We build products and services consciously. But most often than not, we’re building our brand subconsciously. We focus on what we want to say to the customer and the problems we want to solve.
The brand is what the customer sees. It tells them whether they should trust you or not. It tells them whether you have a quality product on offer or not.
A brand is a perception in the minds of the customer. It is a shortcut to faster decision-making. As Jack Trout and Al Ries describe it in their seminal marketing book, Positioning, there is usually one slot per category.
Here’s an excerpt from an NYTimes review of ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman that explains how our brain thinks and decides:
More generally, System 1 uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices. System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes. So System 2 would seem to be the boss, right? In principle, yes. But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily. (The vogue term for this is “ego depletion.”) Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds to it. “Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is,” Kahneman writes, “the automatic System 1 is the hero of this book.” System 2 is especially quiescent, it seems, when your mood is a happy one.
With the proliferation of brands and high competition today, a customer might have 3 brands per category. Do this exercise now:
– Pick any category or industry or service
– List the first 3 names of companies that come to mind
– Pick another category
– Do the same thing – list the 3 names that are top of mind
Now go back to each category and think of all the other brands that exist there and why they don’t occupy your mind space. What is your perception of their value and why don’t they feature in the top 3.
You will also notice that once a brand is established in your mind space for a category, it is very hard to dislodge it.
Now if you’re a business owner, how do you ensure your product or service is in the top 3 in your category?
What can you say or do that no one else can claim?
Can you create a new category altogether? Can you redefine your competitors in a way that elevates you to a customer’s top of mind? Again, this positioning needs to find resonance with a customer.
Understanding the worldviews of your potential customer will help your positioning resonate with them.
It’s not what you say, but what they hear.
Sales and marketing for a product or service often have a direct line to revenue generated.
A brand does not have a direct line that can be drawn to revenue. It’s hard to measure. It has no easy or simple feedback mechanism. Your ‘Brand’ value is a lagging indicator.
Brand building activities would fall in the important but not urgent quadrant of the Eisenhower Matrix. Business is important and urgent and so that takes up most of your attention.
A brand is an asset. A long-term asset that gradually increases in value or depreciates depending on how you maintain and grow it.
Brand is about consistency over a long period. A product can be built in a sprint, a brand cannot be.
