Tag Archives: brand development

Semiotics and Brand Development

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A brand is more than one iconic symbol, it’s a system of interconnected images, actions and signs that create a response in your consumers. While it is often put down to something as simple as logo design (which is anything but simple, in fact), identity and branding work extends beyond the creation of a company logo or trademark. The identity of any particular corporation, product or service encompasses a variety of materials including business cards, marketing materials, staff uniforms, advertisements, commercials, web presence, etc. All of this is created to establish an identity that the consumer comes to value beyond the direct benefits of the company.

A part of establishing the company brand, the identity work is important in conveying the principles, ideas and standards of the organization for which it is developed. Designers work together with strategists, copywriters, marketing directors and a host of other professionals to ensure that a brand identity is communicated effectively and efficiently from the client to the consumer. And in an age of social media and assumed shared interests, the communication is increasingly a multi-faceted conversation.

Most design firms and agencies create branding and identity work for their clients on some level, others specialize in identity and branding only. In any case, brand development involves deep thinking and a commitment to understanding the symbolic interconnectedness of the parties engaged with the brand. This is the art and science of semiotics. But why bother?  There are a number of simple reasons.

Understanding

Semiotics can help you dig into the underlying meanings in communication and establish a richer connection with consumers. On a practical level, a semiotic approach allows you to determine why an ad, a web page or a new product’s design is or isn’t working. It allows you to isolate components, but it also allows you to determine how they work or don’t work in relation to other elements.

Renovation

Over time symbols change and without constant care brands fall apart. A brand can keep making small changes, but ultimately, this process doesn’t work. Eventually you have to strip right back to bare bones and rebuild the brand completely. Semiotics can be used to deconstruct brands and categories, exposing truths that can be used to reconstruct them, and make them stronger.

Articulation

Semiotics can help articulate the problem you actually have, as opposed to the symptom you are trying to address. The approach allows you to move beyond intuition and get to the deeper issues behind what is happening with your brand.

Research

A semiotic approach can help you improve your qualitative work, by helping you redevelop your line of questioning, or listening for different things. Rather than focusing on traditional needs-based questioning and observation, a semiotics approach uncovers deeper issues and subconscious triggers that strengthen the meaning behind the brand.  There is a strong tradition in ethnographic research specifically of employing a semiotic approach.  Both methods are observational and interpretive. Ethnographic research aims to understand what consumers do and why they do it, rather than what they say. In other words, it assumes that human behavior is more complex than what people tell you. Similarly, semiotics assumes that how human beings interact with and understand the world is more than what they tell you.

Briefs

Ultimately, semiotics creates richer, deeper briefs and platforms that creative teams can actually work from. Rather than simply providing data, it provides avenues of expression that the creative team can build upon and use to explore a range of opportunities for communication. It can provide platforms from which to strengthen your communication, be that advertising or design.

Co-Creation and Managing What Matters

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Co-creation has become a central theme for brands and innovators over the last decade, and rightfully so. The idea of collaboration in a postmodern world where information and opinions reach millions in the blink of an eye is a necessity. But what do we mean when we talk about co-creation and is it the panacea it’s made out to be?

Co-creation views products, brands and markets as forums for companies and customers to share, combine and renew each other’s resources and capabilities.  This creates value through new forms of interaction, service and learning mechanisms. In other words, it ideally establishes a dialog between all actors involved in the company’s offerings.  Co-creation is about collaboration. It’s about working together to solve problems, uniting a range of perspectives and approaches to an issue. Very often this collaboration involves consumers working directly with professionals from inside and outside a client organization, to define and create a range of outputs, from strategy to communications, from products to experiences.

Value is co-created with customers if and when a customer is able to personalize his or her experience using a firm’s brand promise and product/service proposition to a level that is best suited to get his or her tasks done or need fulfilled. This, in turn, allows the company to derive greater value from its product-service investment in the form of new knowledge, higher profitability and/or increased brand loyalty.  The interaction established through co-creation produces a sort of community where the company and the user/buyer engage in an ongoing, continuously evolving relationship, defined by and defining a shared set of actions and beliefs.

A key element in all of this is the notion of personalization on the part of the customer.  But what does personalization mean? Personalization is about the customer becoming a co-creator of the content of their experiences.  This doesn’t mean providing products and content that can then be tweaked to meet their needs, because that is still largely a passive process – the company makes it, the consumer buys it and then reconstructs it in something of a vacuum. There is no feedback loop.  In a true co-creation model, customers and actors inside the company are taking active roles in developing and sharing new ideas. Competencies of the consumer and stakeholders within the company come to interact and harness a range of ideas, functional and symbolic.

This is done along four axes: engage in dialogue with customers, mobilize communities, manage customer diversity and co-create experiences with customers. Ultimately, the goal is to leverage customers for a shared creative experience, going beyond insights and creating a constant interaction that produces brand experiences and better products and services. The increase in the number of collaborators and the numerous interactions among them, across each stage of development, leads to products and services that better meet customer needs.  We see a greater diversity of individuals, functions across organizations and stakeholders across the product/service/brand ecosystem getting involved.

While I am a proponent of co-creation, there are problems with a co-creative model. A customer who believes he or she has the expertise and chooses to co-produce may be more likely to make self-attributions for success and failure than a customer who lacks the expertise. A customer who lacks the expertise but feels forced to co-produce may make more negative attributions about co-production. The dialog can backfire.

The second pitfall is that co-creation assumes customers can readily articulate what they want and need. Customers take on roles, which means what they tell the stakeholders inside the organization may not reflect anything more than a whim. Think of cars with 17 cup holders and fins a mile high. What we can articulate is often a manifestation of something else, something we can’t articulate well, which may lead to creating the absurd. Rather than taking suggestions at face value, ideas need to be analyzed through the lens of detachment and we need to tease out meaning and innovation from the unsaid as well as the said.

Finally, co-creation often assumes a fixed identity for the customer, meaning that the person with whom we’re working and the person for whom we’re building changes according to context. If the co-creating customer is in the role of “mom” in one instance, she may be in the role of “artist” later in the day. The dramaturgical shift in identity will shape what he or she says and does as it relates to a brand, product or service at any given point in time. So even though the idea is well developed and well thought out in the co-creation process, whether that be an ideation session or an online forum, it may have little relevance once that stage is abandoned and the customer moves on with the rest of his or her day.

Co-creation can help break the yo-yo effect of research and development, where clients go back and forward between creative agencies, research agencies and their audience. By working with your consumers, rather than directing stuff at them, companies get a real sense of what works and what doesn’t as the ideation takes place. But it is not without risk. As co-creation becomes a mainstay at companies, we will need to figure out how to keep a diverse set of participants engaged, how to share the risks and value of innovation, how to manage the complexity of the system without laying out too many constraints. We will need to learn how to tease out what is actually needed and what are simply flights of fancy. We will need to learn to balance the said and the unsaid. But in the end, the payoffs can and will be tremendous.

The Power of Rituals and the Bottom Line

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In marketing and design, the tendency for most people given the task of figuring out how to engage more customers is to focus on the individual and his/her reaction and behavior at a fixed point in time. We gauge reactions to advertising, track eye movement for a website or record how many people stop at a display. Rarely do we take the time to understand how a product, service or brand fit into the larger picture of shared human behavior and meaning. Unfortunately, that means we overlook elements in the consumer’s life that have the potential for moving interactions with a brand from a transactional moment to something much more profound and long lasting. One element that is overlooked to our detriment is the nature of ritual and how it can be used to understand the customer. And consequently grow the bottom line.

A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. The term usually refers to actions which are stylized, excluding actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers. It may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, be it the larger culture or a subset of it.  And can be as grand as a person’s first Communion ceremony or as simple as the act of brushing our teeth in the morning. But regardless of how profound the act is, a ritual activity is anything but mundane.

From a researcher’s standpoint, ritual behavior can be thought of in a binary way (of course, this is only one way of breaking it down, but being an out-of-the-closet Structuralist my inclination is to construct models this way). On the one hand, ritual is an outsider’s or “etic” category for a set activity or series of actions which to the outsider seems irrational or illogical. On the other hand, the term can be used also by the insider or “emic” performer as an acknowledgement that this activity can be seen as such by the uninitiated onlooker. Understanding both positions, however, is pivotal in uncovering why people do what they do.

A ritual may be performed on specific occasions, or at the discretion of individuals or communities. It may be performed by a single individual, by a group, or by the entire community. It might be performed in arbitrary places, or in places especially reserved for it. It may be public or private. A ritual may be restricted to a certain subset of the community, and may enable or underscore the passage between social states. The purposes of rituals are varied. They are used to strengthen social bonds, provide social and moral education, demonstrate respect or submission, state one’s affiliation, or to obtain social acceptance or approval.  Rituals are used to ensure that certain “necessary” actions take place to keep us safe and happy. Sometimes rituals are performed just for the pleasure of the ritual itself (I’m thinking of my own after-work cocktail).

Alongside the personal dimensions, rituals can have a more basic social function in expressing, fixing and reinforcing the shared values and beliefs of a society or a group.  Rituals aid in creating a sense of group identity. For example, nearly all sports teams have rituals incorporated into their structure, from simple initiation rites when a team is established, to the formalized structure of pre-game pep talks.

At this point I can practically hear someone saying, “Yes, yes, that’s all very interesting but why does it matter to me?” Fair enough. The reason it matters is because rituals are constant – they are acts we perform whether we think about their deeper significances or not. Rituals are actions, they are not something we tend to ponder in great detail. From a marketing or design perspective, that means understanding ritual behavior leads to creating materials that become part of the fixed, long-term pattern of a  person’s life. If done right, your brand or your product becomes part of the ritual, making it that much harder to set aside when a new product or brand comes along.

Add to that the very simple fact that human being are symbolic creatures and ritual is largely a symbolic act. Language, thought and actions are all part of the larger symbolic landscape through which we interpret the world. The instance an object or activity, not to mention a brand, gain symbolic value the more likely they are to become integral to how we interact with the world and become necessary to our lives. The Apple sticker on the back of a person’s car says a great deal about the person – it’s worth noting that we rarely (if ever) see a Microsoft sticker. The brand has gained a symbolic relevance and is as much an element of identity as the clothes we wear for a night on the town.

Finally, understanding ritual allows you to uncover new, analogous areas for growth. A seemingly unrelated ritual or set of ritual behaviors may, in essence, be transferable to a different brand or product category. For example, if you want to understand how hydrating before and after a game can be ritualized, it makes sense to understand how “pre-gaming” takes place when groups of young men prepare for a night of drinking on the town. There are parallels related to shared ideals, male bonding and the establishment of group affiliation. That potentially means new ways of messaging and promotion.

Rituals of various kinds are a feature of almost all known human societies, past or present. They include not only the various forms of religious experience or rites of passage, but also modes of shopping. Many activities that are ostensibly performed for concrete purposes, such as the Black Friday rush to the mall and hitting the car lots the last day of the month, are loaded with purely symbolic actions prescribed by tradition, and thus ritualistic in nature. If you come to understand that, you come to understand new triggers and can develop a long-term relationship with your customer.

Semiotics and the Brand

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Marketers have long recognized the symbolic nature of shopping and consumption.  Products and brands are symbols for sale – products and brands are often purchased as much for their symbolic value as they are their pragmatic value.  And this is the heart of Semiotics.

Semiotics is the study of symbols , signs and sign processes.  I has been a fundamental part of anthropology since the beginnings of the discipline.  Experts in Semiotics are trained to identify and make sense of these symbol systems, uncovering how they construct and reflect the cultural contexts in which they are found. As it relates to business, Semioticians are trained to identify, interpret, and leverage these symbolic meanings for purposes of market definition, brand development, brand positioning, communication strategy, design and packaging.

Brands are symbol systems that consumers associate with verbal, visual, and performative elements of communication. They are temples to meanings that are rarely articulated in focus groups or surveys. That means that every element of a product or service, from cans of beer to amusement parks, is wrapped up in a series of symbols that consumers use to interpret what a brand means and how it relates specifically to them.  These symbolic dimensions add value to products by creating added dimensions beyond the obvious, functional needs. Brands allow consumers to create meaning for themselves, helping them construct who they symbolically want to be. This sense of self is an articulated schema  that functionally controls how self-referent information is structured and categorized.  It establishes how closely a brand reflects the self, which means they are tied to how people construct identity. The more closely the symbolic structures are tied to the sense of self, the more important they become to the individual. Brands, then, speak to those elements of existence that shape the unspoken needs we have as human beings for such concepts as love, status, ritual, power and belonging. In other words, they touch us on a deeper level that stirs our emotions and our interest.

As an example, I have done a great deal of work over the years around household provisioning.  From beer to toilet paper to cereal to soap. In all of these cases, the reasons for brand loyalty are only minimally tied to function. Yes, performance and price drive sales, but consumers are fickle and willing to turn away from brands they have no symbolic ties to when something else comes along. Not so for those brands with strong symbolic associations. Consumers who are loyal to a brand of soap because they associate it with being a good parent are more likely to stick with the brand no matter what. Brewers that talk less about calories and the affects of alcohol, focusing instead on nostalgia, connoisseurship, and status are more likely to retain their consumers.  The more the brand touches the underlying symbolic drivers behind the purchase, the more likely they are to see long-term commitment on the part of the shopper and consumer.

A brand is a sign, or more accurately a system of signs, that triggers a process of interpretation is a consumer’s mind, which means it is more than a series of functional, commoditized features and benefits. It touches on memories, associations with broad cultural ideals and individual desires. It is an act of two-way communication, not just a one-way projection by the company to the consumer. When brands speak to the rationale and meanings behind these semiotic structures, brands move beyond the codes governing a product category and enter the personal space of the consumer. That positions the brand to become something more than a commodity, it becomes part of the consumer’s life and promotes a wider array of associations between the brand and the consumer. That produces loyalty and great market share.

Rebranding in a Recession: It begins within

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When the economy turns sketchy, the inclination of most company  heads is to cut back on marketing, branding, and advertising. After the last few years of elevated unemployment and decreased consumer spending it still holds true.  With a drop in expenditures on awareness campaigns, maintaining or revitalizing a brand often falls to the responsibility of a company’s greatest potential marketing tool, the employee, though this is rarely a conscious decision on the part of management.  When it is a conscious effort, it is typically a huge success or a dramatic failure, with little room for anything in between.

Re-branding during an economic downturn is nothing  new.  As concerns over an unstable economy grow, companies often feel compelled to reinvent themselves and build new interest in the hopes of generating revenue.  They also turn to employees to get out  the message.  This is particularly true of internal projects meant to garner greater productivity, commitment and support from employees  as a company deals with the ramifications of declining profits, lay offs, and employee ambivalence that matches or exceeds that of the  general public. It is frequently something of a catch 22 scenario, where employees are losing or have lost faith in a company and its leaders, even as the need for them to embrace a brand, to truly live it, is at a high point.  But, there are strategies to mitigate dismissal by the employees of an internal branding or a re-branding project during  economic uncertainty and looming lay offs.  Without embracing these  strategies, these projects will ultimately lead to failure, no matter how  creative it may be.

1. Deal with financial realities

As uncomfortable as transparent, open communication may be, leaders, particularly those at the upper-most levels, must relay information about the company’s financial position and forecast to the survivors, establishing priorities and expectations for future decision  making.  Employees must be made to feel that they are part of a  team, not expendable parties.  They must feel that the success of the  company rests partly in their hands, that they have a stake in the  game. Human beings have a remarkable capacity for embracing challenges.  We also have a remarkable capacity for getting involved when we believe we actually have something to lose beyond monetary gain.  Couching in terms that bring the financial realities to life draws employees in and helps develop intense loyalty even if things look gloomy.

If lay-offs have happened the remaining employees may feel that they will be next to lose their jobs.  Whether they believe it is a month away or two years away, the fear becomes ever-present.  The result is abandonment of commitment to the company and lowered productivity.  Additionally, some will feel guilty (sometimes angry) when colleagues have lost their jobs.  They will also view any attempt to get them excited about the company as being based on lies and deception.

2. Reposition the effort as the beginning of better days to come

Understand that people have lost friends and will no doubt have their own anxieties about the future. Get people refocused quickly on any brand message, internal restructuring, job/function changes and any other changes underway, or looming on the horizon.  Focus on the positives by acknowledging what has just happened – that it was necessary evil, but the new branding effort is an extension of brighter days ahead.  The key is that the problems that have existed, and in the eyes of those being hit they are problems to say the least, cannot be overlooked.  Acknowledging these means acknowledging the humanity, involvement, and importance of the employees.  It also makes the idea of better days ahead significantly more realistic and believable.

3. Make sure it is a bottom-up approach

No matter how good a job management does in making employees feel heard and included, they’re still suspect because it is management who pulled the trigger if cuts occurred (especially if those cuts were due to downward sales).  No one cares if they support it. Furthermore, if a company already tends to be structured in highly defined silo, these tend to become more “tribal” as conditions worsen.  This means that only managers with direct, frequent contact with mid and lower level employees have rational and emotional credibility. While an individual VP or Director may be believable, management as an institution is suspect – you may have a good manager in your department, but all the rest are heartless, opportunistic, and looking out only for themselves.  What matters is that the people who have a stake in the company on a day to day, put-bread-on-my-table kind of way are supportive.

4. Get top-down support 

While the re-branding effort needs to get the bulk of its drive from the base of the company, it is helpful to have a CEO or Chairman that champions the cause, particularly it he or she can tie it directly back any major changes in management and policy.  This, however is a tricky business and is dependent on the top brass being seen as taking a populist, no nonsense approach to the business.  If the head of the company is seen as simply carrying on a tradition of undirected change and business as usual, little real change occurs.  If the head of the company is seen as a having a dynamic, uncompromising, innovative approach to dealing with company woes, employees believe that change for the better is an attainable possibility and they will embrace a new  internal branding effort.  

5. Remember that logic and reason may take a back seat

The bulk of employees understand and can articulate the ramifications of lost revenue and brand disintegration, but that hardly eases the tension.  There is a tipping point at which reason and logic take a back seat as worry, fear, and cynicism assert themselves.  This means that any brand initiative needs to account for this heightened sense of emotional distress and recognize that employees will not be thinking about the well-being of the corporation if they do not see it tied to  themselves on a very personal level.  Making a financial case is irrelevant when people are in survival mode.  Consequently, while being transparent about the economic realities of the business is essential to a successful campaign, it is equally important to acknowledge emotional distress and react to it openly and honestly.

 

 

Brand Considerations for Emerging Markets

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Over the last decade, many multinational brands have rushed in to emerging markets, agog at the potential of billions of new consumers who had been liberated from planned economies and protectionist barriers. Their wealth has generally grown much more impressively than in the US or Europe.  They are the next goldmine.  But it’s not as simple as we had assumed it would be. There have been as many disappointments as success stories.  As the initial euphoria wanes, there is a growing realization that the billions of consumers have not embraced the brands, the products or the modes of messaging these companies have employed.  Local competitors are stronger than expected, having the funds and the name recognition to maintain or grow their influence.  National pride and cheaply made local goods often supersede the brand equity of a western brand.  Competition for the top tier of the market is fierce.  And unfortunately, companies have dismissed the roles of history and culture in their strategies for growing their brands in emerging markets.

Most multinationals have traditionally long resisted targeting the local consumer, preferring instead to transplant offerings that were developed for their traditional developed markets. The assumption has been that if we think a certain way about the world, then so goes the rest of the planet. But context and culture have a funny way of changing meaning and purpose.  That being said, Three reasons are often cited for the reticence to localizing strategies and messaging. The first is that the mass market for any single emerging economy is not large enough to justify the effort and cost of localization. In other words, there may be a billion potential customers down the road, but there is risk in jumping in at the deep end.  Second, multinational managers rationalize, emerging market consumers are growing more affluent by the day and are becoming more like their affluent-market counterparts both in behavior and in purchasing power.  Again, if we act and behave a certain way in Cleveland, so do the good people in Bangalore.  As such, the belief is that the company is better off offering globally standardized products and waiting for the consumers to evolve towards these. Luckily, with the success of brands like Pizza Hut and Nike overseas, the view is beginning to change.  Finally, it is argued that to adapt to local market conditions in every emerging economy will undermine core assumptions about standardization that are fundamental to the success of multinationals. The catch in all this is that these assumptions just don’t hold water.

First, products and brands transplanted from existing, economically powerful markets typically appeal to the affluent or those aspiring to the upper socio-economic echelons.  Delving deeper into the consumer base to establish mass-market positions would create the economies of scale necessary to justify localization. And localization along characteristics that are common across emerging markets, allows the costs to be spread over much larger volumes. In other words, while size matters, we need to fundamentally rethink how we structure our cost assumptions.

The argument that emerging market consumers are rapidly becoming more like their Western markets is true, but only to a point. The rate of change is not as rapid as contended. We need to remember that change is not a one-way street – emerging markets influence us, changing the nature of what a brand means on a global scale.  Also, we have to bear in mind that what we see as becoming “like us” is derived from our worldview, not theirs.  That means it is an interpretation that is filtered through existing cultural norms.  Americans and Chinese may both embrace the cowboy image of Coors, but the cowboy image means radically different things in each culture. It is far from certain to what degree Chinese and

Indian preferences will converge with those of Europeans or Americans. It is as most reasonable to assume that they will be driven by cultural norms. That means that to be successful, brands should focus on current needs and cultural patterns, evolving with them as they grow and change.

Consumers in emerging markets tend to shop daily and have 365 opportunities a year to switch brands. That provides more opportunities to message, yes, but those messages have more competition, more distractions and shorter periods to make an impact. Consequently, thinking about how we reach people in emerging markets requires a significant reorientation of how we use media.

The billions of consumers we seek in emerging economies will remain elusive targets unless we are able to rethink how we approach these populations. It isn’t enough to jump into a market and assume people will buy, we need to understand who they are and how they understand make sense of the world.

5 Steps in Brand Development

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To develop custom brand and marketing solutions for clients, you need a process.  Often times, we jump in without thinking through the necessary stages:

Explore: Through a combination of primary and secondary research, the you need to survey the client’s current situation, including strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities in the marketplace as perceived by customers, employees and partners. This stage will also include a review of the client’s core values, brand positioning and competitive advantages.

Envision: Building on the findings from the Explore stage, you will need to make clear strategic recommendations that support the client’s vision and goals, while incorporating the experience and perceptions of the people interacting with the brand. The recommendations will align with each stage in the client’s experience cycle—from customer acquisition to retention. During this phase, you will develop rough concepts to establish a direction for messaging and creative.

Execute: This is where the rubber meets the road. Working with client, you produce the final tactics and creative direction. Depending on client needs, these tactics may include a mix of online, print, broadcast, direct, environmental, experiential and guerrilla initiatives.

Enlist: Involving the folks inside the organization is a necessary, but often overlooked part of a successful brand development process. To engage employees in the new brand and empower them to make good brand decisions, you need to develop and implement a communication and training program for your most valuable brand assets, your people.

Evaluate: Now that you’ve build the platform, you need to test it. For the final stage of our process, you have to watch, measure and evaluate the results of the branding campaign. Based on the results, you can then make recommendations for the next steps to improve program performance or maximize new opportunities.