Every time I pass by the Walker, I look at this phrase on the wall and instantly think of it as a very nice definition for what a brand is. When you consider it, really a brand is the collective bits and pieces of our own and others experiences with a product or service over time. This is why I think John Grant's Brand Molecule idea is a great way to look at a brand.
Along this line of thought, back around when I gave my talk on modern brand building, I was thinking about how to define a brand's strength. The thought ended up taking shape in the form of a formula of sorts that looks like the following: (I realize that this is probably bordering on being a bit ridiculous, but just blame the time I spent in engineering classes early in my college years...)
In this instance, appropriately enough, Bs is Brand strength; T is Time; P2 is the total number of people who hold the same belief of the brand's reputation, which is derived from E+P1, where E is a person's experience with the product or service and P1 is the perceived personality of the product or service.
So, the more people you have who share the same beliefs about a product and the longer they have held those beliefs, the stronger your brand is. Conversely, the fewer people that share a belief about your brand and/or the shorter amount of time they believe that, the softer your brand is. Or something like that.
Why this matters is that the stronger your brand is, the more forgiving people will be when you happen to make a little mistake or slip-up. The softer it is, the less forgiving they'll be and they'll have a much higher propensity to walk away from you.
If you think about this as a person, as we so often like to do in our silly marketing games, it really makes sense. A person's reputation is largely built upon other people's experiences with that person over time. That reputation is stronger as more people believe the same things over longer periods of time.
The inverse is also true. The less people that know you and the less time that they've known you for means that your reputation is still pretty soft and making slip-ups here and there will lead them to think things of you that may not be true ultimately, but they have nothing else to go by, so what can you expect?
Anyway... to come back to why this matters... as companies get more and more involved in social media and start trying to have real relationships with people, it's important to do everything you can as a brand manager and/or partner on the agency side to create coherent brand experiences over time. The more you switch things around on people, the less they'll feel like they can trust you, which means they'll have softer ties to you and will more easily jump to a competitive product.
Furthermore, when you do make a wrong move here or there, the people that love your brand will forgive you and help you move on from it. And should that mistake be loud enough, those same people will defend you against those who don't know you as well.
To wrap this all up, what it comes down to is that thanks to social media and it now being possible for anyone to broadcast a message about your brand to the world, it's never been more important to make a commitment to what you stand for and believe in.
If you're constantly changing things on people, you'll never build the kind of trust and loyalty you'll need to make people want to stand up for you when it's needed most. And who doesn't want more people willing to do that?
What you're suggesting (and I agree) is that, in fact, you CAN control your brand, despite what conventional wisdom is currently saying. You can control what you do, and you can control how your organization reacts to all the (suddenly multiplied and amplified) forces surrounding and interacting with it. Those two components--your actions and reactions--create the impression in people's mind that sticks with them as the brand.
The trick is how to find that consistency. The molecule concept gets close, but I think a brand is actually more like the God Particle (the Higgs Boson), which "gives mass to every elementary particle which has mass"--that irreducible core that gives rise to everything around it. While scientists aren't even sure the Higgs Boson exists, the same can be said of brands...I mean, where is it? You can't see it, you can't touch it, but clearly something is there.
The real challenge to managing one's brand (Boson?) is to collect all those bits and pieces, both organization- and crowd-generated, and turn them into something that people see and understand. In essence, the act of branding is the act of creating a mosaic from hundreds to millions of pieces. While you may not be able to control the individual tesserae, you *can* control the image all of those pieces make when put together.
More pieces, arranged with a clear image in mind, create a more detailed picture. Fewer pieces, or even many pieces inexpertly "tessellated" or "mosaicked" equals a diffuse and fragmented image...and brand.
In other words, the sudden increase in bits and pieces does not mean that control is impossible, it actually means greater potential exists for a more thoroughly defined--and controlled--brand.
Posted by: Tamsen McMahon (@Sametz) | 24 July 2009 at 08:49 AM
hey paul. nice equation. from that same evening, in that thing i did called manners for the modern brand, there was my own not-very-engineered mathematicery. for posterity, it was: (360 x n) + time + interaction = our glorious mess.
my favorite bit is the glorious mess result. knowing that it really is an unpredictable tangle, no matter how we try to construct it, is realistic (i suppose therefore i disagree with the previous comment, that we CANNOT truly control the brand) and therefore helpful in knowing where to place our energies. as well as where we should set our expectations. nice post. thankyou john grant for making it all so CLEAR.
Posted by: dion hughes | 03 August 2009 at 12:22 PM