Refreshing your Brand - using Behavioural Science

A brand needs to keep doing 3 things to remain afresh in the memory of it’s customers:

• Be Distinctively Relevant
• Consistently Coherent
• Always Participative

Therefore, the brand identity is very important – to grow distinctive brands by building:

• Mental availability to create recall in advertising; and
• Physical availability to make it easy for consumers to identify brands in buying situations.

Yet marketers face an important and ongoing tension of:

• Evolving their brands to be more relevant to consumers and their changing needs; with
• Staying familiar enough to trigger and reinforce existing memory structures built over time.

In addition to placating changing consumer needs, marketers now must manage the fact that the contexts within which they build physical and mental availability are changing because of the disruption that technology is bringing.

Communicating a brand’s distinctiveness now takes place in smaller environments like mobile screens and happens in a shorter duration with some ad exposures only lasting seconds at best.

Marketers are adjusting their strategies and their brand identities to win in these rapidly changing environments.

Here are some behavioral science and brand building principles that you should consider ahead of a logo or brand identity redesign:

• Our Brains Prefer Visuals Over Words. Visuals are processed more fluently than words. This leads to quicker and less effortful processing. Less work means more positive associations. It’s also been shown that simpler visuals are processed more easily and positively than complex visuals. Hence, simplifying brand identity or executions of your brand in terms of ads and packaging, should make life for your consumer easier.
• Our Brains Enjoy Solving Simple Puzzles. The brain likes to solve “simple puzzles” and fill in gaps. Research on problem solving shows that consumers get emotional rewards in the form of a dopamine boost when they solve problems. Activation of positive affect related brain areas in the prefrontal cortex have also been observed when consumers solve simple problems. Logos that leave a consumer filling in a few simple gaps may lead to mental rewards that feel good at a non-conscious level.
• Our Brains Are Attracted To Novelty. Our prehistoric brains are attracted to novelty. If you go back 200,000 years ago, we needed to find fresh food, water, and shelter, so our brains are wired to be attracted to new things. The trick to novelty is not to make it so unfamiliar that it triggers fear, but new enough that invokes excitement and interest. This is the tension that brand builders face in building a distinctive brand that evolves enough to stay relevant to consumers but is familiar enough that it doesn’t require excess processing efforts.
• Our Brains Use Context To Make Sense Of The World. Context drives perception. Anytime marketers change their brand, the biggest concern is that the new executions of the brand won’t trigger the brand automatically. To support this transition, marketers should take advantage of the fact that the brain always processes information relative to context and past experiences. Identifying other distinctive brand assets and the common contexts within which consumers expect to see the brand will help the activation of the brand.

Further, there are few question you need to answer as a start point:

• Who are your consumers and what drives their behaviours?
• What makes your brand distinctive?
• Which elements of your brand identity are distinctive brand assets and must not be touched?
• Which of your brand identity elements need to be evolved and how do you go about doing it?
• Which brand identity elements are holding your brand back and should be removed?
• How do you ensure that you leverage context to improve the transition of these changes?

EXAMPLE - MasterCard

Mastercard modified their brand logo, the core brand identity element, in order to improve its visibility across digital channels.

The reason for the change as explained by Mastercard’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Raja Rajamannar, was the changing digital landscape which is  driving their marketing strategy and consumer engagement. Dropping MasterCard typeface was aimed at delivering on the brand pillars of simplicity, connectivity, seamlessness and modernity.

Like MasterCard, a lot of brands have evolved their logos over time, all have taken the simplicity route, with gradual changes over time.

For the take-away

Marketers will always feel the pressures to evolve their brands over time, especially as the context within which these brands are advertised, purchased, and consumed become more digitized.

The key is to be very careful in evolving your brand and to do so in a way that doesn’t disrupt the memory structures that allow consumers to easily identify your brand.