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?

But consumers don’t really behave that way. I was reminded of this during a debate over photography with my 13 year-old son. We are both shutter bugs, but our brand affinities are divided. We both started shooting in grade school. I developed an affinity for the Nikon brand in high school, when I would skimp on other teenage luxuries to buy good Nikon glass. My son Luc’s affinity started a little earlier. His school uses Canon equipment in the photo lab, and as a result, he’s become quite a fan. In truth, there is very little difference between the brands. Both brands offer professional grade cameras. Both have legions of famous followers. But neither Luc nor I will concede this point. I will probably go to my grave believing that Nikon is the only brand for a serious craftsman. He’ll probably photograph that experience with a Canon camera.

The irrational consumer is more than a hypothesis. It’s a well-researched reality. In his excellent study, “Product Experience is Seductive”, first published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2002, Stephen Hoch demonstrated that consumers are easily, and often erroneously, persuaded by their brand experience. Hoch describes four aspects of experience that color our brand preference:

1. Experience is engaging
2. Experience is nonpartisan
3. Experience is pseudodiagnostic
4. Experience is endogenous

It is the last two aspects of his study that I find most intriguing. Hoch showed that consumers have a tendency to distort their diagnosis of brand information. If they have a preference for a certain brand, they tend to color any brand comparisons with the preference in mind. This finding flies in the face of conventional branding wisdom, which argues that consumers rationally employ Bayesian logic to purchase decisions. Hoch cites a 1998 study that found that “when equivocal information about two brands is acquired attribute-by-attribute, the evaluation of the next attribute is distorted to support the emergent leader.”

Hoch also describes a fascinating consumer tendency–the tendency to prefer what one already has. “After a decision has been made, consumers engage in a variety of tactics including avoiding negative information and attitude change.” Therein lies the heart of the debate with my son. Despite evidence that might suggest the Canon platform is a viable alternative for me as I prepare to upgrade my camera body, I was unwilling to consider any brand other than Nikon. And Luc scoffed at my lack of sophistication. Surely, he argued, times had changed and Canon was the clear choice. Fathers and sons live for such debates. Brand marketers fail to recognize their underlying message. Brand loyalty often roots in experience, not price/value or quality differentials. Sometimes, the loyalty is tied to a consumer self concept that is validated through ongoing experience–an experience that seduces the consumer and frames their point of view.

A position is a particular point of view or attitude about something. Thus, when a brand is positioned, it is constructed with a outlook. A well-positioned brand can take any subject and interpret it within the worldview of the brand. Positionings are often well-suited for products, where the brand use and scope of interaction is very limited.

On the other hand, a promise is a commitment. It’s not just a point of view. It’s a declaration of intended behavior. That’s why a brand promise is better suited to corporate brands or causes. A brand promise can be applied to many subjects. It doesn’t interpret these subjects as much as it assures you it will do something in relation to them.

Just when I thought customer service was dead — when I lament how brand after brand gets it dead wrong — a candidate comes along that surprises and delights and restores my faith in brand experience.

About a week ago, my daughter was denied passage on an Alaska Airlines flight. She had planned to travel to Portland, Oregon on her first unaccompanied flight so that that she could visit my sisters for the Christmas holiday. Unfortunately, due to bad weather, Alaska Airlines stopped allowing unaccompanied minors to travel to the region. That in itself was not the issue. The issue was that they didn’t tell us, even when we called that morning (at 4:45am) to ensure she was all set. When we got to the airport, the agent unceremoniously told us Jordan couldn’t board. My little girl was heartbroken, and I was taken aback by the experience. It wasn’t the Alaska Airlines I knew and loved.

I called immediately to voice my displeasure. The brand I knew began to surface again during my conversation with the phone agent. She was calm and professional, despite having been on duty for a double shift. By the end of the call, I had settled down, but I was still disappointed and angry. That is … until this afternoon. FedEx stopped by and delivered an unexpected package from Alaska Airlines. It contained an apology letter and a cute little stuffed animal that was addressed to Jordan. She was thrilled. See, some companies do understand that branding begins with the experience. I often write about the companies who fail at brand experience. I thought it only fair to share an example of a company that succeeded, too.

The challenge reminds me of a great article penned by Sidney J. Levy and Philip Kotler back in 1971. In “Demarketing. Yes, Demarketing,” they asked somewhat hypothetically how marketing might apply to reverse market situations. We’re very familiar with the conventional use of marketing–trying to drive demand for products and services when there is ample supply. But they asked if marketing, and branding, could be used to discourage customers. Certainly, some marketers have used this in a widespread fashion with dangerous products, such as cigarettes. Levy and Kotler described the tricky process of using demarketing to reduce demand in unfavorable business segments, and they described the ethical issues in doing so. But, while much of their work focused on marketing practices and policies, they didn’t address the big symbolic question: how do you create a brand that discourages product use. It’s worth contemplating. Sometimes, thinking about questions such as these helps the marketer to better the brands that must do the opposite.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve been paying particular attention to the practical demands of brand storytelling–looking for ways to help my clients express a brand voice and execute compelling storytelling on their own. On a few recent assignments, we introduced a new tool for clients: storytelling architecture. What is it? At the most rudimentary level, it’s a flexible framework designed to help writers bring brand copy into voice. It does this by suggesting structural patterns that fit the brand. So, for example, if we had a client with a brand story rooted in personal experience, we might suggest one architectural pattern that uses personal anecdotes to humanize the brand and connect it to the bigger story.

The best example of story patterns in action is the MasterCard Priceless campaign. The storytelling architecture relies upon telling the story through purchases. Each purchase builds dramatic tension. The denouement occurs with the final element, which has no price. That example is heavily tied to the brand advertising, but there’s no reason the pattern could not extend to other brand touch points. In musical notation, that pattern could be expressed as A-A-A-B, where the A’s are the verses and the B is the chorus.

But that’s only one pattern example. We’ve also looked at genre. A genre is a meta-pattern. It is storytelling architecture that defines the conventions of the story to be told. Audiences like genres because genre sets expectations and creates a shared set of knowledge. For example, if you were to tell a vampire story, the audience would have a number of pre-conceived assumptions as a result of the genre. They would expect that the vampire needs blood to live. They would assume the vampire cannot be exposed to daylight. And they would probably assume that the vampire was averse to religious symbols. Certainly, many vampire stories have shunned these conventions, but that’s why we love vampire stories–to see how the new storyteller plans to deal with the genre. That’s why True Blood is gaining an audience.

Brands can take the same approach. Their storytelling architecture can rely upon genre to familiarize brand audiences with the bigger story, then the brand can choose which conventions of the genre to observe, and which to break. W Hotels has chosen a very specific genre in which to build its brand. It is linked to social currency. W defies some of the standard conventions of upscale hotel branding in order create its own unique storytelling approach. The architecture uses genre to structure the brand experience.

This work is ongoing, and requires a lot more illustrations than I have space to present. But the work in the subject area is proving helpful to clients and engaging for our team.

Sometimes, the words a brand uses are out of voice but the brand experience still feels consistent. When that happens, it’s usually the visual system kicking in. Because our minds are wired to read more from pictures than words, we skip over the inconsistencies in the verbal expression and read the visual elements that are consistently in voice. Which leads me to the topic of this short post.

As more brands use digital media to connect with their customers, the compensatory yin and yang of verbal and visual identity are often separated. An email, SMS message, or chat room cannot always convey the visual crutches that bolster poorly chosen words. The simple solution is to pay more attention to the words, but then there’s the issue of context. When we speak to one another in person, we can read each other’s body language. That helps to provide cues about our intentions and our state of mind. On the telephone, you can hear vocal inflections that convey meaning. Try reading context from an SMS message. This very limitation is the origin of the dreaded smiley.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how a brand develops digital body language — mechanisms to compensate for the limitations of the medium. I’ve been impressed by W Hotels new SMS service for its most loyal customers. Somehow, they seem to achieve the right tone and style despite the fact that there is no hip imagery or house music to parlay the brand. The question is: how does a B2B brand achieve the same result? What do you think?