Product Branding Trends

by Sheldon Baker

The latest trends in product branding include the focus on the brand experience and the growth of corporate branding. Just look around you. People increasingly see the brand experience as a key driver of the brand relationship. The quality of the brand experience continues to grow in importance after a couple of decades when some companies perhaps lost focus on product performance, particularly in developed markets. If true innovation is defined as product change that provides real solutions to real consumer issues, then it is not unfair to suggest that some brands ignored this premise in favor of quick-fix brand extensions that lacked any longer-term impact.

Surface innovation that fails to truly advance or differentiate can have a short-term positive impact on profits. This effect may be enough for a new product manager under pressure to deliver, but it can turn off consumers in the medium term, as marketing becomes a surrogate for product innovation and stops being truly effective.

Consumers buy products and, for many, the product experience is by far their most important touch point. It should be stressed that, although it has been over-emphasized on occasion, the so-called softer side of the brand remains an important component of the brand alchemy. Through a brands emotional story, the product experience is amplified and linked to the consumers imaginative lifeit is all a matter of balance.

Understanding Brand Experience

The trend toward the development of corporate brands or growth of corporate branding has historically stayed behind the scenes. The easiest way to understand the brand experience is first to understand its component parts.

Brand represents the intellectual and emotional associations that people make with a company, product or person. In other words, brand is something that actually lies inside each of us. It is our subjective understanding of something, be it a company (GNC), a product (Kashi) or even a person (Dr. Andrew Weil). While the word brand is often used more generally and in a qualitative way (GNC is a strong brand), the essence of the brand lies in each of our unique, subjective interpretations, in our understanding of the brand. These perceptions are guided by cultural context, interactions weve had with and about what we are evaluating, and our own personal conception of the world. The more closely aligned a company or product is with the needs and desires of customers, the more likely that company is to maintain a strong and positive mental image in their customers minds, i.e., customers who can then be moved to take productive actionto buy, to engage, to recommend or to think. The science of branding is about designing for and influencing the minds of people in other words, building the brand.

Experience is anything that our senses perceive: the interaction between people and the world. What is valuable about experience is, like brand, it actually happens on the inside. How and why people respond to experiences is at the heart of successful design. And that is what designing for or focusing on the experience is all about: understanding people. The same basic principles apply whether someone is reading information, going to a trade show booth, hearing a radio commercial or viewing a Web site. Even as the media changes, the basic human realities of evaluating and responding to experiences remain the same.

Brand experience is the strategic approach to compelling people to take productive action through the integrated, coordinated planning and execution of every possible interaction that they have with your company or products. That means assessing business strategy through the lens of providing people with carefully designed experiences that meet their needs and desires, with the explicit intention of compelling them to take productive action on your behalf.

As a relatively new discipline, the brand experience is one that is incredibly complex to execute successfully. Not only does it require a sophisticated understanding of business strategy and a deep, scientific and cultural understanding of people and markets, it also demands a broad and neutral understanding of communications and media. It is, at once, the synthesis of business, marketing, design and technology.

Growth of Corporate BrandingThe Web

First things first: the Web has inherent limitations in the degree to which it can contribute to a successful brand experience. For all intents and purposes it is a medium that directly affects only two different senses: visual and auditory. The most powerful experiences touch all five sensesvisual, auditory, touch, smell and taste. Also, most people typically use the Web in the course of multi-tasking. People experiencing companies and products on the Web are often devoting only a fraction of their available mindshare to that experience, unlike other experiences that are more immersive.

However, the Web also has a number of advantages over other media. It is one of a very few experiences that are pull instead of push. People can request what they want, when they want it, largely at any time they want. The Web is also an interactive medium, enabling people not only to get information but to play games for entertainment, to complete surveys that reflect their preferences and to communicate in real time. Being involved and comfortable with the Web, we might take these things for granted, but they represent revolutionary change compared to the interactions a large percentage of people grew up with.

Before the Web, unless we were in an actual store or facility, most of the experiences we had with companies and products were decidedly one-way. Advertisements, created for very broadly defined demographics, screamed at us, sang to us or tried to seduce us with sounds and images that blindly spoke to the lowest common denominator.While some problems with products or services could be taken care of with a phone call, often resolution would require sending a letter via ordinary mail in order to get redress, a notion that seems quaint today.

It is not that many of the experiences and communication channels that were dominant in the past no longer exist today. Rather, digital technology now provides other interactions and tools that complement or enhance the experience we can offer. This distinction is important because we need to understand that the Web is just one part of brand experience. It needs to be approached thoughtfully, as a voice among the chorus, not an end unto itself.

Many companies have developed multi-layered and extremely complex brand architectures over the years: some for historical reasons (like brand acquisitions), some possibly due to a lack of internal cohesion or communication. The trends toward corporate branding and emphasis on the product allow us a different perspective on what brand architecture could and should look like. They imply a simplified brand structure in which the corporate brand would directly endorse a range of product brands, with all intermediate brand levels progressively disappearing. This would clarify the offers, put the product back at center stage for consumers, and force companies to really define their corporate brand and related values.

Sheldon Baker is senior partner of the Baker Dillon Group (BDG), a product branding, advertising and public relations firm in the San Francisco Bay area. BDG has provided brand development for several nutraceutical industry companies including Kyowa Hakko, Daiwa Health Development and Fuji Health Science. Contact them at (800) 570-1262 or online at www.BakerDillon.com.