Strategic Frameworking, Inc.

“Brands are all about how consumers position themselves. Powerful brands succeed by establishing a relationship, a connection, with their customers. To establish that connection — to earn a place in their world — a brand must know its customers and become a part of how customers want to see themselves.”

What’s a Brand?
Brand Types
The Job of Positioning
The Brand Benefit Hierarchy

Quite simply, a brand is a promise to the customer — a mirror in which the customer sees a reflection of him or herself and identifies with, or rejects, the promise he or she sees. Likewise, a brand is also a reflection of your organization. Your brand serves to define your organization and influences every aspect of your operation, right down to corporate culture. Whether measured in SKU per second shopping, margins or shareholder value, the power of your brand has far-reaching impact. On stock valuation. On marketing costs. Even on employee retention rates.

For customers, branding plays two important roles:

In a world with lots of choices, it tells them which choice is right. It serves as a customer’s compass out of the chaos of competing choices. “What’s best for me?”
In a world full of change and confusion, it helps them define who they are — it gives them a badge. Good Mother, Dedicated Athlete, Hip Teenager.

Parent Brands

Marriott, Microsoft, Disney, Frito-Lay
Parent brands serve as our basis for identification — they provide recognition and quality reassurance. They say “safe, reliable, trustworthy.” We associate parent brands with a set of values and imagery, and they evoke certain expectations about what our experience will be using that brand.

Line Brands

Residence Inns, Excel, Disneyland, Lay’s
Line brands bring texture and tangible relevance to the parent brand, while adding the distinctive appeal of their own unique identity. Line brands code a product/service for a specific usage experience — a particular situation or occasion — and provide information about the intended user. They serve as a telegraphic communicator of attributes as well as functional and emotional benefits.

Brand Extensions

Disney Home Video
Brand extension allow parent/line brands to extend to new arenas of competition, new users and new usage occasions. By reinforcing the parent/line identity, extensions increase a brand’s equity. They provide incremental growth revenue to the brand and keep parent and line brands current and vital.

When we interact with a brand, we experience it through a variety of attributes. All of these attributes tell us how to “feel” about a particular brand:

What is it (cognitive)
What does it look like (visual)
How does it feel (emotional)
What does it stand for (symbolic)
How does it sound (auditory)

Brand positioning builds a bridge between the larger self of the consumer (“How I want to see myself”) with a larger idea about a product or service (Kodak = immortality). It constantly seeks to build the relevance and equity of your brand. Proper positioning allows your customer to say, “This is the right choice for me.”

Effective Positioning

Is intrusive, it cuts through the clutter.
Is relevant, it constantly asks, “how can we join consumers” rather than asking consumers to join you.
Differentiates, it demonstrates what’s really different about your brand compared to everyone else.
Strengthens margin, it establishes ownership of the category, not just “squatter's rights,” by focusing on increasing brand equity.
Creates demand, it links the consumer back to the category via the brand.
Is consistent, it demands loyalty to consumers rather than requesting their loyalty to you. It requires you to be faithful to your brand and leverage it fully.
Is customer-focused, it speaks in today’s consumer currencies: time, energy, money, quality and self-esteem.

Powerful brands allow us to join and connect to something larger than ourselves. We associate a brand with a whole bundle of increasingly meaningful benefits — a hierarchy of needs. Brands help us define who we are. Great brands recognize that they play an important role in how people position themselves in the world, which is the true focus of positioning.

Brand Soul: Signing Up for Something Bigger

Great brands are unambiguously anted on quality, deeply felt emotional benefits, identified fundamental beliefs and values. They have a ubiquitous presence and, importantly, sell to diverse segments of consumers. But the best brands have all gone beyond attributes, functional benefits and emotional benefits to articulate their brand soul — they have “signed up for something bigger” by finding not what separates different segments of consumers but what unites them. Thus, powerful brands badge both the product and the user simultaneously. Brand soul — the emotional end benefit — drives everything about that brand and defines brand personality.