How to build a successful brand? Share 4 tips!

All brand models are based on psychological principles, and ultimately come from people’s psychological cognition and learning process. Only when people are added to products does the brand really start to work.

The biggest difference between a brand and a product is that products are on the shelves, while brands exist in the minds of customers.

When we talk about brands in our daily lives, the words we often use, such as brand personality, brand image, brand awareness, brand experience, brand value, brand attitude, brand emotion, brand personality, brand awareness, brand association, brand reputation... all refer to basic human psychological phenomena.

Human psychological phenomena include sensation and perception, learning and memory, cognition, motivation, emotion, attitude, personality, etc. The above brand terms are all derived from these psychological concepts.

Advertising godfather David Ogilvy said that a brand represents an image.

Every advertisement should be a long-term investment in brand image, and brand image comes from the customer's comprehensive associations with the product, the company and the user itself.

It includes associations with product attributes, price levels, product usage experience, product user identity, product functions and benefits, as well as the resulting associations with personality, attitudes, and values.

Association is a psychological phenomenon.

David Aaker, the originator of brand assets, said that brands represent corporate assets.

It is the intangible asset other than the fixed assets of an enterprise, and is the relevant knowledge about the products and enterprises that consumers possess.

Ike divides brand assets into five parts: awareness, recognition, brand association, loyalty and other proprietary assets. This is the five-star asset model.

Another marketing guru, Kevin Keller, further proposed the CBBE model - Customer-Based Brand Equity model based on customer. KK divides brand assets into six dimensions: salience, performance, image, evaluation, feeling, and resonance.

There is no need to explain. From these terms, we can see that brand assets are based on customer psychological phenomena.

Millward Brown, a market research and consulting company under the world's largest communications group WPP, releases a brand list every year, the BrandZ Top 100 Global Brands. In 2018, there were 14 Chinese brands on the top 100 list.

MBI uses the Brand Dynamics Pyramid to measure brands. This pyramid model contains five levels: presence, relevance, performance, advantage, and binding.

The lowest level of this relationship is that the product has a presence in the minds of consumers and consumers know about the product; the highest level is to bind users and establish a strong connection between the brand and consumers.

MBI means that a brand represents a relationship between customers and products.

Relationships are psychological phenomena.

This means that

All brand models are based on psychological principles, and ultimately come from people’s psychological cognition and learning process. Only when people are added to products does the brand really start to work.

Brand is a psychological phenomenon. Brand is the inner drama of consumers.

To build a successful brand, you need to influence your customers through various means. Let customers know, recognize and identify with you.

Of course, different brands have different product attributes, different stages of development, and different characteristics of target groups. Some brands require users to remember, some require users to resonate, some require users to fall in love, some require customers to be interested, and some require users to play with you. But no matter what, we must work hard to win the hearts of customers.

Products, prices, packaging design, store image, the company and place of origin of the product, spokespersons, advertising, promotional activities, and service staff are all means of influencing customers.

Based on customer psychological considerations, there are four paradigms to follow in building a brand: concept brand, experience brand, cultural brand, and social brand.

1. Concept Brand

When people touch, buy, and use a product, the product leaves an impression in their brain through their senses. These impressions and other information input by the product, after being processed by the brain, will become people's internal psychological activities (forming an evaluation of the product), and then control people's behavior (deciding whether to buy the product).

This whole process is called cognition.

Cognition is the process of information processing in the human brain and also the process of people acquiring knowledge. If customers want to make purchasing decisions, they must recognize the product, understand the product, and master the knowledge about the product. For enterprises, it is very important to convey correct knowledge to consumers and guide and direct customer psychology.

Concept is to abstractly summarize and refine the impression formed by users on the product. It is the formatting of user feelings and the induction and conclusion of the concepts, propositions, ideas and principles behind the product.

A brand conveys the knowledge it wants users to master through its concepts. This will allow users to understand the value of your product, identify with your product concept, and let users know who you are, what you represent, and what is special about you compared to other brands.

Concept brands seek users' cognitive responses, and their core goal is to make users aware of the brand and form a sense of identity with the brand. The most basic and important concept is to convey the product’s value proposition, or USP, to users.

The core of concept branding is to lock in a core value for the brand, and then the entire brand is designed and communicated around this value proposition.

Of course, the delivery of value proposition is not just through advertising. Every carrier that connects the product to the consumer, such as the product itself, packaging, stores, and service staff, is conveying information to consumers.

The fast fashion brand ZARA hopes that users will form the impression that ZARA is a brand with "big-name design and diverse styles".

So ZARA formed a large team of designers. In order to get products in front of customers faster, ZARA produces all its products in-house without outsourcing, creating a faster logistics and transportation system; its store locations are close to luxury brands; and it uses advertising, spokespersons, and other means to integrate all of these efforts, all in order to build a fast fashion brand like ZARA.

Of course, the concept includes not only what the product is like, but also why the product is there.

Why do we create such a brand and why do we produce such products? From simply promoting product concepts to spreading the ideas behind the products and what kind of life concepts product users should maintain.

The transmission of these concepts not only helps brands win the recognition of users, but also helps brands find out who its users are.

The “joy” of BMW, the “refreshment” of Coca-Cola, the “energy” of Red Bull and the “naturalness” of Nongfu Spring are the most vivid examples of concept brand building.

2. Experience the brand

If concept brands appeal more to users' perceptions, then experience brands influence users' feelings.

Perception is based on sensation, but is superimposed with more complex psychological activities, such as memory, imagination, and thinking. Feeling is not as deep and comprehensive as perception, but feeling is a more intuitive stimulation.

Humans are, in general, superficial and lazy animals. When you go to a convenience store to buy a bottle of drink, you don’t think too much about it. You just buy whatever you like. Even in interpersonal communication, we often make a final judgment about a person based on the first impression.

In the book "Behavior Design: Zero-Cost Change" written by brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath, they cite a case of corporate transformation. John Kotter and Dan Cohen conducted a survey with the help of Deloitte Consulting. They interviewed more than 400 corporate employees in different countries around the world to understand why large organizations undergo changes.

Change, after all, is about changing people's behavior. Then they found that the most important thing to change people's behavior is not to provide people with a lot of information and repeatedly instill it in them so that they can analyze and think carefully, and then make choices that maximize their own interests.

No, that's not the case. To change people’s behavior, you have to appeal to their emotional level.

There is a saying that only children can distinguish between right and wrong, while adults only look at the pros and cons. This is not right. Most of the time, adults don’t look at the pros and cons, but at likes and dislikes. If you like something, you are willing to do it even if it is not profitable; if you hate something, you will remain indifferent no matter how much its benefits and profits are promoted.

We usually think that the order for people to change their behavior is: analyze → think → change; but in fact, the order for people to change is: see → feel → change.

You see something, it triggers your sensory and emotional side, you like it, you have the will, and then you take action.

And all these influences on the user's sensory and emotional levels, I call it: experience.

Stanley Hainzworth, former Starbucks Global Vice President of Creative, said of Starbucks:

"For brands, the product is the experience, and the experience is the product. Take Starbucks for example. When you taste the drink, the music you listen to, the person you chat with, and the sofa you sit on, it constitutes a complete experience. Who would say that I just come to Starbucks to drink a cup of coffee?"

For a brand like Starbucks, what it cares about is not conveying coffee knowledge to consumers, but creating a coffee shop experience. Starbucks is not a concept brand that promotes how good its coffee is or how Starbucks makes a cup of coffee, but an experiential brand that allows users to enjoy this third space.

To create a perfect user experience, the brand must first be injected with a sense of design, including product design, packaging design, store design, VI visual design, product usage experience and process design, service design and other aspects.

Think about the iPhone in your hand. The establishment of this experience brand is based on the simple and user-friendly design of Apple products, the design of the mobile phone UI and interaction, the design of the Apple store, and other series of designs that create a perfect experience and make you fall in love with this brand.

Secondly, it is the multi-sensory form of information transmission. In addition to vision, it also includes hearing, touch, smell, taste, etc. Let’s talk about mobile phones again. Look at the research that mobile phone manufacturers have done on materials over the years, whether it is metal, glass, ceramics, plastic... just to make you feel an unparalleled smoothness and refinement the moment you hold it in your hand.

In recent years, Internet celebrity restaurants have continued to rise, and most of them are injected with brand experience. From the store's decoration and lighting, the music played in the restaurant, to the exquisite bonsai-like plating, and even the various exaggerated visual effects (such as dry ice and flames), you can get a full sensory enjoyment and can't help but take out your mobile phone to take pictures, check in, and forward and share.

Finally, the design of an experience brand also requires the injection of user emotions. In all aspects of product use and dissemination and promotion, it is necessary to arouse users' emotional responses to the brand, allowing users to generate emotions and feelings such as trust, love, surprise, awe, interest, optimism, happiness, and comfort.

Antonio R. Damasio, a world-recognized leader in neuroscience research and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, wrote in his book "Descartes' Error" that every decision a person makes is primarily controlled by the emotional center of the brain.

We humans have always had two complementary ways of making decisions: emotion and logic. Reason and logic are mainly used to prove the correctness and rationality of emotional decisions.

Descartes, who advocated rationality, was wrong.

The simplest example is that when you like someone, you will discover more and more strengths and advantages in him, and his shortcomings will be ignored by you intentionally or unintentionally. The advantages of the other person that you discover through rational thinking are subconsciously proving that your emotional decision to like him is correct.

Therefore, if you want to influence people's purchasing decisions, you must work on the emotional level and let customers form a positive and beautiful impression, perception and emotional experience of your brand.

3. Cultural Brand

When talking about wine brands and tea brands, many people will say that China has a profound and long-standing wine culture and tea culture, and that brands should be built around these cultures. But if you look more closely at these industries, you’ll find that successful wine brands don’t engage in culture at all.

High-end liquor brands all emphasize brand status and scarcity. Take Jiannanchun, the national liquor of the Tang Dynasty and one of the three famous Chinese liquors, Qinghualang, one of the two major sauce-flavored liquors in China, Luxiang Laojiao, the authentic strong aroma and historical taste of the National Cellar, and Yanghe Blue Classic, which represents the political and business sentiments and the Chinese dream. The reason why Moutai is so popular is also due to its status as the national liquor and the scarcity of its products.

Mid-range liquors like to focus on family and friendship, after all, the main consumption scenario for liquor is drinking together. For example, Zhijiang Liquor’s confidant, Jinliufu’s Spring Festival homecoming, Fenggu Liquor’s making friendship more affectionate, Jinseyuan’s great success must be due to fate, including the early years of drinking a glass of green wine to make friends, and the “home” of Kongfujia Liquor and Gaolujia Liquor.

Low-end liquor is relatively simple, usually focusing on the emotional responses caused by the liquor, such as the old village chief’s “simple happiness” and Jiang Xiaobai’s “youthful wine”.

Look, which liquor brand is built around liquor culture? In the process of brand building, do they focus on drinking utensils, drinking methods, liquor craftsmanship and systems? Most of the liquors that promote these are not successful because this "liquor culture" is too far away from consumers.

The success of Xiaoguan Tea is due to its product design and the selling point of master "handmade" to improve the product quality, give tea gifts a fixed pricing standard, and thus open up the gift market. What tea culture does it promote?

True cultural brand building does not come from emphasizing the product's own craftsmanship, artifacts, product standards and other so-called cultural aspects, because the dissemination of these is essentially self-talk and has nothing to do with consumers.

The cultural brand building referred to here refers to user culture. It is the desires, dreams, pressures, and conflicts shared by a specific consumer group in the context of the entire society. It is a collective consciousness.

We consume because we have needs and desires. Where do our needs and desires come from?

It comes from our self-perception concepts and lifestyle settings, that is, what kind of person I think I am and what kind of lifestyle I should have, which determines what products I will need and desire. For example: I consider myself a middle class person, so I have to eat avocado, cheese and salted egg yolk products (^_^)

Each of our self-perception concepts and lifestyle settings come from the shaping of the influential groups around us and the social culture in which we live.

DW, which was founded in 2011 and entered Tmall in 2014, has now become a street watch in China. People who buy DW watches don’t care about the material, movement, origin, craftsmanship, or brand story of the watch. What they care about is how to match the watch with clothes.

When DW was first founded, its main marketing method was to give away watches for free to influencers, which led to their frequent appearance on social media, especially when worn by trendy uncle Nick Wooster, which created a strong sales effect for DW. Moreover, when these internet celebrities receive the watches, they will also receive an exclusive discount code. Their fans can use this discount code to purchase DW, which will also bring extra income to the internet celebrities. As a result, DW has spread on INS and domestic Weibo.

Trendy culture and fashion bloggers have shaped the DW brand.

When products are consumed by people, they will give specific meanings to the products during use, turning the products into part of social culture. Therefore, a brand can be said to be composed of social culture, products and customers.

Therefore, if a brand wants to design for a specific user group and hopes to become exclusive to this group of people, then the brand must build a cultural identity picture for itself.

Brands need to have a deeper understanding and insight into this user group, understand their likes and hates, their social pressures and identity anxieties, what role the product plays in their lives and what significance it has, and how the product can improve their relationships with themselves, others, and the group.

Only in this way can the brand become the consensus and belief of the group and become the symbol and totem of a group of people.

4. Social Brand

If the three brand paradigms of concept brand, experience brand and cultural brand still act on the psychological level of customers, they are used to establish user cognition, influence user emotions, stimulate user senses and change user attitudes.

Then the creation of a social brand is to focus on the customer's behavior. By interacting with users extensively, we can build relationships, cultivate fans, and lay the foundation for brand building.

The emergence of the Xiaomi brand is the most vivid example of the social brand building paradigm.

Xiaomi has two Internet ideas:

• The first is product thinking: focus, extreme, word of mouth, and speed. Focus on creating single products to achieve high cost-effective and unexpected extreme products, thereby quickly spreading word of mouth, completing sales, and then quickly iterating, making it impossible for competitors to catch up and imitate.
• Another one is user thinking: be a fan and create your own media. Just in June this year, in order to promote the newly released Xiaomi CC, Lei Jun also opened a Xiaohongshu account. So far, Lei has posted 39 notes and gained 19,000 followers.

An entrepreneur who is nearly 50 years old, after achieving success, still goes to a group of post-95 girls' platform to promote his business. I really admire him.

The essence of Xiaomi's user thinking is the book "Sense of Participation" written by Li Wanqiang, which allows users to participate in brand building.

This kind of user participation is not only reflected in the level of brand communication and a large amount of interactive marketing, but more importantly, it is to allow users to participate in the entire process of product research and development, product design, product optimization, pricing, stores, services, brand design, marketing promotion, and sales, so that consumers can feel the presence of the company at all times.

When Xiaomi was developing its initial MIUI system and how the phone should be designed, it listened extensively to user opinions and allowed users to participate, thus accumulating its first batch of fans. Later, when Thunder's gaming laptop brand was created, it also took the same path of socializing with users, replicating Xiaomi's success.

Only when a user is willing to have a relationship with you can he become your fan; only when you have loyal fans can your brand have a solid foundation.

Today, the way all popular stars build their personal brands is, without exception, the paradigm of social branding. Rocket Girls, TFBOYS, SNH48, Cai Xukun, Di Ali Gerba, Lin Yun... They have established an unbreakable psychological bond with their fans through Weibo, fan clubs, handshake parties, birthday parties, meet-and-greets, and highly interactive variety shows.

Especially recently, the major national event marking China's official entry into an aging society - the super topic battle between Jay Chou and Cai Xukun. Every fan who participates in this battle is one step closer to the emotional connection with their idols. Regardless of whether it is a concept brand, an experience brand, a cultural brand, or a social brand, the center of every brand building paradigm is the customer and human participation.

To express it in the simplest formula: brand = product + user.

No users, no brand.

THE END.

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4. Crisis and challenges of marketing promotion in the first half of 2019!

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Author: Empty-handed

Source: Empty Hands (ID: firesteal13)