First disclosure out of the way. Second, I’m a giant nerd. This might be a surprise to many of you, I’m sure, but I still play with digits in my free time. I own and manage a few websites. I’ve custom coded a web app or two. And I move lots of my data around through a network of cloud-based services that provide peace of mind.

Second disclosure out of the way.

I was sent an email this morning from Amazon’s cloud services platform. The email invited me to participate in a survey. Amazon wanted to know why I had not used CloudFront, a service that is part of their cloud computing suite. I use Amazon’s simple storage service to keep my photographs safe and sound, and I signed up for CloudFront because I thought it might be a good service for hosting some of my sites. But when I went to the page, this is the description that greeted me:

Amazon CloudFront delivers your static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

I consider myself a fairly sophisticated guy, but I have no idea what the above paragraph means. Granted, I’m not an engineer, but why do service descriptions have to be so technical? If a true digit-head needed to know that CloudFront uses Edge locations, couldn’t that information have come later. Words like ‘streaming content’ and ‘global network’ have become so over-used that they actually make a description more ambiguous. What does CloudFront do?

It turns out that CloudFront is a brilliant service that makes it easy for a web developer to use several other Amazon cloud services (such as storage) to serve web pages and other digital content. Imagine you wish to develop an app for the iPhone. You could use CloudFront to store and retrieve information you keep in an Amazon database, bundle it into an XML stream, and send it to the user’s iPhone.

As I said at the start, I don’t mean to pick on Amazon, because I’m a fan. But it’s time for tech companies to use plain language, and to do so while avoiding bland, generic statements. Look at how 37Signals describes Ruby on Rails:

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

Ok, so maybe the “programmer happiness” comment is over the top, but at least I know what the product does. Maybe CloudFront should describe itself as:

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery service that helps developers create powerful digital applications that take full advantage of other services on the Amazon platform. It’s fast, global, and very cost-effective.

My copy won’t win any awards. But at least you have a better sense of what CloudFront is.

I can hardly believe you’re coming to town again. Of course, I will be happy to greet you when you arrive at my door on June 24th. I have to say, I saw your photos, and you look absolutely fabulous. Have you lost weight?

Hey, there’s one thing I wanted to ask you about. You know your friend, AT&T? Yeah, I know he’s a swell guy and all, but … I don’t know. That guy stood me up so many times. I don’t want to talk about him behind his back, but everything I’m telling you I’ve already told him … several times. He’s kind of lame. I mean, why do you hang out with that guy? You work so hard to keep yourself up and do well professionally. It seems to me that that guy is holding you back. I realize he was one of the first to support you when you took your big plunge. It was very noble of him (I’m being sarcastic). I mean, really. You could have had your pick of any guy there. Sure, he was generous with his affections (and his wallet was plenty big), but did you ask anybody about his history? I’m just saying, he was never known for being particularly hard-working. I’m just saying.

Don’t take it personally. I love you. You know that. I just think AT&T is a little shallow. I mean, where is he right now? Here I am, talking to you, and there’s no sign of him at all. It would be one thing if we were in some remote area and he didn’t boast about being there for everyone. But this is Los Angeles and I’m in the middle of one of the most populated neighborhoods. Zero bars. Zero. Where is he? 97% of the country! Sure. And I’m dating Angelina Jolie.

Look, you know I love you. You are welcome at my place anytime. But, let’s talk about your friend. Just talk. I’ll be here for you no matter what. I just don’t want to see you hanging out with a loser.

Love,
-lv

The other factor is money, or more precisely, the scarcity of money. Marketing budgets are usually the last to recover when an economy rises from the ashes of a recession. Every expense is scrutinized. Before investing money on a brand, it’s helpful to assess your brand’s overall health. Think about it: Would you be willing to let a doctor perform a procedure on your body without first doing an examination? Probably not.

When funds are scarce and investments are heavily scrutinized, you owe it to your shareholders to assess your state of wellness, or lack thereof. Unfortunately, many managers think that measuring brand health is a massive endeavor that requires quant jocks running loose with expensive studies, time-consuming audits, and complex statistical analyses. They fear that in the end they’ll be sitting around a table scratching their heads trying to make sense of all the data sets, still clueless where to invest. It doesn’t have to be this way. Here are four time-tested diagnostic areas to consider when assessing your brand’s health.

Awareness
Brand awareness is by far the easiest and the least expensive driver to measure. It answers a simple question: Do people know my brand exists? It is usually measured first in an unaided format, and then benchmarked against results from respondents after a little prompting.

Brand awareness is critical for new or emerging brands, where the battle is for recognition. In fact, if awareness is very low, it isn’t worth the time or money to measure most other equity drivers. The mandate for the emerging brand is to win a piece of the target’s mental real estate. Awareness is the diagnostic tool to track your progress.

The corollary is often also true. Coca-Cola doesn’t need to spend a lot of money on brand awareness. It has nearly 100 percent awareness in just about every corner of the world, and in just about every demographic and socio-cultural segment. In the same way that politicians are lamenting the bloated cost to U.S. taxpayers from the physicians ordering too many unrequired medical tests, many brands can skip measuring awareness.

There are occasions when it makes sense for a well-established brand to measure awareness. One example is when it is trying to measure generational decay. For example, a brand like Borden’s Milk might have very high awareness with baby boomers but near zero awareness with millennials. In this case, awareness by demographic segmentation might yield useful strategic insights. Otherwise, save your money and the respondent’s time. Move up the hierarchy of brand equity.

Familiarity
It’s one thing to have high awareness, but quite another to have high familiarity. If someone cites your brand unaided as part of the consideration set of brands in the category, do they know what you do or what makes you distinct? Qualcomm is a well-established brand that has fairly high awareness scores, but a lot of people think it’s a sports brand because of its prominent exposure at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego. Qualcomm is one of the largest manufacturers of semiconductors for mobile devices. It’s an ingredient brand, and familiarity is probably the most important measure of health it should track.

Familiarity is another measure that doesn’t require expensive studies. It can be facilitated online quite nicely, and you can even uncover useful insights from informal qualitative research. Statistical significance is nice to have, but the prescription for poor familiarity is often better informed by the data you generate in deep discussions with targets. What do they think the brand is or does? What makes them think that?

Linking
The sine quo non of brand building is the “higher order” of brand drivers. Al Ries and Jack Trout famously claimed [in their book "Positioning: The Battle for your Mind"] that positioning is the battle for the mind of your target. The war is won when you link your brand to emotional and self-expressive associations. People link Disney to magic, Nike to performance, and Apple to creativity. What do people associate with your brand, if anything? Are the associations the ones you want them to have, or are they a byproduct of the past?

Linking studies are critical for repositioning projects, but they are often poorly designed. The brand community suffers from a nasty plague: rational inquiry. Too many studies attempt to measure brand associations by using rational inquiry. Hedonism plays a role in Virgin Atlantic’s brand equity. It’s a brand that glorifies life in upper class. But if you tried to measure the link between Virgin and hedonism by directly asking respondents how much they value Virgin’s ability to let them indulge their sensual side, you might be fooled by the results. A lot of brand equity derives from irrational associations. When you attempt to rationalize it, you tend to get three kinds of erroneous answers. First, you get people who are too embarrassed to say what they really feel, so they answer falsely to conform to a social norm. Second, you get people who answer in a very logical way. The problem is, in the moment of brand use, they aren’t thinking logically. Finally, we tend to forget our irrational impulses. Since most studies are backward-looking (the study asks respondents questions about past behavior), they sometimes just remember wrong.

One solution to the problem is to simply design better descriptive studies. The old rule about garbage in/garbage out applies. Many managers skip over discussions about the attributes or questions to include on the survey. Survey design is both an art and a science. The artful part is often neglected.

The other solution is to consider experimental study formats. Most people think experimental research is reserved for academics, but experimental studies can be cost effective and highly predictive. Online brands have relied on experimental research more than offline brands, largely because it easier to conduct. Amazon.com frequently tests new features and new user interface designs in real-time by pushing the new material live for a small random sample of its customers. It then compares the behavior of the sample with the behavior of the general population. It’s a safe and effective method for product testing. With a little ingenuity and bravery, brand managers can use similar designs to test changes in brand positioning.

Also, it is important to consider that brands are not static entities. They change over time, just like consumer tastes. Longitudinal studies that track changes in brand associations over time are a useful approach. While the first year of the study might be the most costly, incremental waves of the study are generally easy and economical to execute. Just as your doctor keeps a record of your vital signs, an ongoing linking study provides a simple diagnostic of your wellness.

Preference and loyalty
Do your customers prefer to use your brand even when prices go up? Are they willing to recommend your brand to a friend? Do they give you permission to take your brand into new markets or product categories? Brands with loyal customers can and should ask these questions and consider them in strategy formulation. Brands on the cusp should weigh the potential costs and benefits.

When budgets are tight, loyal customers are like a rainy day savings account. It’s less expensive to keep a loyal customer than it is to win a new customer. However, like contributing to a rainy day fund, you really need to study customer loyalty in advance of when you need to draw upon it. To gauge the strength of your customer’s loyalty, you really need to compare two sets of data. For many of the reasons stated above, it is hard to gauge loyalty with just one wave of a study. Also, some of the best loyalty measures are not descriptive surveys but sales and customer satisfaction data gathered over time.

If you’re planning a baseline loyalty study, there’s another reason you should be cautious now, in a wounded economy. When there are macro-environmental trends that cut across the entire market, you may be measuring loyalty during a low tide. Just like your company, your consumers are also pinching pennies. In this context, most people are willing to sacrifice brand loyalty for pocketbook savings. That will often surface in a loyalty study, and even though it may be relative in regard to your competitors, you’re gathering bad data.

Preference, which is a closely related cousin of loyalty that measures how much customers prefer your brand to a competitor, may be a more effective area to study. There are many simple and effective quantitative techniques to gauge preference, conjoint being a favorite of many researchers. Keep in mind that you may need qualitative data to supplement what you find in quantitative studies. It’s one thing to know that customers prefer your brand to a competitor, even if the price is a few dollars more. It’s another thing to understand why that is.

This is not to say that you should ignore loyalty measures and focus solely on preference. For some brands, loyalty is a critical indicator of brand health, and now may be just as good a time as any to take its pulse.

One size does not fit all
When doctors order lab work, there are many panels of tests they can order to assess your health. They rarely order all. Instead, they assess your age, your family history, your previous health issues, and their surface observations about you after an exam. You must do the same in assessing your brand health. There is no silver bullet brand health study that will serve every brand on the planet. You have to assess what you know about your brand and fit the study to the patient.

If your brand is young, growing, and owns limited market share, you should probably focus your efforts on awareness and familiarity. If your brand is an established and dominant player with scores of legacy data, you may want to focus on linking and preference. As we’ve heard so often in the national healthcare debate, the key to keeping brand health costs down and generating data that will improve your strategies is to focus on the desired outcome, and then work backwards.

Welcome to the age of disposable branding. The longevity of the modern brand identity shrinks each year, which is good for strategic branding firms, but not necessarily good for brands and the cultures they serve.

When anything and everything can and will be branded, consumers will place a premium on stability, familiarity, and simplicity. The average westerner is exposed to more than 250 brand interactions daily. If you believe the brand-as-person metaphor, then the expectation is that the average consumer is influenced by those 250 “brand people” they meet in a day. Imagine meeting 250 acquaintances in one day. How many would you actually recall? How many would influence your behavior?

Or, if you subscribe to the brand-as-link metaphor, each interaction should trigger a behavioral link to a point of view, a goal, or an experience. Add a repositioning every five years, and consumers are sorting out thousands of personalities and behavioral clues while going about their lives. It’s small wonder that branding is often scrutinized by accountants and common sense pundits. Shuffling the deck every few years is an unsustainable (and unprofitable) model.

Back to Basics
Branding exists for two reasons: differentiation and efficiency. Cattle ranchers of the 19th century discovered the differentiation benefit when some of the marks they burned onto their livestock for inventory management fetched premium prices at auction. Today, a strong brand still differentiates products and services by connoting quality, style, feature sets, price/value, and favorable associations with aspirational values and goals.

Reduce Complexity
Like every player in the complicated auto industry, BMW introduces new models annually. But it has successfully sustained its luxury brand position by sticking to a simple brand architecture. Its infamous naming system makes it easy for customers to navigate the product line and align with core brand attributes. The sporty 3-series is the stalwart of the entry-level luxury performance category, and has been so for 20 years. 3-series customers think of themselves as distinctly different from their conservative 5-series brethren. And neither 3 nor 5-series customers mix with the über-performance, ultimate luxury preferences of the 7-series culture. All three segments are unapologetically BMW. That simple hierarchy of brand equities has allowed BMW the flexibility to advance its product lines while sustaining the core equities of the master brand.

Reuse Your Promise
Unless major changes require you to do so, stick to the original brand promise. A sustainable brand strategy builds upon the foundation of the promise while expanding and refreshing its reach and impact at relevant touchpoints. The promise is the compelling truth of the organization. It should seldom change.

When Apple launched Macintosh in 1984, the brand promise was to “improve the productivity and creativity of knowledge workers.” Today, Apple still helps people be more productive and creative. In the 25 years since it introduced Macintosh there have been several management changes, product introductions, and iconic advertising
campaigns, but the promise hasn’t changed.

Recycle Cultural Equity
Sustainable brands participate in an ecosystem. The promise of the brand translates to a set of values that influences consumer behavior. But it doesn’t stop there. Sustainable brands are owned by their consumers. VitaminWater monitors the progress of its brand by circulating ‘love letters’ to all of its internal marketing teams. The collage of email
and written correspondence voluntarily sent to the brand from loyal customers is a cultural sounding board. Though the company has grown exponentially in a short time, its brand has successfully evolved because it incorporates feedback from its brand culture. VitaminWater has never succumbed to the urge to start from scratch (even after being acquired by Coca-Cola). Instead, it follows cues from its most loyal customers to evolve its identity and fuel one of the most astonishing and profitable success stories in the beverage category.

A Mantra and an Agenda
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. It is the mantra of environmentalists, and it should be the mantra of brand managers. It pushes branding professionals to consider strategy and alignment initiatives that explore the possibilities of the previous work while retaining the promise of going further. It also raises interesting questions. With the advancement of so
many online communities, how can technology better connect brands to brand cultures? How do you recycle your brand platform and maintain currency, especially when competitors are willing to throw everything out and start again? How do you measure the value created by practicing sustainability?

The supply of brands competing for consumer attention already outweighs demand. Until now, the cost of oversupply has been marginal. But in the future, it’s likely to change. Global competition and a drive for scale will favor perennial brands. As proliferation continues, consumers will reward the steady, sustainable brands. The rest will be spam.

Read more thoughts on branding by Laurence Vincent on the Siegel+Gale website.

Just as many consumers are finding themselves over-extended financially, many companies are finding themselves over-extended on the brand marketing front. When times are good, and a market opportunity presents itself, it’s a common knee-jerk reaction to extend a successful brand. Fooey Cola is a hit? Great, let’s make Gooey blended cola malts. If all brand extensions were that intuitive, brand architecture wouldn’t be that difficult. In reality, brands are often extended using less obvious relationships.

Marketing researchers at UCLA released a study in 2002 that cast interesting light on how people view brand relationships. The authors focused on “deep” vs. “surface” cues consumers use to evaluate brand extensions. A surface cue is just what it sounds like — Fooey and Gooey sound very similar and use a consistent naming structure and they are both beverages. The relationship between them is a surface cue. On the other hand, if the same company started making Fooey barware, the extension would require a deep cue — Fooey is a cola, you pour cola into a glass, now Fooey makes great cola glasses to enjoy your drink. The consumer has to link the original brand to an abstract category relationship in order to extend the brand in their minds. Understanding the difference can make the difference when you audit your brand portfolio to consider architectural refinements.

But the UCLA study took a novel approach to this subject. They studied the differences between how children and adults evaluate surface vs. deep cues. They found that children 12 and under can evaluate brands using deep cues if they are explicitly asked to do so. If they aren’t primed to evaluate the deep cues, they rely only on the surface cues. Thus, they might favor the Fooey barware because they like the name and think the logo on a glass looks cool. Prime them with the deeper cue and they might give you a different answer, “they’re just trying to sell me a glass.” 12 was a golden age in the study because the researchers found that when respondents were any older, the surface vs. deep dimension nearly mirrored adult behavior.

There are many adult brands who have successfully established a youth market. Starbucks comes immediately to mind. Many of those young Starbucks fans were willing to go with the brand as it extended into bottled beverages, ice cream treats, and music offerings. My own children were adept at finding the Starbucks logo anywhere we went when they were very young. If long-term loyalty is the goal, how do you structure your brand portfolio so that you retain your young brand audience when they age up enough that surface cues are no longer the hook? Many brands find themselves losing an audience when their youngest consumers reach the age of about 14 (e.g., Disney, Mattel). For the brand manager, is there a way to transition those audiences into a new relationship with the brand by switching the focus from surface to deep cues? In other words, can our understanding of the difference between those cues be used to create a migration path for young, loyal customers? Can those cues be used to extend the brand into new markets? And can this form of strategy work without being abused by marketers to further erode public trust about the motives of brands?

Even if your brand doesn’t face the challenge of migrating young audiences up, you should still consider the criteria used in your portfolio to justify extensions. Ask three questions:

1. Is the relationship between brands based on deep or surface cues?
2. If a deep cue, how abstract is the relationship? Does it require significant knowledge of the product or the category for the consumer to make the connection? If a surface cue, is it enough of a link to justify a brand extension or can you roll the extended brand under the primary brand?
3. What is the systemic effect? This particularly applies to complex brand portfolios. How many deep cues are floating around in your system? How many connections can the consumer draw? On the surface level, do multiple extensions dilute the core equity in the brand?

The story really nails an important characteristic of the post-modern society — the role of the life movie (a term coined by author Neal Gabler). There’s a story in our head. It’s the story we want to find in our reality. Psychosis is often created when we can’t balance the story in the head with the real story. But sometimes, priming the story in our head lets us cope with the stressful story outside. It allows us to retain our pride and it creates a path to change in our real life.