Branding: Demystifying Product Perception

A Friend asked about what indie band to have at a company event. I responded with, 

"You need to put together a mathematical 'function' that factors booking price with optimal demographic target saturation to maximize your media impressions leverage. If you can identify your target then you can probably purchase the info from spotify. Who does the larger volume of your target demo listen to with the greatest frequency that asks for the lowest booking price? Factor in your branding model and what band fits your brand strategies best... bla bla bla bla."

And I realized how little people know about branding. The first common misconception about branding is that the brand itself is the company or the product, The Brand is better thought of as the consumer's psychological perception of said company or product. Branding is thusly the active process of changing perception. 

The first few times i heard people use the word brand i was mystified. The words usage was so strange in the way that it referred to large abstractions that didnt seem to fit the word completely in the way it seemed to imply. Thats part of the problem. When people refer to coke or pepsi as a brand we acquire a mental definition of the word in the way children acquire semantic rules and sentence structure. A mother points to a dog and says 'doggie' and the child imitates the word with a new association. And then the child points to a squirrel and says 'doggie'. This is how we come to think of brands as companies or products. Nobody's there to correct us when we miss use the word. Business people and ad gurus benefit from the words mystification by wielding it magnanimously. Nobody bothers to ask what is meant by re-branding or brand recognition, brand stratification, brand development, or brand loyalty. Nobody admits the initial confusion of referring to a music artist or celebrity as a premium brand. However the magical properties of the word lie in distracting from the obvious illusion. The brand was never in the salesman's hand you always imagined it to be there. It was in your head the whole time and never physically existed at all. Re-branding never alters the product, it only changes the existing impression you have of the product and seeks to change it to something else.

In this light, the word branding loses its awe. Branding becomes the act of manipulating perception of a product. It is just a reputation.  Branding never starts with the logo or the media buy or the band that will play at the event. Because the key component missing from that logic is thinking about the minds that will process the imagery of the logo, that will interact with the given media, and will experience the band at the event. People think you're doing something to the product, but you're not altering the product itself in any way. You are just altering the conversation about the product.
Thusly, if you're planning to start altering perceptions then you first need to talk about demographics. 

A demographic is basically a localized cross section of a group of people. Think of the brand strategy as a virus. The strategy is to infect a group of people so that they take a specific action that is ultimately the consumption of your product. What age are they? What is their income level? What are they like as an identifiable culture or group of cultures? Identifying the demographic is key because you need to accurately determine their values.

Take any sociology class or crash course yourself with a quick google session and you will come to understand that culturally identifiable groups of people prioritize aspects of the world into a system of value. Knowing that your demographic is male, 30's, and success driven, might tell you that they value money. You might develop the strategy of infecting them with the idea that your product will help them get rich. The virus cannot attach itself unless properly shaped to fit the mind of your targets.  Ultimately it is about communicating that the product is valuable to the consumer. The product may not actually be valuable to the consumer but that doesn't matter if the brand is. 

Brand strategy starts with brand recognition and brand saturation with the intent of fostering brand stratification in hopes of establishing brand loyalty. These abstractions are less mystic when you recognize the interchangeability of product perception with brand. People just seem to think of the word brand as being something more, because it has really good branding. 

Just did it,

-MM