The Brand Pyramid

Today I attended a presentation about branding strategy that presented a pyramid like this:

I later learned that that's called the Customer-Based Brand Equity pyramid. The bottom level, the base of the pyamid, is your company's definition. The next layer represents the meaning that has for your customers, all the implied attributes and qualities that come with your brand. , next the feelings and judgements they make about that meaning, and last of all, the tiny triangle up top, represents their response -- the relationship your customers have to you. This struck me as an interesting image in more than one way.

First of all, it graphically shows how the population shrinks as you go through the marketing process. You broadcast a message, some percentage of your targets ignore it completely, some further percentage doesn't think it has anything to do with them, and so forth. Finally some tiny fraction of the initial audience takes up the call to action and converts to a customer.

Secondly, I was struck by the parallels with models of communication such as this:

If you imagine our pyramid above twisted back on itself as a kind of mobius strip, it might look like the map on the left.

"Relationship" in the pyramid above and "response" in the diagram below, both rely on interaction to take place. This diagram is like the pyramid, but with feedback.

And feedback is key here. The big public lessons about branding in the 21st century is that your brand is what the customers think it is, and corporate message is only part of that. Every twitter about your product, every website titled $your_company_sucks.net is part of the big conversation about branding. And not just your customers, but your future customers, your ex-customers, your competitors, get to join in.

It would be disingenuous for me to say that the people who gave the very short presentation I saw didn't get that point. In fact, they spoke quite a bit about external input and customer feedback as part of the branding strategy. But that brings me to my third point. Every 1000 words about public input was offset by the graphic in front of me of a pyramid -- rigid, hierarchical, one-way. Like doctors who are their own worst patients, or the cobbler's proverbial shoeless children, just because you're in the marketing department doesn't mean you're in control of your own message.