Branding: How Many in Marketing Really Understand What Branding Is About?

Perhaps nothing is more misunderstood in marketing than brand husbandry – what Margaret Marks and Carol Pearson in The Hero and the Outlaw incisively call “meaning management. “  Indeed, more than a few marketers have disdained the value of managing the meaning of products.

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers declared 15 years ago in a Marketing Tools article, “Once any marketer takes over the customer relationship, the consumer will have very little need for a mass-marketed name brand.”  Of course Peppers, with a background in direct marketing reflects the traditional inattention to branding in the world of direct marketing.

The advent of the Internet delivered the coup de grace to branding in the minds of many marketers.  But like one-to-one marketing gurus Peppers and Rogers, those who believe that way don’t understand the dynamics of branding, and indeed the contribution that branding can make to a balance sheet.  Of Coca-Cola’s $127 billion market cap, $66 billion is attributed to brand equity. As such, Coke is the most valuable brand in the world, beating out such formidable behemoths as IBM, Microsoft, General Electric and Toyota.

Those who denigrate the importance of branding would do well to read Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson’s The Hero and the Outlaw (at the left under “Must Reads”).

Drawing on extensive quantitative analysis, Mark and Pearson illuminate the qualitative aspects of brand personalities. They infer from their research results that brands fall within 12 archetypal personalities ranging from Pepsi’s and Harley-Davidson’s Rebel archetype to Hallmark’s and Victoria’s Secret’ Lover archetype.

Consumers evaluate brands through human personality traits, whether or not the marketer has imputed human traits to the brand. The brain unconsciously makes anthropomorphic readings of products as part of its efforts to make sense of what it is processing – which brings us to a critically important but much overlooked fact: according to cognitive scientists, 95 percent of the mental activity that goes into forming our perceptions, thoughts and decisions takes place outside of consciousness.

So what do most marketers and market researchers focus most of their attention on? The five percent zone. To truly appreciate the value of branding it  helps to understand the neurological side of the branding picture that lies outside the boundaries of consciousness.

A Duke University study found that brands, somewhat unique among proper nouns, are processed primarily in the emotional, sensuous right brain. That and other research indicate that brand loyalty depends on emotional arousal. As with humans, we will reject brands that lack attractive and consistent personality characteristics.

One researcher who commented on the Duke study opined, “This is very intriguing indeed. It supports our instinctive belief that brands are a special class of word - they are like a poem all in one word in their ability to evoke and express ideas."

In recent study in which subjects’ responses in a Coke vs. Pepsi blind taste test were tracked by fMRI technology, researchers found that brain responses indicated a somewhat even split in beverage preference. However, matters changed dramatically when researchers told people which cola they were drinking. Coke was preferred by 75% to 25%. The fMRI scans showed that when people knew they were drinking Coke, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, which are related to memory and cognitive control, both got excited. In most cases Pepsi did not have the same effect.

People’s brains appear to process Coke with greater animation in regions of the brain associated with archetypal imagery than Pepsi does. People’s imagery of Pepsi does not appear to be as deeply rooted. It’s all a matter of crucial differences in brand personality that Pepsi will never be able to resolve regardless of money spent in marketing or the creative talents of marketing creatives. Coke long ago took possession of the deeper recesses of  most cola drinkers’ brains, and the odds of being booted out are virtually nil.

Next: Brand persona vs. brand personality.

Comments

[Jeff paul news]

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