The Marketing Book 5th Edition

Personality

traits

Values

Emotional rewards

Benefits

Attributes

390 The Marketing Book

lead to a value which is welcomed by con-
sumers. Thus, the emotional reward of fun
could lead to the value of autonomy. For these
passengers valuing ‘what they want to watch
when they want to watch’, this value of
autonomy could be the key reason for some
passengers travelling with one airline rather
than another. Consumers rarely spend long
seeking and interpreting information about
brands; therefore, at the top of the pyramid is a
personality representing the personality traits
associated with the values of the brand. By
using a personality who exhibits the traits of
the brand to promote the brand, consumers
draw inferences that the brand has some of the
values of the promoting personality.
One of the benefits of the brand pyramid is
simplifying internal communication about the
characteristics of the brand. Since consumers’
choice decisions are based on a low number of
attributes (Miller, 1956), only the three most
important attributes are to be included at the
base of the pyramid. Once these have been
identified from consumer research, the brand’s
team then need to work together in a workshop

to develop the three ‘ladders’. Focusing on the

first attribute, the team need to consider what

rational benefit this leads to, then what emo-

tional reward arises from this, followed by a

debate about which values result and finally

what personality traits arise from this value.

This laddering is repeated for the other two

attributes, resulting in three unique chains.

Finally, by then examining the personality

traits, the brand’s team need to consider which

well-known person might represent the elicited

personality traits.

There is an advantage of undertaking this

work with the brand’s team together, rather

than as a series of individual exercises. It

requires people to ‘spark off’ each other and a

more creative environment results from the

team being together, drawing on their diverse

backgrounds. Working together as a group, the

brand pyramid can stimulate ideas about crea-

tively positioning the brand (from the lower

levels of the brand pyramid) and developing

the brand’s personality (from the upper level of

the pyramid).

Internal implementation

To implement the brand essence, a suitable value

delivery system is needed to support both the

functional and emotional aspects of the brand.

By focusing first on the functional aspects of the

brand, value chain analysis (Porter, 1985)

enables a production flow process to be insti-

gated, and for services brands, a services

blueprint (Zeithaml and Bitner, 1996) captures

the operational flow process. By referring back to

the brand essence, an appropriate balance can be

struck between outsourcing some activities and

keeping others in-house to strengthen the firm’s

core competencies (Quinn and Hilmer, 1994).

The emotional values of the brand can be

supported by recruiting staff according to the

extent to which their personal values align with

the brand’s values (Kunde, 2000). A further

way of engendering employee commitment is

to encourage some degree of empowerment,

which is increasingly common (Buchanan and

Figure 15.14 Brand pyramid summarizing the
nature of the brand promise