Joining People & Brands

Design Management Review, Summer 2004 by Eckersley, Michael

As the focus of relationships that customers honor with pride and loyalty, strong brands don't just happen; they are designed and nurtured. In this endeavor, it is crucial that companies know their customers intimately. To get beyond the superficial, Michael Eckersley proposes-and Bill O'Connor illustrates-a "deep dive" research methodology that unveils the kind of thorough understanding essential to building powerful brands.

When was the last time you experienced a truly great product, service, or environment? You know-something so utterly useful or engaging that it simply captured your imagination and drove you to tell others about it? This kind of thing doesn't happen often, and the success of its appeal is almost never accidental. Somewhere, somehow, a team of people created a standout consumer offering, and it found an audience eager for more.

Such extraordinary consumer offerings are statistically rare and valuable. They attract people in ways and for reasons that are not always apparent. To earn the attention of a sophisticated consumer audience in today's crowded media culture is to beat the odds. Some brands demand market attention on the basis of thin rhetoric and lots of cash, but the effects are usually short-lived. Sustaining earned market attention over time, with ever-new reasons for consumers to stay involved-now that's the measure of a great, living brand.

Modem brands transcend any particular offering. Think of them as metaofferings-embodiments of ideas and values that attribute meaning to (and derive meaning from) product and service experiences. Their intangible value ebbs and flows in the marketplace, but there is no question that a strong, wellmanaged brand contributes valuable intellectual property to any enterprise.

So why do so many brands fail to break through and earn a place in consumer consciousness?

Causes of brand failure are always more complicated and varied than are the reasons for success. But from our perspective as business-oriented social scientists and planners, it is clear that brands begin and end with people, and that companies suffer for lack of deep knowledge of the end customer-how she thinks, perceives, and acts within a natural cultural context. Confusion, faulty assumptions, and bad decisions are the natural consequence of that information deficit.

Branding, at its best, is a science of artful attraction. Sensitive applied social-science tools are brought to bear to uncover a wealth of contextually rich audience information. This information, methodically sifted and shaped, inspires the fertile minds of creatives and brand strategists alike. The result? Integrated brand meanings and architectural elements that resonate with the right audience on multiple levels. Though it's still far from being a sure hit, such a brand should find the stars aligned for its success.

Brand Conversations

"Know your customer" is still the first principle of business, but it is often the first casualty of growth and success. While standard market research is good at capturing a 30,000-foot market perspective, and "values and lifestyle" research will get you closer, neither affords an accurate "up close and personal" picture of the customer. Focus groups, used inappropriately, lead to grotesquely skewed conceptions of "the mind of the customer." Through this lens, the customer becomes a vague abstraction, a chimera, and it is spectacularly difficult to serve a customer nobody really knows. No wonder brands get stale and lose their ability to engage the customer in conversation.

But strong brands are all about conversation, and good conversation is two-way, lively, and mutually rewarding. It is one of our most intrinsically human needs, and it grows out of a deep desire for personal identity and interpersonal dialogue. Conversation is a good metaphor for the ideal function of a brand, as Paul Hawken pointed out early on in his classic book Growing a Business.

Speaking of conversation, have you ever found yourself cornered by someone who has a desperate need to talk about him- or herself, but who hasn't the slightest interest in hearing what you might have to say? Some companies demonstrate similarly boorish behavior in their attempts at brand communication. Endlessly fascinated by who they are and what they have to say, they show genuine disregard for anything the audience might have to contribute to the conversation. There might be a feigned interest, but you get a clear sense that they're simply not built for input. Eventually, you walk away or change the channel. By the time they figure out nobody's paying attention, it's usually too late; they're out of business.

More than a few brands are conversationally challenged. Whether the problem is technical (you've started the conversation at the wrong place, they can't hear you, or they're simply the wrong audience), stylistic (your technique is inapt or distracting), contentrelated (your message is irrelevant or uncompelling), or some combination of these, it is best to remember that the currency of brand conversation-like good interpersonal conversation-is genuine interest in what the other has to say. Such interaction fuels mutual interest, empathy, and even the possibility of relationship.