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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Excerpt: Brand Vinci
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Excerpt: Brand Vinci

Manage your brand like a physical asset, and carefully select the ideas and feelings it inspires

Brand Vinci: Decoding Facets Of Branding: By Pavan Padaki, Bloomsbury India, 97 pages, ₹299Premium
Brand Vinci: Decoding Facets Of Branding: By Pavan Padaki, Bloomsbury India, 97 pages, 299

DELHI :

Pavan Padaki eschews jargon early on in his book Brand Vinci: Decoding Facets Of Branding. His aim: to “decode the very design of branding as a concept, and as a tool". Each chapter in the book is dedicated to one of six facets of branding—brand balance, brand purpose, brand perspective, brand positioning, brand property and brand protocol. Padaki, director—insights and creative at the brand consultancy firm brand-comm and principal of Insights in Sight Consulting, gives examples to show how managers can use these aspects to control what they want their brand to say.

In the chapter on “Brand Property", he talks about how to select the characteristics you want your brand to be associated with. Edited excerpts:

As the word suggests, brand property is an asset, and sometimes, even a liability. In our lives, we as individuals tend to do things repeatedly, either consciously or subconsciously. Such actions get associated with us as our behaviour, preferences, tastes, habits, personalities etc., and before we know it, we begin to own them as our property. The trick is to know which of these associations should be possessed as assets, and which of these are needed to give up as liabilities. The same holds true in the world of brands.

If you smoke publicly, the tag of a ‘smoker’ gets associated with you. If you are seen smoking more often, then it’s possible that a tag of ‘heavy smoker’ is attached to you. Eventually, your identity, recognition, personality, or equity, could be that of a SMOKER, even if you are an artist or a policeman. Your ‘smoker’ association could become your brand property.

A brand could also own multiple properties. Let us observe a few examples where associations have become brand properties, and how a brand would cease to exist if it loses or gives up its brand property.

Imagine if Coca-Cola gave up its red colour. Poof! Coca-Cola will cease to exist as a brand. Why? Because the colour red associated with the brand is now an established brand property. Now imagine Pears soap as an opaque and rectangular soap, instead of being translucent and oval-shaped. The brand Pears will cease to exist. Similarly, Toblerone chocolates will cease to exist if they are coloured or pebble-shaped, or if Mini Cooper is marketed as an SUV, and the Land Rover as a sporty convertible.

The bottom line is that brand properties make brands, and many times the essence of a brand is its brand property.

Even personalities have brand properties. Would you be able to relate to Napoleon Bonaparte without his signature hat, or to Hitler without his moustache? As mentioned earlier, brands have multiple brand properties. Mahatma Gandhi’s brand properties would be his white loin cloth, thin skeletal body, round-rimmed glasses, a walking stick in his hand, and a bald head.

An effective brand strategy is to know which brand property to enhance or build the brand on, and which one to underplay or phase out.

Brand properties can be decoded by mapping out the various associations based on perceptions, experience, or even hearsay. (I suggest Interbrand’s nodal mapping exercises, which give a clear pictorial map of associations). The interpretation of the mapping would clearly spell out what a brand can do, what a brand should not do, what a brand could enhance, or how to spot the chink in the competition’s armour.

Here is a crash course to identify your brand’s property. If you do not own a brand, think about yourself as a brand, and this powerful mapping technique could give you some strategic direction for your life.

The association mapping can be done by asking the relevant audiences some simple, key questions like:

‘When I say (name of brand), what comes to your mind first?’

‘When I say (name of brand), what visuals come to your mind first?’...

‘When I say (name of brand), what feelings come to your mind first?’

‘When I say (name of brand), why would somebody buy this brand?’

‘When I say (name of brand), why would somebody not buy this brand?’...

Make sure you have represented your relevant audience well. When you have all your responses, tabulate them by identifying common associations. Now, map the responses with greater numbers closer to the core of the map, and plot the lesser numbers further away from the core. The ones closer to the core will indicate that they are strong associations, asking you to consider them as brand properties to be enhanced or built on. The ones further away will tell you that the association is yet to be established as a brand property, or if the association can be infringed on by a competitor. It could also warn you, if some unwanted association is close to the core of the brand, which could become a liability sooner or later.

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Published: 14 Dec 2014, 07:17 PM IST
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