The Brain’s Guide to Building a Brand
You only need to look at a fraction of one of these logos, and your brain fills with images and experiences.
The Nike logo reminds me of an ad I saw over 20 years ago, featuring a montage of athletes in the moments before their competitions begin. Right when the whistle or gun was about to sound, the screen turned black. “Just do it” appeared. I still get chills thinking about that ad and the anticipation I feel competing.
Most people think about branding backward. Conventional marketing says companies create brands.
Not so.
Our brains create brands.
Companies can influence how a brand is perceived but do not control it.
To help create a strong brand we must begin with the brain and how it processes brands.
What is a Brand?
Let’s use Starbucks to illustrate the concept of a brand.
When driving on the highway, you pass a sign for Starbucks at the upcoming exit. It instantly triggers neurons in your brain to fire, activating memories and experiences associated with Starbucks:
You think of your favorite drink order and the relaxation you feel when you take your first sip.
You picture the smile of the barista, the dim lighting, and the earthy, comfy furniture in the stores.
You think of the ridiculous price tag and the painfully long line in the airport Starbucks as you fear missing your flight (just me??).
All of this is triggered nearly instantaneously by a company name with a color, font, and picture you recognize.
A brand exists when you experience repeated associations with a company that activates multiple parts of your brain to give you an impression of a company. A combination of sensory, emotional, visual, auditory, and conceptual experiences form memories and strengthen the neural networks surrounding the brand. When we say a company has a “strong brand,” we mean that a company or product activates a set of consistent, positive associations in the brain.
Neurons that Fire Together Wire Together
The neurons in your brain form complex networks of connections. When signals are repeatedly transmitted along certain routes, they form connections called neural pathways, which are like roads. Some roads are dirt paths, some are two-lane residential streets, and some are eight-lane highways. When one neuron repeatedly stimulates another, the strength of the signal between the two increases.
The more frequently neurons fire together (say, the mermaid logo and the delicious smell of coffee), the more pavement gets laid down on that road, making it faster to travel from one association to another. The stronger the associations between attributes and a brand (i.e., the bigger the roads), the quicker the brain activates all other associated attributes.
At a market level, “brand” is a culmination of the dominant attributes most people associate with your product or company.
That is, a brand is what other people perceive about you, not what you say about yourself.
Product Category is Your Brand’s Foundation
The product category is your brain’s most important association with a product or business. This association allows your brain to classify your brand within a familiar structure.
Let’s test this. What brand do you think of when reading these words?
Low cost
Friendly service
No frills
Colorful
Quirky
Having trouble? It’s probably difficult to think of a specific brand because you don’t have any context for these descriptions. What if we add the word “airline”? Now, what brand comes to mind?
If you didn’t guess Southwest, you likely narrowed it down to a few options. The category gave you context for these descriptions.
The category is a brand’s foundation. Associations and differentiation are nearly always built on top of the category.
This is why building a brand for a new category can be so difficult. Our brains don’t yet know how to process the category. The brand’s associations are essentially in limbo until we connect them to something familiar. A useful tactic for new categories is to borrow a familiar concept. Consider the common use of a cross-category metaphor: “Uber for groceries” (Instacart).
Category familiarity also explains why it can be challenging to brand services or concepts such as “cloud computing” or “mortgage-backed securities.” Unless the audience understands the category, any hope of brand-building is moot. If you sell water bottles, establishing your category can take milliseconds with a simple photo of a water bottle. IT consulting services may require more explanation to ensure your audience understands what exactly it is that you do.
Marketing doesn’t own the brand
Marketing is often thought of as the “owner” of a brand, but this mindset can be deceiving. While marketing typically sets brand strategy—such as positioning, messaging, color, and tone of voice—brand cohesiveness must be a multi-functional effort. The product experience, customer service, retail experience, sales, and marketing all influence the brand impression. The departments with the greatest influence on brand perception are those that have the most frequent interactions with the customer.
Consider a B2B software provider whose brand identity is more strongly influenced by frequent product usage, interactions with the sales rep, and annual conferences rather than advertising. The teams most accountable for the brand impression would be the sales, engineering, and events teams.
Compare this to a product such as toothpaste, whose brand touchpoints are dominated by product usage and advertising—the innovation and marketing teams would have the most influence over how the brand is perceived.
3 Principles for Building a Strong Brand
So, how do we apply this information to our daily work? Here are three simple principles to integrate into your strategies, practices, and reviews to help create a strong, brain-based framework for building a brand. Though simple on the surface, they are hard to execute.
1) Consistency:
Regular, reliable, and repeated exposure to the same brand elements creates stronger brand associations in the brain. This requires a consistent overall message, tone of voice, color, logo, and general brand experience. Messages can be slightly modified to fit the context, but aim for as much consistency as possible. Repeated exposure to the same elements will strengthen the neural networks.
Common Consistency Mistakes:
Product launches that seem totally from one another, as though they are come from different companies
Different messages in different channels
Changing brand assets too frequently (such as positioning, packaging, tagline
2) Congruency:
The entire brand experience must be cohesive. If advertising promises one thing and the product doesn’t deliver, customers experience dissonance. For example, an airline can’t boast about on-time flights when customers are frequently delayed.
Common Congruency Mistakes:
Messaging overpromises what the product delivers
Customer service or sales interactions don’t have the same tone of voice or vibe as marketing
Actions go against the company’s stated mission
A company promotes sustainability or social-impact efforts in one domain but is silent on a vulnerable issue for that category
3) Connection:
Connection in branding is about creating positive neural associations in your customers' minds. Aim to deeply understand your customer and demonstrate genuine empathy for their needs and challenges. By aligning your brand with their values, using storytelling to relate to their experiences, and building personal relationships, you create meaningful connections.
Common Connection Mistakes:
Evoking emotion without a purpose, such as creating tear-jerking content or humor without relating it to the brand or products
Trying too hard to appear “relatable” or “authentic”
Eliciting fear, guilt, or insecurity to try to sell more product
My hope is that you have shifted your thinking from brand as your asset to brand as your customer’s perception. Your role is to influence the desired impression you want your customers to have about you. The more intentional we are with consistency, congruency, and connection, the stronger our brand will be.
