IABC Branding & Marketing Commons

My mother had a saying, “Handsome is as handsome does.” However good you may look, it just doesn’t matter unless you behave properly. And here’s another one: Actions speak louder than words. What you, as a company, say and do is more important than a beautifully designed logo or a well crafted tagline.

In fact, taglines are pretty much useless unless, when applied internally, they rally the troupes. When I heard this yesterday at a talk by Daryl Travis of Brandtrust, I admit, I was taken aback. All those hours I’ve spent in my life fine tuning the perfect tagline…It just isn’t important.

Travis’ talk was about emotional branding (also the name of his book). His concept is based on recent brain research, and it’s fascinating beyond belief. I will try to do it justice with the briefest of summaries: Brands exist in the human mind. The mind contains countless memories which affect future behavior. When your brand promise comes into alignment with your customer’s mental model, then your customer will receive your brand message. You cannot alter the existing model, so you must make your message compatible with the model that’s already there, in your customer’s head.

The question we, as marketers, must ask is: How does our brand make the customer feel? This is critical, because brands are not about facts, they’re about feelings. We may think Wal-Mart is about price, but in fact, it’s successful because people feel Wal-Mart is the champion of the common man.

One more thing my mother always said: Tell the truth. If your brand promise doesn’t ring true–that is, if it doesn’t come into alignment with existing mental models–then you’re toast.

Just thought I’d share.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Branding defined, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.