Further thinking: What, exactly, is your brand?

Robert Heath and Paul Feldwick presented a paper at the 2007 MRS conference entitled ‘Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising’ (IJMR: Volume 50: Issue 1). The problem is much worse than this …we have spent the last 50 years using the wrong model of the brand.

Is this bottle of Coca Cola a product with an image?......

            .…or one of many manifestations of Coca Cola-ness?

 

The conventional view

The conventional marketing view is that this is a Coca Cola product around which marketing activity has created a set of associations and imagery in the consumer’s mind. These associations add value to the product and are conveyed to the consumer by ‘brand communication’. The brand does this, it is thought, by sending messages – rational or emotional – to the consumer through the medium of its advertising, packaging and other marketing activities.

 

 

A new model?

The brand has come of age in the last two decades. It is no longer something that is synonymous with the brand owner and which simply sends messages to the consumer – it has become the very thing that the consumer experiences. It feels real and it has substance – brands have visions, philosophies and personalities.

This means that consumers experience brands in different ways. Brands are no longer the senders of messages – they are now interpreted by the consumer as a series of manifestations of underlying brand essences.  Advertising, packaging, sponsorship activities and even the user imagery of a brand are all manifestations of it and, cumulatively, they construct its meaning. This transformation in the status of the brand renders the messaging model redundant – the brand becomes the thing itself that is experienced ... and therefore interrogated by consumers.

The manifestations of a brand build up over time in the sub-conscious of the consumer.  Brands are structured in their minds in what can be called ‘propositional hierarchies’. It is these hierarchies that determine the meaning of the brand. As a result, a brand is not just a matter of what a consumer thinks about it. It is also an outcome of how the consumer thinks about it.

The way in which propositional hierarchies are formed depends on the way in which a brand is experienced and so they change according to context. Marketing activities are the ways in which brand owners can maintain, or transform, the propositional hierarchies of their brands. Brand owners, themselves, also become effectively repositioned. They do not communicate ‘messages’ about their brands, what they do instead is manage and develop their brand’s propositional hierarchy in the mind of the consumer.

To read more...

Instantiation: Reframing Brand Communication

International Journal of Market Research: Volume 50, Issue 2, 2008