The biggest difference between a brand and a product is that the product is placed on the shelf, and the brand exists in the mind of the customer.

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “empty hand” (ID: firesteal13) The author is empty-handed. Authorized to reprint.

We talk about brands every day, words such as brand personality, brand image, brand awareness, brand experience, brand value, brand attitude, brand emotion, brand personality, brand awareness, brand association, Brand reputation…points to the basic psychological phenomena of human beings.

Human psychological phenomena include feelings and perceptions, learning and memory, cognition, motivation, emotions, attitudes, personality, etc. These brand terms are derived from these psychological concepts.

Ad campaign godfather David Ogilvy says the brand represents an image.

Each advertisement should be a long-term investment in the brand image, and the brand image comes from the customer’s comprehensive association with the product, the company and the user itself.

It includes associations with product attributes, associations with price grades, associations with product use experience, associations with product user identities, associations with product features and benefits, and the resulting personality, attitudes, The association of values.

And association is a psychological phenomenon.

David Eck, the originator of brand equity, said the brand represents corporate assets.

Intangible assets other than fixed assets of enterprises, which are related knowledge about commodities and enterprises.

Ike divides this brand asset into five parts: visibility, awareness, brand association, loyalty and other proprietary assets. This is the five-star asset model.

And another marketing guru, Kevin Keller, further proposed the CBBE model, Customer-Based Brand Equity, based on the customer’s brand equity model. KK divides brand equity into six dimensions: salience, performance, image, evaluation, feeling, and resonance.

There is no explanation. From these nouns, it can be seen that brand assets are based on the psychological phenomenon of customers.

Millward Brown, the world’s largest communications group, market research and consulting firm Millward Brown will publish a brand list every year, BrandZ global brand value 100. In 2018, among the top 100 list, there were 14 Chinese brands on the list.

MBI uses the Brand Dynamics Pyramid to measure the brand. This pyramid model consists of five levels: presence, relevance, performance, strength, and binding.

The lowest level of this relationship is that the product has a sense of presence in the consumer’s mind, the consumer knows the product; the highest level is the binding user, and the brand and the consumer establish a strong connection.

MBI means that the brand represents a relationship between the customer and the product.

The relationship is a psychological phenomenon.

This means —

All brand models are based on psychological principles, and all come from people’s psychological cognition and learning process. When people are added to the product, the brand really starts to work.

The brand is a psychological phenomenon. Brand is the inner drama of consumers.

To create a successful brand, it is necessary to exert influence on the customer’s heart through various means. Let customers know, know and agree with you.

Of course, different brands have different product attributes, different stages of development of the company, different characteristics of the target group, some brands require users to remember, some require users to resonate, some require users to fall in love, some require customers Interested, some require users to play with you. But no matter what, you have to work hard in the heart of the customer.

Products, prices, packaging design, store image, product companies and origins, spokespersons, advertising, promotion activities, service personnel are all means to influence customers’ hearts.

Based on the consideration of the customer’s psychological level, there are four paradigms to build a brand:

Idea brand, experience brand, cultural brand, social brand.

I. Idea Brand

After people contact, buy, or use a product, the product will leave an impression on the human mind through the senses. These impressions and other information input by the product, through the processing of the mind, will become the inner psychological activities of the person (formation of the evaluation of the product), and then dominate the behavior of the person (determined to buy this product).

This whole process is called cognition.

Cognition is the process of human brain information processing and the process of people acquiring knowledge. To make a purchase decision, a customer must know the product, understand the product, and acquire knowledge about the product. For enterprises, it is very important to convey the correct knowledge to consumers and guide and lead the customer psychology.

The idea is to abstract and refine the user’s impression of product formation. It is the formatting of the user’s feelings, and it is the induction and summary of the concepts, ideas, concepts and principles behind the product.

The brand conveys the knowledge it wants to the user through the concept. So that users understand the value of your products, agree with your product philosophy, let users know who you are, what they represent, and what is unique compared to other brands.

The idea brand seeks the cognitive response of the user. The core goal is to let the user know the brand and form the user’s recognition of the brand.

The most basic and the heaviestThe idea is to pass on the value proposition of the product to the user, or USP.

The core of the concept brand is to lock in a core value for the brand, and then the entire brand is designed and disseminated around this value proposition.

Of course, the transfer of value proposition is not just a transmission through advertising. Every carrier that has a relationship with the product, such as the product itself, such as packaging, such as shops, and service personnel, is transmitting information to consumers. .

How to build a successful brand?

Fast fashion brand ZARA, it hopes that the user will form the impression that ZARA is a brand with “big name design and changeable style”.

So ZARA has established a large team of designers; in order to appear more quickly in front of customers, ZARA products are all self-produced without looking for OEM, creating a faster logistics and transportation system; shop location is close to luxury brands; Advertising, spokespersons, etc., all in all means to build a fast fashion brand like ZARA.

Of course, the concept includes not only the product itself, but also the product.

Why do we want to build such a brand and why we want to produce such a product. From simply promoting the concept of the product, to the idea behind the dissemination of the product, and what kind of life concept the product user should continue.

The delivery of these ideas not only helps the brand win the user’s approval, but also helps the brand find out who is its user.

BMW’s “Yue”, Coca-Cola’s “Shuang”, Red Bull’s “Energy”, and Nongfu Spring’s “Natural” are the most vivid examples of the concept brand.

Second, experience brand

If the concept brand is more appealing to the user’s perception, then the experience of the brand is the user’s feeling.

Perception is based on feelings, but superimposes more complex psychological activities such as memory, imagination, and thinking. It doesn’t feel as deep and comprehensive as perception, but it feels more intuitive.

Overall, humans are superficial and easily lazy animals. You go to the convenience store to buy a bottle of drink, how can you think so much, and you can buy it with a pleasing eye. Even in interpersonal relationships, we often make a final conclusion on a person based on the first impression.

In the book Behavioral Design: Zero Cost Change, written by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, they cited a case of corporate change. John Cotter and Dan Cohen conducted a survey with the help of Deloitte Consulting, who visited more than 400 employees in different countries around the world to understand why large organizations have changed.

Change, in the final analysis, is to change people’s behavior. Then they found that the most important thing to change people’s behavior is not to provide people with a lot of information, repeatedly instilling them for analysis and deliberation, so as to make choices that are in line with their own interests.

No, not like this. To change people’s behavior, we must appeal to people’s emotional level.

There is a saying that children are right or wrong, and adults only see the pros and cons. This is not true. Most of the time adults do not see pros and cons, but likes and dislikes. Like things, even if you are unprofitable, you are willing to do it; if you hate things, you will be indifferent to advocating its benefits and benefits.

We usually think that the order in which people want to make behavior changes is: analysis → thinking → change; but in fact, the order in which people change is: see → feel → change.

You see a thing that triggers your senses and emotions. You like it, you have a will, and then you will act.

And all of this exerts influence on the user’s sensory and emotional levels, which I call it: experience.

How to build a successful brand?

Former Starbucks Worldwide Stanley Hainzworth, vice president of creativity, said when talking about Starbucks:

“For the brand, the product is the experience, the experience is the product. Take Starbucks, when you taste the drink, the music you listen to, you chat with someone, and the sofa you are sitting on, constitutes complete Experience, who would say that I just came to Starbucks for a cup of coffee?”

For brands like Starbucks, it’s not about communicating coffee to consumers, but about creating a coffee shop. Starbucks is not a brand of ideas about how good coffee is, how Starbucks makes a cup of coffee, but an experience brand that allows users to enjoy this third space.

To create a perfect user experience, the brand must first have a sense of design, including product design, packaging design, store design, VI visual design, product experience and process design, service design and other aspects.

Think about the Apple mobile phone in your hand. The creation of this experience brand is based on the simple and humanized design of Apple products, the design of mobile UI and interactive design, and the design of Apple store. Experience, let you fall in love with this brand.

Secondly, it is a multi-sensory form of information transfer. In addition to vision, it also includes hearing, touch, smell, taste and so on. Let’s go back to the mobile phone and look at the research on materials by mobile phone manufacturers over the years, regardless of metal, glass, ceramics, plastics… just to let you hold your hand,Feel an unparalleled smoothness and sophistication.

How to build a successful brand?

This In the past few years, the network red restaurant has been rising, and most of them are the injection of brand experience. From in-store decoration and lighting, music played in the restaurant, to delicate platters like bonsai, and even a variety of exaggerated visual effects (such as dry ice and flame), you can enjoy a sense of full sense, involuntarily Take a photo of the phone and call it, share it and share it.

Finally, the design of the experience brand also needs the injection of user emotions. In the various aspects of product use and communication promotion, the user’s emotional response to the brand is evoked, and the user is born with trust, love, surprise, awe, interest, optimism and happiness. Emotions and emotions such as comfort.

Anthony R. Damasio, a world leader in neuroscience research and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Medical Research, wrote in the book Descartes’s Mistakes – every decision of man It is mainly controlled by the emotional center in the brain.

We humans have always had two complementary ways of making decisions: emotion and logic. Rationality and logic are mainly used to prove the correctness and rationality of emotional decision-making.

The Descartes that advertises reason is wrong.

One of the simplest examples, if you like someone, you will find more and more strengths and advantages in him, and his shortcomings will be ignored by you intentionally or unintentionally. The rationality of each other you discover through rational thinking is that the subconscious is proving that you like his emotional decision is right.

So if you want to influence people’s purchasing decisions, they must work hard on the emotional level to create positive, beautiful impressions, perceptions and emotional experiences for your brand.

Three, cultural brand

When it comes to wine brands and tea brands, many people will say that China has a deep and long-standing wine culture tea culture, and it is necessary to build brands around these cultures.

But if you look deep into these industries, you will find that successful wine brands simply don’t have culture.

The high-end liquor brands emphasize brand status and scarcity. Try Jiannanchun’s Datang National Wine, China’s three famous wines, Qinghualang’s two major sauces in China, and the strong fragrance of the fragrant Laojiao and the country. The historical taste, the classic political and business feelings of Yanghe Blue, and the Chinese dream, and the reason why Maotai is widely pursued is also due to the status of its national wine and the scarcity of its products.

The mid-end liquors like to make a fuss about family and friendship. After all, the main consumption scene of wine is poly drink. For example, the Zhizhi confidant of Zhijiang Liquor, the Spring Festival home of Jinliufu, and the friendship of Fenggu Liquor are more affectionate, and the great things of this world will have a chance, includingIn the early years, I drank a cup of green wine to make a friend, a Confucian house wine, and a “home” of blast home wine.

Low-end liquor is relatively simple, usually focusing on the emotional reactions caused by wine, such as the “simple pleasure” of the old village chief, Jiang Xiaobai’s “young wine.”

How to build a successful brand?

You See, which liquor brand is built around the wine culture. In the process of brand building, do they focus on the utensils of drinking, the way of drinking, the craft and system of wine? Too many of the white wines that promote these are not successful enough because these “wine cultures” are too far away from consumers.

The success of small pot tea is to enhance the product grade through its product design, the master’s “handmade” selling point, and give the tea ceremony a fixed pricing standard to open the gift market. Does it promote the tea culture?

The real cultural branding is not from the so-called culture that emphasizes the craftsmanship, artifacts, and product standards of the product itself, because the dissemination is essentially self-talking and has nothing to do with consumers.

The cultural brand referred to here refers to the user culture.

It is a collective consciousness that a particular consumer group shares the desires, dreams, pressures, and conflicts in the context of society as a whole.

We consume because we have needs and desires. Where do our needs and desires come from?

It comes from our self-awareness concept and lifestyle setting, which kind of person I think I am, what kind of lifestyle I should have. This determines what products and desires I will have.

For example, I think I am a middle class, so I have to eat avocado, cheese and salted egg yolk products (^_^)

And each of us’s self-awareness concepts and lifestyle settings come from the influence groups and the social cultures around us.

How to build a successful brand?

Founded in 2011 In the year of 2014, DW settled in Tmall, and now China has become a street watch. People who buy DW will not pay attention to the material, movement, origin, craftsmanship and brand story of this watch. What they care about is how to use this watch to match clothes.

When DW was founded, the main marketing method was freeSending watches to net reds to wear, and often appear on social media, especially the wearing of the tide of Nick Wooster, to DW to create a strong cargo effect.

Moreover, these net reds will receive a special coupon code when they receive the watch. Their fans will use this coupon code to purchase DW, and will bring additional benefits to the net red, so DW is on the INS. Spread on the domestic microblog.

Trend culture and fashion bloggers have shaped the DW brand.

When a product is consumed by people, people will give the product a specific meaning when it is used, and turn the product into a part of social culture. Therefore, the brand can be said to be composed of social culture, products and customers.

So, if a brand is designed for a specific user group and wants to be exclusive to this group, then the brand will build a cultural identity for itself.

The brand needs to have a deeper understanding and insight into this user group, understand their love and hate, their social pressure and identity anxiety, what role the product plays in their lives, and what meaning it has. How products improve their relationship with others and with groups.

Only, the brand can become the consensus and belief of the group and become the symbol and totem of a group of people.

4. Social Brands

If the three brand paradigms of concept brand, experience brand, and cultural brand are also applied to the psychological level of customers, it is used to establish user perception, influence user emotions, stimulate user senses, and change user attitudes.

So the creation of social brands is to exert force on the behavior of customers. Through a large number of interactions with users, we build relationships, develop fans, and lay the foundation for branding.

The emergence of Xiaomi’s brand is the most vivid example of social branding paradigm.

Xiaomi’s Internet thinking has two, one is product thinking: focus, extreme, word of mouth, fast, focus on single product creation, achieve high cost performance, exceed expectations of the ultimate product, thus rapidly spread word of mouth, complete sales, and then quickly iterate So that competitors can’t catch up and imitate.

One more is user thinking: be a fan, do it from the media. Just in June this year, in order to promote the newly released Xiaomi CC, Lei Jun also opened a small red book account. So far, Lei has sent 39 notes and gained 19,000 fans.

A 50-year-old entrepreneur, after his fame, went to the platform of a group of 95 girls and tried to promote it. Anyway, I admire it.

How to build a successful brand?

The essence of Xiaomi’s user thinking is the book “Participation” written by Li Wanqiang, allowing users to participate in brand building.

This kind of user participation is not only reflected in the level of brand communication, but also a lot of interactive marketing. More importantly, users should participate in product development, product design, product optimization, pricing, store, service, brand design, marketing promotion. In the whole process of sales, let consumers feel the existence of the company all the time.

The development of Xiaomi’s original MIUI system, how the mobile phone should be designed, listened to the user’s opinions, and let the users participate, thus accumulating the first fans for Xiaomi. Later, the creation of Raytheon’s gaming notebook brand also took the road of socializing with users and copied the success of Xiaomi.

Only if a user is willing to have a relationship with you, can he become a fan of yours; only with a loyal fan, the brand has a solid foundation.

The way all traffic star personal brands are built today is, without exception, the paradigm of social brands. Rocket Girl, TFBOYS, SNH48, Cai Xukun, Di Lieba, Lin Yun… They have established an unbreakable psychological bond through Weibo, rice circle, handshake, birthday party, meeting, strong interactive variety shows and fans.

In particular, it has recently marked the official event of China’s entry into an aging society – the battle between Jay Chou and Cai Xukun. Every fan who participated in this war, they are closer to this emotional connection with their idols.

Whether it is a concept brand, an experience brand, a cultural brand, or a social brand, the center of each brand creation paradigm is a customer, and everyone is involved.

Use one of the simplest formulas to represent: brand = product + user.

No users, no brands.