The Marketing Book 5th Edition

Positioning Personality

Presentation

• Brand Vision
  
  
  • Culture
  
  
  
  

Relationships:

• staff to staff


• staff to customers


• staff to other stakeholders

380 The Marketing Book

As a result of the saying ‘value is in the
eyes of the beholder’, if a brand is to thrive, its
added values need to be relevant to customers
and not just to managers. An engineer may
believe they have helped in the branding
process by developing a computer chip which
repeatedly tells an unbelted car driver ‘your
belt is not fastened’. Yet to hear of the caravan-
ning enthusiasts saying they would pay to have
this removed as it’s so irritating when jumping
in and out of a car reversing a caravan onto a
small pitch at a camp-site provides some
indication of its worth to customers!
One way to identify added value oppor-
tunities is to accompany customers both on
their shopping trip and when they are using the
brand. This enables identification of the stages
they go through when choosing and using a
brand. By then talking with customers about
each of the incidents, and getting them to
identify what they liked and disliked, how
different brands provide different benefits at
each of the stages, ideas begin to surface about
ways of enhancing the brand.

Brand as identity

Drawing on the International Corporate Iden-
tity Group (van Riel and Balmer, 1997), identity
is about the ethos, aims and values that present
a sense of individuality differentiating a brand.
Particularly when the organization brands its
offerings with its corporate name, or the brand
is strongly endorsed by the corporation, this
involves much internal ‘soul searching’ to
understand what the firm stands for and how it
can enact the corporate values across all its
range. Communication is not directed just at
consumers, but also at staff, so that they can
appreciate how they must behave to be the
embodiment of the brand. For example, the
Apple computer company believes in increas-
ing people’s productivity through challenging
inborn resistance to change. Its corporate iden-
tity of the bitten apple epitomizes this – the
forbidden fruit with the colours of the rainbow
in the wrong order. This perspective of the

brand is in sharp contrast to that of the brand as

a ‘legal instrument’ and a ‘logo’, since the

emphasis is on the brand as a holistic entity.

Brand identity can be appreciated from the

model shown in Figure 15.5. Central to any

brand is its vision, which provides a clear sense

of direction about how it is going to bring about

a better future. To achieve this stretching future

depends on a culture with staff who believe in

particular values and managers who have a

common mental model about how their market

works, and therefore how the brand must be

developed. The core thinking behind the brand

can now be translated into a positioning strat-

egy, that manifests the brand’s functional values

and a personality which brings the brand’s

emotional values to life. Underpinning all of this

is a clear understanding amongst staff about the

types of relationships they need to have with

each other, with customers and other stake-

holders to enact the brand’s values. If there is a

unified form of internal behaviour, the organiza-

tion can be more confident about presenting the

brand to stakeholders with a design and promo-

tional support that differentiates the brand in a

manner which stakeholders welcome. Figure

15.5 shows the different interactions between

Figure 15.5 The components of brand identity