What do you want your Brand to stand for?

Consumers are increasingly judging brands by what they believe in, stand for, and do in the world. Also entrepreneurs increasingly want to work on something they truly believe in. In fact, big parts of people today and especially the young generation are in search for meaning. It matches well that building a brand is about brand identity planning – or, in other words, about creating BRAND MEANING. Throughout the book, you will get to know very different options to underpin your brand with identity/meaning. This can be a compelling higher purpose to improve the world, values and good intentions, authority in a specific field of expertise, the association with an appealing reference group, a specific brand origin or tradition, or an affiliation with a certain art movement, philosophy, or subculture. So you will learn step-by-step how to build a high-end brand with a higher purpose – often an ethical and sustainable brand, an alternative and spiritual business, or even an activist brand.

Effective Branding draws on Consumer Psychology

Building your brand is a journey of self-discovery. Developing a purpose-driven brand requires, first of all, to find out your own purpose in life: What is your ‘reason for being‘ that motivates you to jump out of bed in the morning? How can you fulfill your 'higher purpose' through your brand? The book describes various frameworks of consumer psychology that help you to better understand yourself, what you want your brand to stand for (your Brand Personality), and your customers. It connects brand-building with consumer psychology and explains how you can make your customers see that there is a higher purpose for your company and how to specifically define that greater end. It outlines the best techniques to uncover deep-rooted Consumer Insights – to connect your customer’s life goals with the purpose of your brand.

The main Branding Strategies the book relies on:

Identity-driven Branding:  Expand details...

While positioning-based (mass) marketing aims at defining and constantly adapting its market positioning according to market research and consumer surveys, identity-driven (high-end) brand management means deriving the brand philosophy from inner beliefs and visions. The major challenge of identity-driven branding is to find out what a brand should actually stand for – to develop brand identity: a detailed construction plan of brand meaning. For many lifestyle brands, symbolic benefits even exceed functional product benefits. This means that big parts of product benefits are not made in the factory, but in the marketing department (Heine et al., 2018).

Purpose-driven Branding: Expand details...

As customers are increasingly interested in understanding the brand purpose, character, culture and business practices, successful brands focus on ‘why’ they do what they do, instead of what they’re selling. Purpose-driven entrepreneurs pursue innovations in culture & society, not in products. But it's quite a challenge to find a meaningful band purpose – and, ideally, to combine it with life goals of the target customers.

Personality-driven Branding: Expand details...

The personality-driven approach to branding can complement identity-driven branding and take it one step further. Drawing on the concept of anthropo­morphization, the central idea of personality-driven branding is to enliven a brand in the minds of brand managers and company employees (MacInnis and Folkes, 2017). Instead of describing a brand’s personality with just a few terms, managers should have a metaphoric picture in mind about what kind of person their brand represents, just as if they would think about a ‘real’ person: What are the brand personality’s goals in life? What is her/his lifestyle? How does s/he look like? How would s/he design a website or flyer? Developing a brand personality allows you to create meaning, to know much better what and whom your brand should actually represent. Personality-driven branding sees the brand personality as an intentional agent and the focal point for brand management, who guides all branding decisions and provides inspiration. If all employees were to align their actions with the desired brand personality, the organization would appear to act as one person (Heine et al., 2018).

Personal branding: Expand details...

In the 19th century, it was common that a manufacturer would vouch for the quality of his products with his family name. Companies were ‘humanized’ as their founders and owners were their public faces, which helped building personal and trustworthy relationships with customers. Today, customers still want to connect names and faces to the brands they like as much as they did a century ago. The point of giving your brand a face is turning it into a human-like relationship partner (Fournier and Alvarez, 2012). A person selected as the brand’s public face should be developed as a ‘personal brand’ that is representing the company. One of the major success drivers for self-employed people in creative industries, such as designers, artists, chefs, or architects, is to turn themselves into a ‘person brand.’