How building brands in now beyond not just quality messaging, but even image projection or 'emotional layers'. A workshop at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA)

1. Understanding brands
DCCaB
MICA
6th July, 2014

2. What makes brands powerful?
?

3. Why makes brands powerful?
?

4. Ahmedabad to Dubai, 3 hour non stop

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7. Profit  Business Oxygen
Commodity + X = Brand
What goes into building the X?

8. An understanding of the human mind
Both of them...
Opsy Cog
Intuitive Rational
Always on Deliberate
Fast Slower

9. Opsy, our intuitive brain determines for us what is
Right. Wrong
Cool. Uncool
Good. Bad

11. 13 Absolutely Hottest World Cup Players.
You Can Thank Us Later

12. On a date…
Beer Wine

13. What does a kiss signify?
On the forehead?
Lips
Air
When it is…

14. How many kisses?

15. What do you notice?
Symbolism
Meanings
Shared
Cultural/audience context
No obvious, logical reason why it should mean
so…
Powerful
Given

16. Conditioning  Communicating meaning
16
Culture  Meaning making system
And our opsy absorbs it all the time

17. Branding  Meaning Making
Brands built for Opsy’s approval
Therefore understanding culture key to branding

18. The business of making ideas
18
The business of making things

19. So far...
19
Brands ensure business profitability
To do so, they must transcend commodities
Winning the approval of our intuitive brain
Which is shaped by culture
Which attaches potentially powerful meanings to
symbols
Branding too is meaning making

20. Over the years, the role of branding has
evolved
Three generations of branding
thinking

21. Three phases with differing roles for brands
Not water tight separation, but shifts in
emphasis
None of the meanings have died…
Nor have any of these ‘never’ existed
21

22. Phase 1: brand = quality assurance
Familiar symbol or name  Trust in quality

23. 23

24. 24

25. Rational proposition/payoff
Reason to believe (RTB)
25
Predominant meaning of brand through…

26. Evidenced in the blind faith!
75%
Salience = Quality perception

27. Phase 2: brand = identity expression
Quality  hygiene,
Brands increasingly vehicles of emotional meaning
and self expression
Using the concept of models (as role models),
brands promised achievement of an idealized state
Characterized by use of celebrities and visible branding
27

28. 28
28

30. In this thinking, the role of quality assurance
does not disappear
but assumes a secondary, supporting role
Rational
proposition
Reason to believe (RTB)
Emotional
proposition
Self expressive
proposition

31. So far, brands operated on simpler
principles
Aided by a media and selling
environment

32. Salience = Preference
An equation that worked for the already large brands
Single channel TV Low capacity retailer

33. Now as the world gets increasingly flatter…
And the platforms – from multiple to limitless

34. And increasingly transparent

35. Demise of salience as strategy
Disappearance of the black box
?

36. What is the meaning of brands in this
world?

37. What is the new need of our times?

38. Imagine being in a world where…
All that you know has changed
- how things work…
- what’s wrong, what’s right…
- the language…
How would you feel?

39. Lost? SearchLost?

40. Ensuring we are not lost in the fast changing,
increasingly alien world around us
Including, our childhood

42. a personal perception of
"too much change in too short a period of time"
accelerated rate of technological and social
change  people disconnected and suffering from
"shattering stress and disorientation"
Let’s look at some examples

43. Success/winning is important
What if you realize your are in the wrong race?

44. Hate being trapped in
the rat race
Yet cannot not be
a part of it
44

45. The compass lead definition of success

47. When success = sedans
How do you sell the idea of an
expensive non-sedan?
47

48. A new definition of success  a new kind of car

49. From change in definition of success,
To change in rules of success

50. Conformism Uniqueness
50
Facelessness Failure

53. So have been relationships
Not just the notion of success impacted by
change

54. Family structures Primary economic activity

55. How is it impacting the idea of motherhood?
55
Mum Me
An ordinary identity A life of sacrifices

56. Soccer moms
The phrase soccer mom generally refers to a married middle-class woman
Busy or overburdened
Portrayed as putting the interests of her family, and most importantly her children,
ahead of her own
Sometimes accused of forcing their children to go to too many after-school activities;
overparenting them in concerted cultivation rather than letting them enjoy their
childhood.

58. Changing meaning of motherhood
2008 2013

59. Indra Nooyi on why women can’t have it all

61. Emerging signs – changing femininity

63. So what is the third generation role for
brands?
63

64. Change creates conflict
Many established notions of how to be are getting challenged by change.
With no readymade guidelines to cope with them, it is creating conflicts in
what were previously comfort zones.
64

65. Resources Desires
Want to do Need to do
New realitiesOld ideals
Society I, me, myself
65

66. An idea solves something
As rapidly changing paradigms throw up new
questions and equations
To which pre-existing answers don’t always fit
Brands are ideas helping people cope with them

67. At play: four dimensions
67
Life Insight Category Insight
End use
Insight
67
Brand truth

68. For example Tata Safari
68
Brand’s idea – rejection of the race prescription
Life
The rat race trap
Category
Car 
Race accessory
End use
Mobility  only
way is upward?
68
Brand
Unconventional
choice.
Off-roader

69. Movies
Brands
All symbols. Embodying ideas, meanings
relevant in emerging cultural context
Celebs
Movements

70. Product truth Life truth
Faster search
Pressure of parenting
Superior home solutions
Rate race trap
Off roader
Conformism coercion
Future shock
Innovative features
The ‘what we do’ The ‘why we do it’
‘Meaningful escape’
‘Performance parenting’
‘Purposeful defiance’
‘Effortless navigation’
Idea
Femininity trapConvenient ironing ‘Guilt free femininity’

71. The elevator pitch of a brand
Insight (Life truth)
Idea
The core guiding everything else, the starting point

72. The fuller brand picture
Insight
Idea
Proposition
(benefit)
Persona Proof
Rational (what do you do?)
Emotional (how do you
make me feel?)
Self Expressive
(how do others/I see me?)
Traits (how am I as a person)
Relationship (between the brand
and the audience)
Why should I
Believe your promise?

74. Learningcurve.org.in