Why do People Forget About Your Brand?
This is essentially the first Law of Brand Science: you’re trying to get people to buy your brand, and the first hurdle is, they can’t even remember where they put their keys, much less remember your brand.
What’s the most distinctive brand asset of all?
Ipsos and Jones Knowles Ritchie did a big ol’ global study to find out. 25 countries. 33 categories. 523 brands. 5,000 brand assets. And 26,000 people.
The core question: did LOTS of people connect the thing to the RIGHT brand?
Then they sliced them into three tiers: gold, silver & bronze.
Is There Brand Loyalty to Colleges?
We usually think of college (or uni) as a loyalty purchase (if we think of it as a purchase at all).
People pick a school, attend it, graduate from it, love it, bleed red & yellow (go Yeomen!), and even send their kids to their alma mater.
And graduation rate is one of our key quality metrics for how good a school is. Start there: end there.
But the data tell a different story.
Should You ”Bland” Your Brand?
Just to clarify: a logo is not a ‘brand’. Or at least it’s not your BRAND: your ‘Big B’ brand is your entire reputation and the sum total of all you do — product, pricing, where you’re sold, what your CEO Tweets, is it hip on Cape Cod, do you have a store in Monaco, etc.
But a logo is a key, often essential element of your brand. It’s your “little b” brand.
Here are 3 key reasons to keep (or create) a funky logo:
Are Premium Brands Only Bought By Affluent People?
Are these differences statistically significant? I dunno, but most likely, yes.
Do these patterns vary by category (cars & stereos & vacations vs shampoo & coffee)? No doubt.
Are there caveats galore? Of course! Sheesh!
But the main findings run against the grain of a lot of “common sense” in marketing, and have real implications for how you market or advertise your products.
How Valuable is Your “Brand”?
It’s gotta be more than just your revenue, or your market cap. But how do you measure it? Is it $10M or $10B?
Interbrand just released their latest list of the best global brands. Their formula is “financial performance” + “the role the brand plays in purchase decisions” + “the brand’s competitive strength and its ability to create loyalty.” It’s a secret sauce, but it does meet ISO standards.
BrandZ and Brand Finance have their own methods. Jonathan Knowles was kind enough to gather the data for all three.
Overall, they mostly agree on the ranking of the world’s strongest brands. Whew.
But they disagree quite a bit on the dollar values.
Big Brands Have Higher Loyalty. Again.
One of the oldest laws in marketing is that small brands suffer twice: they have many fewer buyers, AND those buyers buy slightly less often (lower repeat, AKA loyalty, but don’t say loyalty, it’s a terribly messy word that should only be used for pets & sports teams). This is called Double Jeopardy. It’s older than me.
Is Your Brand Easy to Recognize?
A quick & unscientific way to test is to do an online image search of “your brand” or “your brand + your category”. (E.g., “Starbucks”, or “Starbucks coffee”.) Then zooooom out (Ctrl - or Cmd - ).
Check it on its own & against competitors. Can you tell them apart? Is there anything beyond your logo or product that pops? Do you look like everyone else, or are you creating your own distinct look?
Do Heavy Buyers Stay Heavy?
The TL;DR: not so much.
In a classic study,The NPD Group measured the purchase frequencies of 2,261 consumers across 27 brands in both CPG and non-cpg categories. Then they came back a year later to see how much folks were stll buying.
Cognitive illusions
Here’s one reason brand science is hard: shoppers at times are totally logical and utterly irrational. Take “cham” prices.
