One lens through which you can view your brand is, "How does my brand bring happiness to people's lives?" Does your brand make people happy? Does it make their lives easier? Is is surprising or unexpected in some way? Is aesthetically pleasing or beautiful? Is it charming? Is it amusing? Is it funny? Does it help people save time or money? Is it an indulgence? Is it quirky? Is it intuitively easy to use? Does it convey status?
Consider GEICO's gecko. Or Apple's product design. Or Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World. How about iPhone's Siri? Or the scent of a Cinnabon product? Or the anthropomorphic M&M characters? Or the latest Hermès scarf design? Or the feeling of driving a brand new MINI? Or Harley-Davidson bike? Or even the simplicity of Swiffer house cleaning products? Consider the friendliness of your local Starbucks barista.
How does your brand bring happiness to people's lives?
A brand's identity system helps people recognize the brand. It helps people encode the brand in their memories and quickly extract it from their memories. The system incorporates a number of identification triggers. These almost always include visual components but can also include other sensory components such as Cinnebon's cinnamon scent and Harley-Davidson's engine sound. Several hotels are exploring distinctive aromatherapy scents. The visual components can include a shape or icon such as Nike's swoosh, McDonald's arches or the Olympic rings. Often packaging shapes are a part of the system such as Coca-Cola's distinctive bottle shape or Absolut vodka's unique bottle shape. Colors are usually a part of the system such as John Deere's green, UPS's brown or Southwest Airline's vibrant color palette of blue, red, gold and orange.
Consider personal brands. I am known by my name. Sometimes people associate me with my Brand Aid book. Many people know that I earned an MBA at Harvard. People who interact with me in person know that I usually wear a bow tie with a jacket. People that know me well expect me to arrive in a Toyota Prius as I have owned three of them since 2000. And friends know that I am a passionate sailor. Each of these are "brand" associations that may also serve as triggers for people to think of me. My brother associates me with scary clowns, but that is another matter entirely.
The more distinctive elements that you can build into your brand identity's system the better. They may include names, shapes, colors, patterns, type fonts, visual styles, sounds, scents, textures, flavors, spokespeople, jingles and feelings. You can also associate your brand with occasions, events, situations, product uses, lifestyles or particular types of people.
The system should be rich but not overly complicated and flexible enough to be effective in every media, use or application. And here is the most important part - you must use the elements consistently over time once you have decided what they are. This is key to memory encoding and decoding.
An important role of the brand manager is to determine the memory structures associated with the brand so that marketing communications can reinforce and leverage these structures. Also, potentially useful new brand associations can be discovered in the process.
For instance, Bush beans might be associated with summer, picnics, grilling, family and Duke (the dog). Coke might be associated with its bottle shape, the color red, the beach, parties and nightclubs. A pizza brand might be associated with cheese and tomato sauce, family and friends and watching sports on television. Hallmark's greeting cards are associated with holidays, special occasions, family and friends. But they also are associated with candy and flowers among other product categories.
Everyone knows McDonald's arches and Nike's swish. Most people associate Harley-Davidson with the sound of its engine. Many people associate Tesla with Elon Musk and batteries and alternative energy. People associate Cinnabon with the cinnamon scent. Many brands are associated with fond childhood memories or with sex. What is Old Spice associated with? How about Dos Equis? ("Stay thirsty, my friends.") GEICO?
The trick is to discover all of the items people associate with the brand so that those associations can be reinforced, built upon and used to help people recall the brand associated with not only marketing communication and the brand identity itself, but also with specific relationships, occasions, complimentary products and other memory triggers.
If you have not identified and mapped out your brand's memory structures, you need to do so. it will help with the effectiveness of your advertising and your brand's identity system.
