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?
