10 minutes and 58 seconds to understand the three major brand models

Last month, a piece of news from Procter & Gamble shocked most of the advertising industry.

Procter & Gamble has established an advertising company!

However, in reality, P&G simply formed a new agency by selecting personnel from several advertising companies that served it, such as Grey, LB, Saatchi, and Hearts & Science, and working together in P&G's designated office.

Upon hearing the news, my colleague curled his lips:

Isn’t it just an overseas assignment? It is said so elegantly and refinedly.

However, it is not surprising that P&G's every move can cause an earthquake in the advertising circle. After all, it is the world's largest advertiser, with an advertising budget of $8 billion a year, and at its peak it supported 6,000 agencies around the world.

In fact, P&G is also the pioneer of brand management.

In May 1931, Neil McElroy of Procter & Gamble took the lead in proposing the establishment of brand managers, who would be fully responsible for brand operations and promote P&G's transformation from functional management to brand management.

Subsequently, the brand manager system was widely adopted in the world, especially becoming an organizational management paradigm for consumer goods companies.

The status and role of brand in marketing are becoming increasingly important, and brand has become the main source for enhancing corporate competitiveness. Brand management is becoming more and more prosperous.

(McElroy, by the way, later served as U.S. Secretary of Defense)

Although P&G began to shift to a brand-centric marketing approach in the 1930s, it has always been unclear what brand management is all about. At the beginning, P&G's brand managers were only responsible for graphic copywriting , media spending, promotional plans, and giveaways and packaging suggestions.

It was not until the 1960s that David Ogilvy proposed the theory of brand image, which advocated that advertising should give brands more emotional benefits and create emotional brands.

Following in the footsteps of Ogilvy, Grey, an advertising company serving Procter & Gamble, proposed the theory of brand personality. They believe that the communication between brands and consumers is divided into three levels: from logo to image to personality, giving the brand personalized characteristics, and personality is the highest level.

It sounds like Grey is superior to Ogilvy, but there is essentially no difference in image and personality.

Whether it is the brand image theory or the brand personality theory, it is nothing more than creating intangible value for the product beyond the physical value. They are viewpoints and methods to guide brand building, but they are not systematic brand management standards.

It was not until 1991 that David Aaker published Managing Brand Equity, which clearly answered this question: brand management is the management of brand assets.

Brand equity is the result of previous marketing investment in the brand, the added value of products and services, and an important asset of the enterprise.

We can safely say that DA has single-handedly drawn a circle next to marketing - branding.

He pioneered a brilliant new discipline, and thus became a leader in the branding world, known as the originator of brand assets.

So, how do you manage brand assets?

DA came up with a five-star model of brand equity: brand awareness, brand recognition, brand association, brand loyalty and proprietary brand equity.

Okay, now let’s review the points I made in the Brand Beginner’s Guide and the Brand Advanced Guide:

• Brands have three functions: enhancing recognition, credit endorsement, and creating premium
• Brand contains three major systems: symbol system, benefit system and meaning system

The symbol system appeals to the user's memory response, the interest system appeals to the user's cognitive response, and the meaning system appeals to the user's emotional response.

In the five-star asset model, brand awareness represents the degree of consumer memory of the brand and is an assessment of the recognition power of the brand symbol system. It appeals to the user's memory response.

Brand awareness represents consumers' overall impression and cognition of the brand's functions, quality, utility, and attributes, and is an assessment of whether the credibility of the brand's benefit system is sufficient. It appeals to the user’s cognitive response.

Brand association represents consumers' comprehensive associations with product benefits, prices, usage occasions, users, images and personalities. It represents consumers' attitudes and emotions toward the brand and is an evaluation of whether the brand meaning system can win users' recognition and create sufficient premium. It appeals to the user’s emotional response.

Brand loyalty represents consumers' affection for a brand, purchasing tendencies and consumption habits. The main purpose is to evaluate whether the brand meaning system can win the favor of users and create sufficient loyalty. It appeals to the user's behavioral response.

Brand-specific assets include intellectual property rights such as trademarks and patents. A trademark is a system of symbols and its value lies in enhancing recognition. Patents belong to the interest system and their value lies in credit endorsement.

Note – Brand loyalty can be divided into five levels:

• No loyalty
• Inertial purchase (subconsciously choosing the same brand every time, the symbol system is at work)
• Satisfied purchase (repeated purchase due to satisfaction with product quality, the benefit system is at work)
• Emotional and commitment purchases (identification with the brand, meaning system at work)

Therefore, we can also see from the five-star model that brand assets are built based on the process of consumers' "recognition - cognition - identification". First let consumers know you and remember you (brand awareness), then let consumers recognize you and understand you (brand recognition), then let consumers identify with you and like you (brand association), and finally let consumers continue to buy from you (brand loyalty).

David Aaker has written more than a dozen books, the most famous of which are his brand trilogy: Managing Brand Equity, Building Strong Brands, and Brand Leadership.

Seven years later, another brand guru, Kevin Keller, published "Strategic Brand Management". This book was later hailed as the brand bible.

KK pointed out that the construction of brand assets should be based on consumers, and proposed the famous CBBE model (Customer-Based Brand Equity).

This model answers two questions:

1. What are the elements that make up a strong brand?
2. How can a company build a strong brand?

A brand consists of six elements: significance, performance, image, evaluation, feeling and resonance.

Then these six elements are divided into four levels: brand identity, brand connotation, brand response, and brand management.

Enterprises should build brands according to these four levels:

To build a brand, you must first establish a brand identity. The key to brand identity is to create brand significance. Whether the brand is easy for consumers to recognize, whether the brand is often mentioned by consumers, and whether consumers will think of you first when purchasing similar products, this is significance.

After having a distinctive mark, it is time to create connotation for the brand. Brand connotation mainly includes two elements: brand performance and brand image.

Performance mainly refers to the physical aspect of the brand, how well the brand’s efficacy and quality perform in meeting consumer needs.

Image mainly refers to the psychological aspect of the brand, and the image mainly comes from four aspects: user characteristics, purchasing channels and usage conditions, personality and value, and brand history, traditions and development process.

What KK refers to is actually close to DA's five-star asset model. Significance is similar to popularity, performance is similar to recognition, and image is similar to association.

But the next two levels show the difference between KK and DA. KK emphasizes more on the brand establishing a relationship with users.

After establishing the brand identity and shaping the brand connotation, KK emphasizes that the brand must guide consumers to establish the correct brand response.

Brand response includes two elements: evaluation and feeling.

Reviews represent consumers’ rational opinions about brands, including credibility, quality, purchase considerations, and superiority.

Feeling represents consumers' emotional perception of the brand, including whether the brand makes consumers feel safe, happy, excited, self-esteem, social recognition, etc.

After guiding consumers’ brand responses, the brand ultimately needs to establish a brand relationship with consumers – resonance.

Making consumers feel a sense of belonging, improving loyalty, and actively participating in brand communication and marketing is actually the loyalty in the five-star model.

The three elements of distinctiveness, performance and image describe what the brand itself should possess.

The three elements of evaluation, feeling and resonance emphasize the relationship between brand and consumers.

KK's model is more like a mixture of brand assets and brand relationships.

Brand asset theory points out the way for corporate operations and management. Therefore, after David Aaker, major global advertising companies such as Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi, Dentsu, Bates, and JWT have all proposed their own brand operation models to guide corporate brand asset management.

Brand relationships are more suitable for diagnosing brand performance, so the models of most market research companies around the world are based on brand relationships.

For example, Millward Brown, a market research and consulting company under the WPP Group, has developed a model on brand relationships - the Brand Dynamics Pyramid proposed by Dyson Farr and Hollis. This model divides the relationship between brands and consumers into five stages:

• First of all, a brand must exist in people’s minds. People recognize the brand and know it stands for something.
• Secondly, this brand is related to people’s needs, is useful to target consumers, and can meet certain needs of consumers.
• Third, the brand performs well in people’s lives, and its functions and performance meet the requirements of consumers.
• Fourth, the brand has advantages over competitors and can differentiate itself from them.
• Finally, the brand must establish a certain emotional connection with consumers and be bound to consumers' emotions, which is the top of the pyramid.

The existence here actually reflects the popularity of the five-star model and the prominence of the CBBE model.

Relevance, performance, and advantages are the recognition of the five-star model, the performance and evaluation of the CBBE model.

Binding refers to the association and loyalty of the five-star model, and the image, feeling, and resonance of the CBBE model.

One picture to sum it up.

After all, brands have an impact on people's hearts, and brands are actually a psychological phenomenon.

The first thing a brand seeks is a person’s memory response (recognition, remembering – who are you?), followed by a cognitive response (knowing, understanding – what do you do?), then an emotional response (identification, liking – what does it have to do with me?), and finally a behavioral response (continued purchase – why should I keep buying you?)

That’s the essence of the entire brand model.

The author of this article @空手 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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