The six senses of branding!

Sixth-Sense Branding

By Harish Bijoor

The brand is an intangible. Managing this intangible has been made into a fine science by practitioners of the science of brand management over the years. Years of painstaking research in categories as diverse as FMCG and durables, services and products, have led us believe in the make-believe world of the rational brand.

If only the brand was a tangible, all this would have worked beautifully. Sadly the brand isn’t tangible at all! The brand is as intangible an asset as any can get. A piece of intangible asset that occupies virtual space in the concept that is a consumer mind! Quite like a mystery wrapped in an enigma encased in suspense! The brand is a difficult proposition in itself.

Firstly there is the intangible asset. The consumer buy-in needs to be got for the concept of the brand itself. The marketer’s challenge is one to get the consumer to pay firstly for water in a bottle. And the second challenge is to get her to pay that much more as a premium for the brand Bisleri with all its allure and appeal. This is tough task number one!

Tough task number two is to operate in virtual space. All of us know that the consumer mind and mood is vital. None of us however do know with accuracy as to how all this works. The mind is an amorphous concept. A concept that finds the seat of thinking embedded in it. And the seat of thinking is normally embedded in the brain. An organ that is yet to be understood! And guess what! Just as the seat of love is romanticized to be in the heart (represented by the shape of the heart slapped and immortalized in the Playing Cards of our lives), we just might be wrong about the seat of thinking as well!

The brain and indeed the entire spinal cord, ending right up at the Coccyx could be at play for all we know! For all we know, we sit on the seat of thinking most of the time!

Add the entire nervous system to this process of brand understanding and response, and we have an intricate network to manage! A huge network that we just don’t understand as yet!

Tougher task number three still is the fact that the marketer has to manage the concept of virtual space! This is a concept as pure as it can get. It is a concept as wild and maverick as free will itself! The consumer is quite diverse and unpredictable in the exercise of his will and in the articulation of choice as triggered by the marketing stimuli marketers believe they send accurately to their customer base!

Add the big one to all this! The marketer needs to understand not one, but all his target customers. The new day and age has proved it to the marketer decisively that there lies a lot of deceptiveness in the aggregation of the consumer as a homogenous mass. Understanding needs to be in clusters. Distinct and dominant consumer clusters that may run into hundreds of groups, depending on the category of product you represent!

The marketer is boggled by the size of task at hand. The best thing to do in this situation of chaos is to attempt the simplification process. Brand folks have done this very well over the years. And it worked! Worked in a day and age when the offerings in the market were limited and choice was governed by limited availability. Not anymore though! Not for today and not for the brand new Brand age ahead of us!

Management of brands in the present and the future will be a complete art, science and philosophy on its own. The immediate imperative for the savvy brand manager to understand is the imperative of understanding consumer clusters that make the choice for his brand of peanut or pumpkin. This understanding needs to be a holistic understanding. Something that defies the concept of the brain and rational thinking. Something that goes right into the nether depths of the spinal chord and further into every tiny nerve-end that stretches miles and miles within our physical bodies.

Savvy brand management of the years ahead will be about depending on senses beyond the ones we already know and understand. The sense of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are reasonably well understood and acknowledged by us. We need to now go beyond these basics. Branding will need to tread into the territory of the not-yet-understood realms. Soft-realms that represent a cluster of what we could call the Sixth Sense!

Sixth sense branding will need to depend on consumer intuition. A whole lot of dependence on the gut-feel mechanics of consumer movement will need to be brought in as studied science. The market Psychologist and Sociologist alike will have a role to play in this process at hand! The endangered species of social Anthropologist will need to be pulled out of the back room and given her place in the sun!

Brands dominate every part of our lives today. If we are to make branding relevant in a society that is emerging as Generation Infinity, branding needs to re-invent itself and make it relevant to the consumer of tomorrow. A discerning, maverick consumer, who in his consumer-evolution index is many, many notches ahead of the consumer traditional marketers have been comfortable dealing with in the past!

If branding needs to maintain its edge and relevance, it needs to get complex. More complex in its approach than it is today. The consumer is a complex entity. Branding needs to match this complex animal in its cue and response dynamics. Very simply put, we need to invest a great deal of time, money and effort in research and development. R&D that focuses on the complexity marketers deal with. The simplification process has gone too far! Far enough to stop yielding results!

The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com