Friday, December 11, 2009

Brands must help human brains



Image from ClipArtHeaven.com

Humans like things that are predictable. As such, one thing that a brand must do is act as a proxy for an expected future event, reward, benefit or feeling. A strong brand is something that brains can use as a shortcut to represent a set of expectations. Each and every brand comes with a set of expectations and implies some predictable result.

Your goal as a brand builder is to fully understand what those expectations are and then deliver on them so people see your brand as something predictable and therefore something that does not require a great deal of future analytical thought. If your brand delivers on promises of value and meets expectations every time then people will simply see your brand as a highly predictable, low-involvement decision and they will choose it more often than not.

Once you do not meet the expectations, however, then people's brains will start to think analytically again and you'll have to convince them to choose your product over the competing ones all over again.

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