Every brand wants to be your special snowflake, but only a select few can win your loyalty, and if your brand isn’t special, people won’t choose it.
Legacy brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Apple have long established themselves in the market. Each brand has a particular logo, and qualities that are clearly demonstrated to the public. A brand is the idea behind a company, product, or organization that represents it. It can have a strong or weak value that is dependent on the strength of qualities that the company says it upholds. When a brand is seen this way, you can move beyond the idea that a brand is just a series of symbols or logos. While the visual aspect is one part of a brand, it takes more than wonderful design.
“In simple terms [a logo] is a visual representation of your brand,” said Ryan Burgio, managing partner at Stryve Marketing in Kitchener, Ont. “It communicates what you are trying to communicate as a brand, through a visual cue.”
If you walk into any lecture hall at the University of Guelph, stand at the front and you will see a plethora of glowing Apple laptops looking back at you. Forbes ranked Apple as the most valuable brand in 2015. The exact reasoning of success behind the tech giant is often a case study in classrooms and board rooms, but the conversation will at some point come back to the late Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple.
“[Steve Jobs] was one of the early people to understand that a brand needs to have values, it needs to have something to connect emotionally with an audience” said Burgio. “That to me was ahead of its time.”
Once you start pulling back the curtain on the marketing industry you can see that brand management has as much to do with sociology and psychology as it does quality or performance.”
American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley wrote, “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.” This passage refers to Cooley’s concept of the looking-glass self, and it’s one of the reasons why we care so much about what we buy. It assumes in the context of marketing that, consciously or subconsciously, people mostly buy things because they care about what others think. Companies want to have the brand that will make you think you will look, feel, or be your best in the eyes of others.
According to StatCan as of September, 2015 the Canadian advertising, public relations, and related services industries have an operating budget of $7.5 billion. Firms in Ontario make up 56.2 per cent of that operating budget. For reference, while McDonald’s and Coca-Cola may not be Canadian brands, the marketing house that builds their marketing plan for the Canadian market could very well be Canadian.
It was 2015 that marked the sixth year in a row that Google has been named most desirable workplace by Fortune. This shiny record is not just about the cash, or the perks.
“A lot of times branding is not just externally focused. If you’re talking about a new brand having a sleek modern-looking brand one part of attracting the people that will able to execute the business to make the brand more impactful,” said Burgio.
A brand is only as strong as the effort behind it. If one of your brand values is to uphold safety, and quality, and you break that trust, no matter how established it is, your brand will suffer big losses. The saving grace in this situation is if your brand can stay on consistent even in times of crisis. “You can be Tylenol or Toyota,” is a phrase used by folks in the marketing industry that refers to two tragic incidents surrounding the companies in reference. Ultimately, Tylenol took full responsibility for their actions, ate their losses, made improvements in line with their brand and moved on. Toyota buried the product defect information, and their brand has still not made a full recovery.
The best brands are well thought out, and resonate with every aspect of a business, and the products manufactured. Business elites go to great lengths to make sure their brand is in alignment with audience needs. This includes countless focus groups, neuro-marketing, and the investment of thousands of dollars into research. So, while your start up or not-for-profit might not have the big bucks needed to do it all, the principal stays the same. Define your brand, embrace it throughout your company, and people will choose it as their special snowflake.