The best place to start this discussion is some sort of definition of ‘Brand Salience’. To me it is the extent to which your brand comes to mind. This might be unprompted, as in ‘what brands of beer can you name? That first question may be followed with a prompt such as ‘which of these brands are you familiar with? A brand with strong salience will be identified quickly, those with none will remain anonymous.
A common phrase in marketing is ‘build a brand’. The actions taken by marketers to address this often-mouthed objective differ. There is no template to build a brand, but there are well established principals.
Most young marketers would struggle to think past Instagram and Tick Tock, believing the way to build a brand is to do stuff that gains attention and eyeballs. The reality is that doing so barely scratches the surface of what is required.
Building a brand is a long-term proposition, inconsistent with the very highly targeted digital capability we now have. Building a brand requires that you create and leverage distinctive visual, verbal, and aural assets. On encountering one of these assets, a current or potential customer has the brand immediately brought to mind.
The first task is to identify any distinctive assets your brand might have on which to build. In most cases this is after years of zigzagging and bouncing around. The potentially distinctive assets of most brands are a bit like the jumble in the bottom of a kids toy box. Lots there, bits and pieces, but nothing that has been picked out and made really distinctive.
As a marketer it is your task to pick those pieces and build them into a distinctive asset of the brand.
The Ehrenberg-Bass institute has developed by grid that captures the essence of all the above by reflecting two factors: Fame and Uniqueness.
- Fame quantifies the percentage of category buyers brains where the brand has an immediate and salient link to the brand asset being tracked.
- Uniqueness quantifies the brands level of ownership of that asset versus competitor brands.
The challenge for marketers is that to build such a matrix that has real relevance can cost a lot of money. It is one thing to do an audit of an existing brand, entirely another to audit a market category to identify holes in the competitive profiles which can be leveraged.
Understanding the factors that will drive distinctiveness that are relevant to the consumer is the first point of call. There is often the debate about the role of creativity in determining what is distinctive and relevant, and how that distinctiveness is captured by the combination of visual, aural, and verbal characteristics.
For example, what I regard as being a truly great example of Australian brand building is Meadow Lea margarine. While it is now relegated to the discount bins through stupidity and poor brand management, the tagline ‘You ought to be congratulated’ would bring ‘Meadow Lea’ straight into the mind of most Australian women over 50. Early in the process of building Meadow Lea, qualitative research identified that women were still doing most cooking and housework while increasingly holding down a job and managing the family. They were sensitive to criticism in all these areas, and were looking for acknowledgement. Meadow Lea acknowledged the emotional need and addressed it by telling them they deserved to be recognised and congratulated. The advertising captured the essence of that acknowledgement, visually, aurally, and verbally. Over the course of a couple of years Meadow Lea went from being one of many brands of margarine, to being absolutely dominant. I would suggest that the remnants of that brand salience remains. 30 years after the idiots who inherited Meadow Lea after the usual multinational financial engineering occurred and the advertising stopped, most still correctly associate ‘you ought to be congratulated’ with Meadow Lea.
Typically, the steps to build a brand cost a lot of money in advertising, and importantly in the initial stage of identifying those elements that can be built into distinctive brand assets. Most small businesses do not have the resources to even begin. However, two points are relevant:
- If you are a local plumber, accountant, architect, whatever you may be, you need only be distinctive in your local market, however you define that market.
- AI is throwing up tools that locals can use that promise to deliver at a relatively modest cost, and with some marginally compromised accuracy, the sort of understanding previously only possible after big investments. Mark Ritson, Marketing Prof at large recently wrote a very useful post in which he labels this data as: ‘synthetic data’.
Thinking strategically and acting creatively is the foundation of identifying, building and leveraging distinctive brand assets. You should try it!
My thanks for the catalyst of this post, and the outline for the header graphic goes to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for marketing science.
