Branding: created or discovered?

Dominique Lopes

SIS-628-02 Applied Public Diplomacy
Craig Hayden

11/08/2012

In class I brought up the idea that brands are discovered, not created. Many of my classmates disagreed with my assumption, but I believe it was not the assumption that was wrong but the fact that I argued my point very poorly. Therefore, I would like to take this venue to further discuss the idea that an organization, or country can no more create their brand than they can create the world they exist in.

Tim Leberecht, in a TED talk entitled 3 ways to (usefully) lose control of your brand, states, “Your brand is what others say about you when you are out of the room”. Marketers might try to project an image or slogan that they want associated with a specific product. They might even spend millions of dollars to convince a general public that their product is in fact one thing or another; however, this can never work if this image is not already inside the minds of the consumer. A good marketing scheme for branding will only work when the organization has discovered what the public already thinks of them. An example is when Coca-Cola reformulated their recipe. They tried to rebrand themselves as new and fresh but soon realized that the old recipe was too strong of an image in the mind of the consumer, even if consumers chose the new one more constantly in blind taste tests. The old flavor drew associated memories of childhood or summer days. The new flavor did not. This forced Coca-Cola to re-rebrand themselves as Coca-Cola Classic. Millions of dollars could have been saved if Coca-Cola first spent the time with their customers to find out how they perceived the product, what drew them to purchase.

 If a product has a bad connotation marketing Judo, as one classmate put it, can work, but only when a company fully understands what their product’s image looks like. A company could accentuate “positive” facts about a product, a little “look at this hand, not at this one” magic trick. This course of action can never erase the bad connotation though; it just obscures it a bit. The negative image will always live on as a branding within the consumer’s minds, and a company can then only distract from it. A brand exists and evolves within the consumer’s psyche and only once this is discovered a branding campaign can actually work. Nothing comes out of thin air.