Brand Essence

By Tig Tillinghast for www.marketingprofs.com

Brand essence is the abstraction that audiences take away after experiencing the sum of brand impressions--from both the marketing and from personal experience with the product, transaction process and service.

Brand essence is the lasting impression--usually summed up with one simple (sometimes brutally honest) assessment--that defines the personality qualities of the product or company. Apple Computer's brand essence may be seen as "artful technology that's mostly useful." MarketingProfs.com's essence might be "earnestly trying to make academic marketing theories practicable."

Note that this definition focuses on the customers' view of the brand essence. Marketers trying to sum up the brand essence frequently fall victim to the temptation of defining the brand essence as what they want it to be, rather than what it actually is among customers. This may make for nice PowerPoint presentations to bosses, but it does little good for ongoing marketing work.

Customer's-Eye-View

The customer's-eye-view of brand essence is the more useful version because it forces marketers to consider their influence on brand essence in the greater context of the audience's holistic experience with the company.

Too many times advertisers talk about attempting to adapt a brand essence toward a high ideal, like 100 percent customer satisfaction, yet they fail to see the futility of trying to do so in the face of a poor service organization. Remember Ford's "Quality is Job 1" campaign from years ago?

When using brand essence to inform marketing efforts, I believe it important to phrase things correctly. Some readers may have noticed that the two examples I gave above constitute two different parts of speech. The first was a noun, where the second was a verb. This was deliberate, reflecting the state of the brand.

I recommend not limiting yourself to one format--whether it be a short list of adjectives or a description of someone doing something. Use whatever best describes the personality. But certainly do not use multiple phrases or--heaven forbid--multiple sentences. The brand essence is an essence: a phrase, a word.

It is useful because it informs the ongoing marketing, product development and service actions of a company. In terms of a marketing return on investment, developing the brand essence is tough to measure.

Influence & ROI

It can have an extreme influence. For instance, advertising may position certain qualities or actions of a company as being a positive rather than the negative that the audience previously assumed.

Shell Oil can talk about how much cleaner its operations are--har har--relative to dirty-burning coal. Can it develop a brand essence of the environmentalist? Probably not. It could, though, develop a brand essence of a serious partner in trying to increase the energy-to-pollution ratio.

What's the return on that investment? That's hard to define, especially when the real return may involve hard-to-quantify measures such as the degree to which politicians feel it popular to introduce additional regulation that, in turn, will lower profits.

This tough-to-define brand essence, with its tough-to-define measures leads to a great deal of marketing babble. I don't think there's a single topic in our field that generates such a high ratio of double-speak (and that's saying a lot).

Nonetheless, it is real, it does matter and deserves your attention.