"Brand Real" - Laurence Vincent

WHEN TO FOCUS ON BRAND ARCHITECTURE

”..You should use your brand architecture to create leverage across the portfolio. To do this, you have to answer important questions about each brand in your portfolio, including the master brand:

- How typical is the brand of its product or service category?

- How much does this subbrand rely upon brand-specific associations of a parent-brand? Are those brand-specific associations strong enough to provide competitive advantage for this subbrand?

- How broad or narrow is the total brand portfolio?

- ***Who is the target audience for the brand, and what is their dominant mode of thinking about brands in the category (i.e. analytic versus holistic)? 

- How typical or atypical is this brand in comparison to other brands within the portfolio?

- How well can audiences outside the organization relate brands withing the portfolio to one another? Is it intuitive? if not, how much effort does it take to sort it correctly?

… there are specific moments in time when you should pay particular attention to brand architecture and focus on these questions. The are:

- Mergers and acquisitions…

- Cost-cutting…

- Crisis…

- Hygiene…

- Diversification (p 91-94) …”

"When I was a Cub Scout, one of my troop leaders advised us boys to focus on our character, not our personality. He said the boy who focuses on developing his personality might win a popularity contest, but the boy who focuses on building his character will triumph in life. That sounds like a cliche you might find on a Successories poster, but it stuck in my head when I was an impressionable youn hoping to make something of myself. It sticks in myhead today when brand managers ask me how to create a more vibrant brand identity. The best brands develop a voice that reflects their character,not desirable personality traits. We can thinks of many ways to describe that character, but the truth is that it is always revealed through actions (p 159-160)."

"… a brand’s behavior should always be guided by a credible promise that results in a consistently strong experience. Brand identity allows brands to get credit for such an experience by giving them a signature. In the same way that you look to the bottom of a painting to identify the artist, a brand identity helps us connect an experience to a brand (p 168)."

UTA Brand Studio Launches First-Ever Brand Dependence™ Index as Key Predictor of a Brand’s Influence and Potential | Business Wire →

“In the consumer electronics list released today, Samsung had the highest Brand Dependence Intensity score and Microsoft had the highest Brand Dependence Impact score, which adjusts scores for national levels of brand familiarity. The core Intensity score measures how much people are dependent on, or “cannot live without,” a brand. A brand can potentially score up to 100 points for complete attachment or -100 points for complete aversion. A majority of survey respondents gave Microsoft a high brand-self connection score, agreeing with statements such as “this brand is part of who I am.” Apple ranked fifth on the index, with an Intensity score of 18 and an Impact score of 15. Googlesurpassed Apple slightly with an Impact score of 19 and an Intensity score of 18.

…

Three key factors that influence a Brand Dependence score are enrichment, enticement and enablement. All three drivers have been proven in previous rounds of research to affect a brand’s overall attachment score, but enrichment—or how much a brand symbolically expresses the identity of the individual—has been proven to be the most impactful of the 3. Apple scored very high on enticement (which reflects the aesthetics and experience of the brand) but lagged on enrichment, which may explain why recent Apple advertising has shifted away from demonstrations of product functionality and instead into values, as it did with its recent “Misunderstood” holiday commercial featuring a teenage boy’s surprising contribution to his family.

…

Unlike traditional ways of measuring brand strength, Brand Dependence™ is measured on the basis of the following two factors: (1) how close (far) a brand is to (from) consumers themselves, and (2) how often and naturally thoughts about a brand come to their mind. These two factors are, in turn, determined by how much consumers see a brand as being like themselves, sharing their values and belief systems, the degree to which they believe a brand is indispensable (or useless) in their lives, and how pleasing it is to their senses. People who are attached to a brand (a high BD score) are more likely to purchase and repurchase products and services than people who merely say they “like” or “prefer” a brand.

The next steps for the Brand Dependence Index will be a custom offering to clients who want to score their own brands as well as interpret the core drivers behind the score.”