Brand Associations

The way we relate to brands has changed. In the middle of the twentieth century, brand management was about using marketing ‘to do things to people’.

Brand Associations
The way we relate to brands has changed. In the middle of the twentieth century, brand management was about using marketing ‘to do things to people’. The people were collective rather than individuals, the emphasis was on the brand’s marketing, and choices were made by the brand manager, not by the customer. Now there is a wave of new marketing that is shifting the focus towards the customer. It talks about greater equality with consumers, empowering them to make their own choices, treating them as thinking individuals rather than an amorphous mass. Doubtless this paints too extreme a picture, but the general direction is evident.

A consequence of this trend is an increased interest in understanding people, as a foundation for marketing brands. This is where the market researcher comes in. Over the past 20 years I have experienced a growth of demand for research into consumers’ needs and their attitudes to brands, and this forms the subject of this book: how to look after a brand, based on understanding people.

Taking the customer as the focal point, we begin by looking at their associations with a brand – all the content they carry around about a brand, knowingly or unknowingly. This provides the foundation for going deeper into understanding people’s needs, and how these relate to brands. For example, many telecommunications brands tap into a deep human need for connecting with other people. This shows the role which a brand can play in someone’s life and, at a deep level, the reason why they want it.

Moving from, ‘Why would I be interested in it?’ to, ‘How well does it do its job?’, we will look at how people make overall judgements about a brand. This is not just one total assessment, but covers a small number of key measures that summarise the level of desire for a brand, for example how people rate its quality, the extent to which they feel it offers something different, and the clarity of what it stands for. These overall judgements we call brand equity.

That covers the what and why. We then look at how a brand does this through various points of contact with people, which we term the ‘touchpoints’ between the person and the brand. And from a different slant, we go on to discuss targeting: which types of people in which types of situations.

But desire for a brand is not enough. Many brands successfully distinguish themselves from other brands, but fail to convert these positive qualities into sales. We identify the factors that make the link between brand equity and brand sales. And finally we tackle the most difficult topic: exploring the ups and downs of brand success.

Brand Associations
Think about a specific brand. Try to identify all the associations you have with that brand, all the situations, emotions, memories, images, colours, smells and so on. This is a difficult task, and a core skill of the market researcher is to have techniques for tackling this in conversations with people.

Imagine we are discussing a brand of coffee with someone. Some of the associations we may discover might be: the sound when piercing the foil of a new jar, and the sense of freshness and warm aroma that comes out;

a strong, bitter taste, that gives you a slight kick when you take the first sip;

an aging relative, Aunt Mildred, who always offered you a cup of this brand when you went to visit her;

being in an office, unable to make progress on your work until you have a cup to pick you up;

a vague impression of exotic places where the beans are grown;

a famous actor who has advertised the brand;

your neighbour, who drinks the brand;

oranges (next to the coffee jar on your shelf).

These associations generate various reactions. They may induce a neutral response or strong feelings, either drawing you emotionally towards the brand or repelling you. They may invoke action and energy, or calm and stability. They may lead to rational assessments about the brand, for example, ‘I want that particular feature that is offered by the brand’. And they may strengthen a sense of continuity or habit, if the associations are long-standing and reinforced through repeated experiences and consistent marketing.

Some of these associations, such as the famous actor, will be common to all people that have noticed them. Other associations will be more specific to the individual, such as Aunt Mildred. But many of those may be part of a shared experience to a certain extent, since many people may have someone like an Aunt Mildred, even if their own version has slightly different characteristics. And there will be some apparently random associations, that result from an accident of the individual’s experience – they may keep the coffee jar next to the oranges in their own home.

Even when associations are common to many people, reactions to those associations will vary. The association may be essentially objective, such as, ‘this coffee is made from pure arabica beans’, but the way people react to that information will depend on their own motivations and the type of person they are. One person will find it exotic, stimulating and pleasurable, while another may find it elitist, distancing and difficult to understand. And in many cases the associations can be contradictory within the same individual. Aunt Mildred, the famous actor and the person’s neighbour may all trigger very different reactions, some positive and some negative.

Having said that, the associations that influence brand choice most powerfully are those that are shared by many people and which evoke a consistent positive meaning. These are often based on some association with an identifiable aspect of the brand’s marketing, such as a specific product or service feature, or a mood or image consistently conveyed by the brand (such as humour).

The general task of the market researcher is to identify and make sense of these associations and perceptions. We tend to focus more on the common associations and major themes that will help a brand manager, but we also recognise the uniqueness of each individual’s story. And we are a lot more subtle than some people realise.

We rarely ask people directly why they buy something. Direct questions tend to evoke responses that are overly rational, and limited to aspects that sound acceptable to admit publicly. People are more inclined to say they buy a brand because it tastes delicious, than to admit they are influenced by the pretty packaging. To avoid this we use more indirect techniques, such as asking people to describe their overall preference between different brands, as well as asking for their detailed associations with the brand and their perceptions of what it does well and poorly. We then infer which aspects are important, by observing which perceptions and associations connect strongly with the preferred brand.

Good researchers are alert to the pitfall that normal language can sound very objective. The phrase ‘that brand tastes delicious’ runs the risk of sounding like an objective fact, or the judgement of a panel of expert tasters whose opinions will be accepted as the truth for all of us. In this case it is easy to see that taste is a subjective judgement by each individual, but it even applies to apparently more factual issues, such as the luggage space in a car. We can read about factual measures of the load capacity, but our perceptions are still subjective, influenced by softer issues such as how easy it looks (to us) to fit things in, and specific personal experiences.

People don’t make scientific judgements comparing brands on a fair and equal basis. They draw conclusions, often subconsciously, based on the accidental intersection of the brands and their lives. Typically, market researchers study many brands that compete in a ‘category’, and Figure 1.1 (see overleaf) shows a ‘map’ of some brand perceptions you might find for the coffee category.

In these sorts of maps, the perceptions are positioned according to their meaning. In quantitative research studies, these positions are determined by the patterns in the data. For example, ‘full-flavoured’ and ‘aromatic’ appear close together, since brands are broadly perceived to have both characteristics or to have neither of them. Conversely, ‘energised’ and ‘quiet and relaxed’ appear far apart on the map, since most brands tend to emphasise one or the other association, but rarely manage both. We will talk more later about the shape of this map, when we discuss general themes of consumer needs.

Many themes are discernible in each area of the map. For example, a particular brand may emphasise an ‘energy’ theme, through an emphasis on perceptions appearing on the left side of the map. It may be perceived to have a strong taste, deep rich colour, be good for active situations, making you feel full of life and energy, and it says to other people that you are a dynamic, go-ahead sort of person. If you are aiming to build your brand on this theme, then working via all these sorts of perception will contribute to the total effect.

Different perception items do not act independently of each other in driving desire for a brand. A soft texture to the product is likely to contribute to an association with feelings of gentleness. And a common mistake is to assume that functional perceptions will contribute to emotional reactions, but it can also be the other way round. You may convey a sense of heritage and seriousness for a brand, which influences people’s perception of how it tastes. People may well perceive it to have more body and depth than they would if it did not carry those emotional connotations. A good example is evident for many brands of whisky. They carry a strong perception of ‘authenticity’, deriving from tangible qualities of the process of production and maturing, as well as from more emotional aspects concerning the traditions of the specific location associated with the brand.

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