Branding a Brand
Branding a Brand
This article closely overlaps my post on distinctive brand assets, and I intentionally did my best to separate the two—rather than having one really long article discussing both brand assets versus branding.
As I've made my way through books, whitepapers, and especially after taking former London Business School Professor Mark Ritson's MiniMBA in Marketing, I've come to realize that there are varying camps of thought, with little agreement, on two terms that seem trivial: brand and branding.
I've noticed that when people in the branding world are asked "what is branding?" the answers, for some reason, unconsciously become answers to "what is a brand?" Branding is a verb, and a brand is a noun, and the process of branding leads to the creation of a brand. Here's a definition I like from Stef Hamerlinck about branding and brand:
"A brand is a distinctive, experiential promise that represents a product, service, or business. While branding is the continuous process of developing those experiential, distinctive assets associated with that product, service, or business."
Simply put, branding is about making sure your brand stands out from alternatives that customers might consider over your brand. Brands help customers make fast and easy decisions. Brands are a mental shortcut; whatever brand comes to mind quickly in a buying situation is the brand we choose. The branding process of creating distinctive brand assets should ultimately strive to build and refresh customer memory structures so that your brand can be top of mind in buying situations.
People who claim that customers only choose your brand because it fits in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, or because it has a "why," or that your brand needs a USP in order to succeed, have missed recent research from Erenbergh-Bass and others, which shows that customers, in the majority of cases, don't perceive meaningful differences between brands. They choose a particular brand because it has something that appeals to them, and brands can't actually own a single attribute.
That said, this doesn't completely negate the idea that your brand can be relatively different from competitors with certain brand attributes. But what the research debunks is the idea that customers primarily choose a brand over its competitor because of its benefit, or "reason to buy," or unique associations. You can't own a specific attribute, but you can be more of that attribute relative to competitors.
A brand is all about what it does for the company. The primary reason we need a strong brand is to reduce price sensitivity. It's not about driving growth and increased volume (which are certainly factors of brand), but if you look at what brand does, more than anything else, it increases your company's profitability, something that everybody wants. And a big way to increase that profitability is to make sure your brand comes to mind when customers are in-market.
N.G.