A BRAND IS A MEMORY
A BRAND IS A MEMORY
Friday, 15 August 2008 04:32
By Jonas Bergvall
For anyone 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 1990's, 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 rumour, a relationship, an image, a unique position and so forth. But these descriptions are all 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.
A brand is actually a memory Everything you remember about a company, through 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. You like the way they look, you think you look good in that kind of car, they don't break down too often and you think the overall quality is pretty Okay. 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 defined 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 brains actually have 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 who we are, values, dreams and self conception. Your Brand Memory Identity should be constructed to include all three of these memory systems, although you may want to emphasize one system over the other - depending on what your competitor's 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 is 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 in 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 it has acknowledged value. For example, an engineering 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 enables 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.
This article "A Brand is a Memory" is an extract from an upcoming book with the working name Sophisticated Branding by Jonas Bergvall.
