experiences add new bars or modify existing bars.  People constantly reassess their values and reconstruct their bars.  Positive and negative brand experiences also rebuild bars.

Advertising is tasked with penetrating the bars.  However, most advertising is processed passively.  When advertisers use gimmicky attention-getting devices, consumers’ perpetual filtering will block them.

As Mackay states, a lot of traditional advertising is founded on the Injection Myth.  “Advertising doesn’t work like a hypodermic needle.  We can’t load a shopping list of facts into our ads and then simply inject them into consumers’ minds.”  Nor can we assume that we can put meanings into our messages and that those meanings will lodge into the minds of consumers.  “It’s not what our message does to the consumer, but what the consumer does with our message, that determines our success.”

Advertising’s task is to reinforce and maintain long-term memory traces that are often subconscious.  It works defensively, using repetition and reinforcement to avoid a brand fading from the consumer’s mind.  Thus, advertising’s main role is to reinforce feelings of satisfaction with brands already bought, and even induce more frequent purchase, rather than influence brand switching.

Brand switching, seen in the context of the Cage Metaphor, is a tough ask.  In real life, we know how difficult it can be to change people’s minds.  It is that much harder when we rely on a TV commercial to do the job.  A commercial message that challenges head-on a consumer’s belief in a brand will likely fail.  However, if a new product or service is offered, the consumer in the cage will be more receptive; he or she will have no pre-existing negatives.  Likewise, when someone they respect or identify with talks to them, consumers give themselves permission to change their minds and switch to a new brand.

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Consumers don’t just look at the brand, but what’s behind the brand.  And what’s beyond it!

“Everything you do communicates something about your brand to your customers and prospective customers,” said Sergio Zyman, former chief marketing officer of The Coca-Cola Company.  “The way your phones are answered, the way your staff interacts with the trade, the look of delivery vans and packaging.”  The emotional connection between the brand and consumers extends well beyond the 30-second TV commercial.

Brand building and advertising should always possess something inherent that allows them to live on in consumers’ minds. Sadly, most advertising mirrors culture and leaves its audience with nothing new.  However, when brands do create culture, they become part of consumer consciousness.

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Bibliography: How My Advertising Works, Cutting Edge Advertising, Cutting Edge Commercials
(Pearson Asia) and How Asia Advertisers (John Wiley & Sons), all by James Aitchison.