Products Help Build Brands

A little while ago, I read a great article by Frank Striefler, a principal at Wolff Olins, called 5 Marketing Principles Brands Should Embrace in 2010. And his first principle, Create Better Realities, got me thinking about BrandTags.net.

Striefler noted that to create better realities we need to innovate products to help create real value rather than add to perceived value as products are the most powerful brand-building tool. By innovating products with our brand purpose in mind, we act according to our capabilities, as Striefler mentioned in his 3rd principle, and we either meet or exceed consumer expectations influencing how our brand is perceived in the marketplace!

After reading this, I thought the BrandTags site is a great example of how products shape your external brand perceptions. BrandTags has been able to create comprehensive brand association tag clouds for hundreds of brands by collecting 1.7 million tags and counting!

These brand associations offer us a glimpse of what the market perceptions are for certain brands. All brands, whether consciously influenced by brand strategies or not, have market perceptions tied to them, even if it's a big question mark!

What I've always found interesting about these clouds is that people often associate the brand with the product & founder/leader most prominently, followed by emotional associations. If a brand has done it's job right, these tags will align with the organization's brand purpose (and if you're really good - the organization's internal perceptions will align with the brand purpose as well - but that can't be determined by BrandTags ... yet).

The way I see it, is that the organization's products prove what business the brand is in and how it's trying to accomplish its purpose. A great example is Google, who seems to be a non-stop force of innovation. Currently, they are planning to develop a super-fast broadband connection - 200 times faster that the fastest broadband connection in the US today. This innovation supports and creates further reasons to believe in its brand purpose - to make the world's information universally accessible and useable!

Once consumers engage with an organization's product or service, they begin to form emotional associations with the brand based on if & how their expectations were met (expectations are often created by advertising, messaging and PR). One of my favorite lines in the film Art & Copy was from George Lois, who said something along the lines of, I'm so good at selling products that if your product is crap, I'm going to put you out of business, because no one will buy from you again. Meaning that if your products don't live up to thier promise, you're in trouble!

You can begin to see this with BrandTags. Cirque Du Soleil, whom I've written about before, has incredibly high emotional brand associations, with tags like: amazing, awesome, exciting, weird, unique, etc. This tells me that Cirque Du Soleil delivers on its brand purpose with every experience it creates fostering strongly aligned brand associations. Therefore, brand associations are created through engagement with the organization's products/services - in this case it is performances!

Apple is very similar. First they are strongly aligned with Steven Jobs, the mac, iPhone, iPod and Love, which makes sense knowing the high level of brand affinity felt for Apple. But following the tags based on products and its founder, are the emotions that come from owning or experiencing an Apple product: amazing, awesome, best, clean, cool, creative, design, expensive, hip, innovative, quality, simple, sleek & trendy! I'm sure these were words that even popped into your mind when I first mentioned Apple. This is because Apple consciously innovates products & experiences that only refuel these perfectly aligned perceptions.

But now, lets look at a brand that has done a pitiful job of meeting expectations - GM. A company that has poured billions of dollars into advertising its brands, only to see a resulting brand value of nothing! Clearly their product experiences were not living up to their messaging/promises!

GM's tag cloud is interesting: First some of the largest tags featured were where GM is from (America, Detroit). Then the other most prominent tags were of negative emotions towards the brand (bad, bankrupt, big boring, cheap, crap, dead, dinosaur, junk, old). This clearly indicates that customers were deeply unsatisfied with GM products and they were not innovating to remain relevant to consumers! Lastly, I found the products lists particularly interesting. Unlike Apple, where people thought of their products' brand names as associations, GM had generic labels for its products, such as trucks, cars, motors, with the exception of Chevy. Proving that customers had no meaningful connection with its plethora of products!

So, yes products are the most powerful brand-building tools, as they prove out your brand purpose, and we can look to BrandTags to see if these products are meeting expectations and truly building a strong brand!