Decoding Brand Behaviour: Unlocking the potential of brand behaviour to drive distinctiveness and growth.

Hello! And Welcome to the Business of Brand Behaviour! The purpose of this newsletter is to share my journey into all things brand behaviour related from my PhD at Bayes Business School.

I’m sharing my initial research proposal here today. I’m sure it will evolve and develop and I get into my research.

I’m hoping that as I learn, so will you! I’ll share with you my insights and learnings on how organisations and businesses use their brand behaviour to drive business growth.

Feel free to get in touch if you want to find out more!

Ciao

Sandra

Background:

My proposed area of study is understanding the role that Brand Behaviour plays in driving brand distinctiveness, and therefore business growth. I believe that this is part of the Marketing discipline, and sits at the intersection of Brand Identity, Brand Experience and Organisational Behaviour.

Based on the work completed by Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg Bass Institute (2010), it is well recognised that distinctiveness helps a brand to be chosen in the moment of need, increasing penetration and ultimately growth.1

Through my work as Strategy Partner at global branding agency Jones Knowles Richie (JKR), it has become increasingly clear that while the visual and verbal assets of a brand are important, for a brand to be truly distinctive it needs to consider how to align parts of the organisation that play a role in creating the brand experience.

From my perspective, Brand Behaviour is the behaviour, acts and actions that a brand is known for. It is a behaviourally led idea (or set of ideas) that reflects the organization or brand’s purpose and values that guide the acts or actions a brand takes. ?It is understood through the brand experiences that a consumer has with that brand, formulated from a mix of the brand’s identity and communications as well as organizational behaviour and culture that delivers the brand experience.

This was reinforced by my experience of working at Red Bull. Their positioning “to Give Wings to people and ideas aligned the brand behaviour. It sat at the core of the organisational culture and the brand actions taken, providing an important foundation for Red Bull’s distinctive brand and had a tangible impact on business growth.??In this case, this brand behaviour was specifically defined, articulated and enacted clearly in an organization and acted as the red thread that ran through the entire brand experience, making it both distinctive and cohesive.

I believe that brand behaviour could be a bigger opportunity for organisations and have a hypothesis that:

·????? In addition to distinctive brand assets, brand distinctiveness is founded on brand behaviour (firstly how the brand behaves, and then how the people in the organization behave to support this)

·????? When brand behaviour is aligned and executed across an organization's disciplines as they create the brand experience, an aligned brand behaviour can be an important driver of distinctiveness and therefore, business growth.

·????? That as we head into a world where AI will play an integral role in brand experience, brand behaviour is likely to become more importance to the brand experience, as it evolves to encompass behaviours delivered through both employees and AI at each touchpoint.

·????? At the core of Brand Behaviour is an emotional foundation that has the potential to be completely unique, and very difficult to copy.? Does it have the potential to be a brands most distinctive asset?

Research questions:

What is brand behaviour and how does it manifest?

What is the relationship between Brand’s Behaviour & Brand Distinctiveness?

A.??? What is brand behaviour?

How is Brand Behaviour understood and articulated by employees, managers/leaders, and consumers?

B.??? What is the relationship between Brand Behaviours and Brand distinctiveness

What is the relationship between brand behaviour and brand distinctiveness (correlation or causation?)

Data and Proposed Research:

·????? A four-stage approach made up of qualitative interviews, a quantitative questionnaire, and analysis.

·????? My plan is to replicate this methodology across a range of clients, to understand the differences between service v product brands; and single v multiple brand businesses.

·????? I would like to partner with a brand led large agency group and work with a selection of their clients to answer this brief most effectively. In a mutually beneficial arrangement, I would like to access chosen clients’ employees and management teams to conduct primary research. This would be supported by secondary research sources that will help to understand each brand’s current understanding of consumer perceptions and associations around brand distinctiveness.

·????? I will focus the study on organisations and brands that have been identified to have positive distinctiveness associations.

·????? Please note that at this point, I have left the questions quite open ended as they are likely to evolve as I go further into my research. Depending on where the value lies, the focus of the questions may shift more towards the drivers of Brand Behaviour, or to the different interpretations of a brands behaviour on business outcomes.

Stage One: Establish the language of brand behaviour within an organisation.

Methodology: Qualitative interviews

Sample 1a: A cross section of employees from different disciplines within an organisation

Key question areas:

·????? Explore understanding of the overall brand and strategy

·????? How they would describe the organisations brand behaviour

·????? How their role helps deliver the brand strategy

·????? Describe examples of how their actions demonstrate or impact on the brand behaviour

Sample 1b: A cross section of managers and leaders across an organisation

Key question areas:

·????? How they would describe the overall brand strategy

·????? How brand behaviour is understood in their business, what it looks like and how they describe it

·????? In which parts of the brand experience is the brand behaviour most important?

·????? How do they incentivise and reward brand behaviours?

·????? What frameworks do they use to align brand behaviours (e.g. competency frameworks etc)

Stage Two: Assess the level of alignment of brand behaviour in an organisation

Methodology: Quantitative questionnaire

Sample: representative sample of employees from key disciplines who impact on the brand experience

Key question areas:

·????? % recognition of the defined brand behaviour in their organisation

·????? % agree that the brand behaviour is reflected in their role

·????? % agree that rewarded based on demonstrating the brand behaviour

Stage 3: Consumer’s perception of brand behaviour

Objective: To assess the level of recognition of the (defined) brand behaviour

Sample: Consumers who have experienced the brand in the past 4 weeks

Methodology: Online quantitative questionnaire using language and terminology to define brand behaviour as gauged from stage one.

Key Question areas:

·????? To what extent do consumers associate the brand behaviour with the brand?

·????? % who correctly recognise and attribute brand assets

·????? Collect data on touchpoints and interactions with the brand in the past 6 months.

Stage 4: Analysis

·????? For each business, analyse the extent to which are the following in alignment:

·????% recognition of defined brand behaviour in the organisation

·????? Once I have a set of data across a range of organisations. Compare the analysis above to understand the differences between different types of businesses.

Implications of my PhD research.

I would like to further the thinking in my industry by helping brand owners and leaders to create more aligned brand experiences, and in turn, more distinctive brands.

I believe that this model could help brand owners and leaders to better understand how to create distinctive brands by considering the behavioural elements that underpin these efforts.

The implications of my research could help overcome the silos that exist in larger organisations by further to broadening the concept of branding beyond the marketing department.

By using brand behaviour to orientate resources deliver better outcomes, we can help business leaders to leverage the power of branding as a long-term strategy for business growth.