The power of brand recognition
If you’re in a blind test of choosing a toothpaste out of the 2 that are in front of you, testing on the basis of quality, which one will you go with?
The better quality one, right?
Why did you pick that up?
Because you want the best for your teeth.
Now, one of the jars is put up with a label of a brand that is highly recognized, which one will you go with this time?
The majority of the people would choose the label one.
That’s exactly what brand building is about. This experiment might well suggest that brand recognition not only facilitates the choice, but it changes the perception and taste of the product itself.
You would leave the quality behind and just to go with a brand that has a face on it because you know you can trust it.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
It is about making clear what we want the consumers to know about us.
Brand building is about who you are and the kind of company you want to build. It’s about how your users are able to relate to you.
We all recognize the major companies of the world, from Apple to Google to Facebook and all the companies have a name and a face to them. Just like Apple has a face of Steve Jobs attached to it, similarly, mention of Mark Zuckerberg means somebody talked about Facebook. That’s why, Apple‘s sales had experienced a massive decline when Steve Jobs was thrown out of his own company. Several CEOs were hired and paid millions just to make things worse.
How to build your brand
The first step that we have to take and ironically, the hardest one is understanding the problem in the first place. Asking the right questions.
Why are we doing this?
What is so important and missing currently around us, that our brand is promising to fill the gap for the consumers?
Indeed, often we try to solve a problem that makes us look good but it’s the wrong one, we tend to apply rationality and logic to situations of high uncertainty.
In short, this is not a sort of decision that can be made with mathematical models, so therefore the need for a vision and the understanding of hidden facets of reality which the human brain might be wired for arises.
And money spent on branding seems to be one of those things that while can’t be explained by economists, it is instead an element of trust. In short, as a subconscious assumption, if you’re spending money to build a brand and a reputation, you have more skin in the game, and more to lose.
Breaking down the Assumption of barriers
Now, stepping into the next context for building a brand for your product or company, there are several assumptions taken in mind.
· People always want convenience and low prices
· Rationality is what drives people’s actions
· Marketers and brand managers are liars trying to manipulate people
· People are biased, and we need to leverage those biases
In a world that is now overpowered by tech, where tracking visible metrics has become inexpensive, those metrics become the key drivers of companies, that neglect their brands and focus on building functional products.
And the thing is, large tech players, with the most valuable brands in the world, are aware of the fact that their brand-building activities are a key element of their success. But they pretend those don’t count.
Are ads Sufficient?
Once you have generalized this and moved further in your procedure, you arrive at the process of ad making.
If you ever want to know truly about what a brand conveys or stands for, try deducing their ads, and then apply the rules of reverse marketing.
Every ad effectively will have two audiences: potential product buyers, and potential product viewers who will credit the product owners with various desirable traits.
Your duty as a marketer or brand manager here is to decipher which one is your priority and which ones would you like to target by keeping the context of the ad in mind.
This isn’t easy to grasp and internalize, however, perception can enhance our products. Perception isn’t just about improving the user experience, but it is also about building more technical specifications in your product or adding features.
Your duty, is to make a shift in mindset, to your product and make it stand out from your competitors.
Coca-Cola knew that well when it developed a unique shape for its bottles a century ago. As the story goes, when Coca-Cola wanted to preserve its brand, it invited its bottlers to come up with a bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.
If you thought about a tech giant well when Google launched its search engine, its super-clean design, not only enhanced user experience but it also signaled one thing that Google was actually good at search!
So much so, that “google it” became a synonym for “search it” and it actually now became ever more used.
Context in Decision Making
The way we perceive things is driven by context. There are thousands if not millions of hidden possible ways we can use perception, at no additional cost, or capital investments to improve our business right now, by changing the way our product or service is perceived.
It just requires creativity and the ability to think that what might seem illogical can actually turn out to be subconsciously rational, even if hard to explain.
Understanding the kind of context people experience your product or service.
Or determining the kind of context you want to create for your brand it is critical to building a successful brand.
What drives your consumer to do something and how can your brand be a part of is the context which gets added as an element in brand building.
Thus, if you do understand the process, you also understand why it becomes important for brands as well to advertise themselves to become “fit.” And the best way to advertise themselves to choose to build a business that lasts.