REDEFINING BRAND ESSENCE

1. REDEFINING BRAND ESSENCE CHRIS BARNHAM CHRIS BARNHAM RESEARCH AND STRATEGY LONDON: UK

2. THE CONCEPT OF BRAND ESSENCE?

3. Brand Essence: Your Reaction? Boredom? • Trying to tie down a brand to a few words • Endless hours…. …in airless rooms?

4. Or is it This? Antagonism? • An over-simplifying of the brand? • A barrier to creativity? • The antithesis of what a brand is?

5. We know about Brand Essence… BRAND ESSENCE BRAND PROPOSITION BRAND VALUES BRAND ATTRIBUTES

6. Essence: the Conventional View… • Part of the brand • Fixed, unchanging, independent of context • The heart of the brand • The brand reduced….to a few key words

7. Have We Misinterpreted Essence? • Brands increasingly have a sense of ‘realness’ about them…. • The ‘modern’ mindset thinks…. • Real…. • Like an object? • Objects and things ‘have’ essences • Therefore, brands must ‘have’ essences too

8. An Alternative View… • Brands are real, but maybe they have a very different kind of realness… • This alternative mindset thinks…. • Essences are, themselves, forms of reality • Brands, therefore, ‘are’ essences • A ‘pre-modern’ interpretation of essence

9. The ‘Pre-modern’ View of Essence “The world is a plenum, everything is connected and each body acts upon every other body, more or less, according to the distance, and by reaction is itself affected thereby; it follows that each monad (essence) is a living mirror or endowed with an internal activity representative according to its point of view of the universe, and as regulated as the universe itself” (Leibniz: 1714)

10. The ‘Pre-modern’ View • The very antithesis of our conventional view: • Essences have become building blocks of reality • Essences are relational • They are defined by their context • And brands, we know, behave like this: • Defined by their relationships and context • Marketers call this ‘positioning’…..

11. A pyramid (!) of binary oppositions Structured in a hierarchy BUT, the brand essence is the whole of the pyramid …..not just the top What does an Essence look like? Etc Etc Etc

12. Key Observations • The values in the pyramid are defined by all the brand’s ‘relationships with the world’. It, therefore, extends potentially to infinity…. • These values are also ‘essences’

13. The Brand Structure is also Dynamic THE CONCEPT OF ‘PROPOSITIONAL HIERARCHY’

14. Propositional Hierarchy:How Does It Work? • The nature of a brand essence is determined: • By the values, or essences, it contains • And where those values are in the hierarchy • Critically, the same value in a different position gives a brand different meaning

15. Managing Propositional Hierarchy • Raising ‘youthfulness’ and ‘refreshment’ up the hierarchy • Or reinforcing their position • Relatively easy to do….

16. Managing Propositional Hierarchy • Trying to graft a new value onto a ‘brand’? • When we may already believe the opposite….. • ‘Not peace’ ness -is it contained within ‘George Bush ness’? • Very much harder to do…. ‘MAN OF PEACE’

17. This is Not Laddering…. • We are not simply identifying which values are deemed to be important • Rather, identifying how consumers think about a brand • i.e. my concept of ‘London’

18. Modern Parallels? • The structure of binary oppositions: • Structuralism…and, therefore, semiotics • The relational view of reality: • ‘Chaos Theory’ ….butterflies in the Amazon • “Little changes can somehow have big effects” • ‘Tipping Points’ • Is this ‘Propositional Hierarchy’ at work?

19. Summary • We have thoroughly misunderstood the concept of brand essence • Properly understood, it offers a model for understanding the true nature of the brand • Brand essence should be thought of as dynamic, relational and multi-dimensional The very antithesis of the conventional view.