BRAND IS A MEMORY, MORE THAN A LOGO

Brands, Branding, Brand Ambassadors, Brand Activations’, Brand Brain, Brands, Brands, Brands…………….. For every one new to brands trying to grasp what branding is all about must be a complex task. Even more so if you are looking for straight answers.

But considering that branding enjoyed a huge amount of interest during the past four years, hopefully most people who are even remotely interested in brands have grasped that a brand is more than a logo.

But then what exactly is a brand? There are countless definitions for this term; a promise, a rumor, a relationship, an image, a unique position and so forth. But these descriptions are all the results of branding, not the brand itself. A better description is a person’s collected experiences of a company, product or service with a certain name. But not even this description is spot on.

Here are my thoughts about what a brand is all about from my viewpoint as an Experimental marketing practitioner.

A Brand is Actually a Memory

Everything you remember about a company, through the interaction what other people say about them, advertising, using their products or every other interaction is their brand for you.

Say that you particularly like a certain kind of car brand say the Hummer. You can like the way they look (macho and almost intimidating) you thing you look good in that kind of car (confident and Macho) they don’t break down too often and you think the overall quality is pretty good (of course the price tag is also handsome) that would be a strong brand for you. But let’s imagine that you, God forbid, lose your memory through amnesia. Then you wouldn’t have a clue about what kind of car you like.

The Brand as a Memory

By constructing a brand as a memory you get a better tool for managing your brand. The clever thing is that you actually start at the end. In order to be able to manage your brand over time you construct a ‘Brand Memory Identity’

This is a description of the ideal memory your customer should have of your brand. This is someone who wouldn’t imagine buying anything else other than your brand he preaches your excellence to everyone he knows, and is prepared to pay a little extra for your brand. That’s what all your customers should be like, right?

When you have defines the end state, the rest is just about backing your way from that point to now. What does your customer need to experience to get the kind of brand memory that you would like him to have?

Our brain actually has three different memory systems. One is called the semantic memory which remembers factual knowledge. The second is called procedural memory and enables us to develop skills and habits. The third is called Episodic memory which consists of memories about whom we are; values, dreams and self-conception.

Your brand memory Identity should be construction to include all three of these memory systems although you may want to emphasize one system over the other-depending on what your competitors brands are like.

Contextual Branding

But there is one catch though you can’t just imagine up any kind of brand memory you like. The reason for that you can’t really force your client to want to take in everything you say or do. It would perhaps be convenient, but impossible as long as everyone has their own will. Besides, it would spoil all the fun by turning everyone into buying drones.

You need to consider your customer’s context. I suggest that all brands are contextual. They are of use to a certain type of person at a certain point in time. In order to find out about your customer’s context, you can use a concept called a ‘Field’. A field can best be described as a world of its own, where people and institutions have something in common. For example, the field of art, the field of literature, the field of branding, the field of Business and so on.

In every field there are certain kinds of things that have acknowledged value, called capital. Any asset works as a symbolic capital in those contexts where education serves as an Educational Capital in the field of business but not in the Field of Literature. Through strategies, individuals, groups and institutions try to maintain the value of their capital and defend or improve their positions. These attempts are often more or less unconscious.

This is where your Brand Memory Identity becomes handy in that it can help your customers with their strategies, maintaining the value of their capitals which enable them to improve or defend their positions. Your brand does this through supporting your customer’s knowledge (semantic) skills (procedural) and self-image (Episodic)

This is the kind of winning situation you can accomplish for both parties. You help your customers and your customers reward you by sticking with you.

Just some thoughts.