What is Brand?

What is brand? experience? experience AND perception?

John

Perception does not matter when it comes to branding, because if your product is a good enough experience, everybody will want to have it, regardless if they actually need it or not.

Bob

How are people going to experience a product if they did not perceive it as something positive first?

John

That is where marketing comes into the play …

The Product: A box of Chocolate
Marketing message: Our box of Chocolateis the best box of Chocolate you will ever purchase in your life
Brand: The customer who is opening the box of Chocolateis will either believing it or not, through experience

Branding is the experience. Others do believe that branding is marketing. I think they’re two separate, but related, things

In the end, if the product can not hold up to the message, it doesn’t matter how good your marketing is. You might have gotten the money, but the brand will suffer because of it.

Very interesting thoughts.

I can tell you about a world without branding which was heavily influenced by marketing from the outside. Part of the cold war was the effort to broadcast as far as possible into eastern Europe. TV, Radio etc. Watching West German Television mostly (oops, did I say that in public? ), like most other East Germans, especially Teens, we got constantly exposed to Brands we didn’t have or only very limited access to.

The continues exposure to those messages created a Misperception about the actual quality of the item causing most people to believe that the “stuff” in east Germany is all junk compared to the “fancy” things offered in West Germany.

This, among other things caused a severe lost of sales for the already troubled east German CPG Industry, when the Wall came down and about 8 months later even more, when the Currency in east Germany was switched to West German Mark, the DM. People bought all the crap they saw on TV all the time and couldn’t get before.

That lasted not too long and people realized, that the stuff is not better than what they had, on the contrary, especially when it comes to food products. The east German stuff was often of much higher quality and more organic. People remembered the names of the old products which were little or not at all advertised. Some of those companies that managed to survive long enough, despite the suffering, until this happened were suddenly able to prosper again.

A lot of the old items are now available as coca cola and other brand items, being brands in their own right. They don’t have to advertise much, some don’t even do any advertising at all until this day. The exception is expansions into areas where the products are not known.

People knew what they got. Branding can increase the perceived value of an already good product. It can not turn junk into gold. Okay, maybe it can create a false perception of value for a very short period of time, until people try it and find out for themselves that it is junk.

Branding helps if you have a quality product but so do your competitors.
Good branding might makes the difference whether the consumer buys yours or the one from your competitor.
Porsche or Ferrari? Audi or BMW or Mercedes? Pepsi or Coke? HTML or JavaScript Ads? .. oops … just kidding hehe.

This shows to me, that perception and experience go hand in hand together.

You are able to create a false reality via perceptive marketing messages, but at some point is it the goal to get the consumer to buy the product.

At this point its experience and you better make sure that the created perception can live up to the actual experience. If it can not, as “John” said already, your brand will suffer as a consequence of it.

Cheers,
Carsten