Dear Client, Let’s Get on the Same Page About Branding
snippet 2 —
A quick run through over The Brand Gap intro by Marty Neumeier: What branding is and isn’t, and why it’s good for your business.
In his book The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier challenges our common understanding of what a brand is. It’s not a logo, it’s not a brand identity bible, and it’s not the product or service.
According to Neumeier, a brand is people’s “gut feeling about a product, service or organization.”
It’s something the public slowly but surely decides about your business based on the accumulation of your communication efforts with them.
Communication here encompasses everything from your ad campaigns to your press releases, customer service, product packaging, UX design — anything and everything about your business that ends up in contact with the public.
You know when you walk into a bar or cafe and decide, I don’t like this place. It’s your gut feeling speaking here. It’s a quick intuitive reaction that helps you navigate the options of said bars or cafes. You don’t need to stick around where you feel uneasy. That’s how you make choices about which brand of shoes, airlines, fashion, etc you want to spend your money at. When you get past the the utility of features and price sensitivity, you start thinking at a brand level — “Which brand is likely to give me the best experience?”
That brings us to a very interesting conversation: Benefits v.s. Features, which Seth Godin brings up here:
“Most marketers I know still get hung up on the features and the truth of the matter is that we care about the features because we worked really hard to build the features.
But our customers don't care about the features at all; they only care about what the features will get them. And what they will get them are benefits.
You know buttonfly jeans — that's a feature! The benefit is your girlfriend will think you look good in these. Those are different things.”
Your girlfriend thinks you look good in those G-Raw Jeans. That’s a benefit. It is a perception — in other words, a gut feeling. You’re likely to shop with G-Raw again because the last experience with them made you feel good, and a synaptic link in your brain has been formed that associates G-Raw with reward.
Hello, Pavlov!
Question:
Ok, how can I get people’s gut feeling to side with my brand, and not any other?
Before we dive into positioning & differentiation according to Neumeier, let’s set something straight. Your brand is not for everybody. You, yourself, are not liked by everybody. The notion that people will collectively agree on one thing, from a brand, to a story, to a person, to a truth is a fallacy in itself.
This can be better described as subjective relativism. Truth is relative to the individual's perspective or beliefs. In other words, what is true for one person may not be true for another, due to subjectivity of truth, and variability of experience, values and culture. So dear client, don’t get bummed that people don’t universally love your brand. It’s a good call for differentiation, the first of Neumeier’s Five Disciplines of Brand Building.
Stay tuned!
Begin at 12:37 for the sake of Benefits v.s. Features.
