How do buyers internalize a buying proposition and create a brand?

Most traditional definitions of brand omit the single most significant distinction: the relationship between buyer and seller that lies at the heart of every brand.

These two actors relate to the brand in substantively different ways, with clearly distinguished perspectives, terms, expectations, needs, and basic understandings of what it all means. Our definition of a brand, therefore, centers on the buyer-seller relationship.

Value Fulfillment Model for Brands

The figure above depicts several social and psychological dimensions of brands, calling attention to the fact that buyers within a media marketspace encounter a vendor’s value proposition, apply buying logic and a branding calculus to the vendor’s value proposition, and create the brand—the sum total of the customer’s experience of satisfaction, the richness and meaning of the relationship with the vendor, the interactions with all brand touchpoints, and the story that frames the buying and using experience of the customer.

The traditional approach, however, minimizes, or discounts altogether, this relationship. “My customers just want toothpaste. They don’t want a relationship with me or my company.” The focus lies on the transaction. But as loyalty, customer retention, and lifetime customer value emerged as important metrics for brand management in the 1980s and 1990s, the relationship between buyer and seller moved to center stage. This relationship takes on paramount importance for brand managers who seek success in the Networked Economy.

The four elements of every brand
We define a brand in terms of four interrelated elements: satisfaction, collaboration, relationship, and story.

Satisfaction
In our definition, a brand represents the principal satisfaction that a customer expects and desires from the process of buying and using a product or service. This means customers buy an intangible gestalt—a thought, a feeling, a physical sensation, even, in some cases, a social interaction, that all coalesce into a desired, pleasurable satisfaction.

Coke, for example, represents far more than colored, sugared water: as the company’s slogans suggest, this drink adds a certain spice to life, representing a pause that refreshes. Between the lines, it says stop and smell the roses, enjoy your life, in a certain lusty but playful way, and, perhaps most important, do it with friends and family. Decades of branding have deeply imprinted upon us that Coke is as much a social activity as it is personal thirst quencher.

Collaboration
Hundreds if not thousands of customer interactions with a product or service, and related marketing activities, build a brand. A brand, therefore, also represents an ongoing collaboration between seller and buyer. While a single event may position a brand in the mind and heart of the customer, a brand summarizes the totality of these many experiences. In a meaningful way, each positive or negative outcome of the buying and using experience goes into the buyer’s “emotional bank account.” Over time this account grows and produces interest, or, through regular or catastrophic withdrawals, the balance shrinks to zero: the customer defects to another brand.

Effective collaboration means that the seller has a well-defined and effective strategy for making new deposits in the buyer’s emotional bank account. It does so with the active permission of buyers. The branding process helps buyers understand how to translate certain experiences into deposits into the account. A brand educates new customers in how to get the satisfactions that existing, branded customers already experience. A brand conveys a set of behavioral and perceptual norms from existing to new customers, from one demographic generation to each successive cohort that follows. As such, a brand acts as a mechanism of culture and suggests that use of the tools and methodologies of cultural anthropology and sociology may serve brand managers.

Relationship
This collaboration produces the buyer/seller relationship. Most companies and marketing managers do not yet understand what it means to have a relationship with a customer. If they did, they simply would not treat them the way they so often do. Generally, service firms—professional or retail—tend to understand and therefore do a better job of relating to customers.

In other words, a relationship has no brand value until management supports it with specific policies, training, and technical infrastructure. A happy face doesn’t cut it without results, and you don’t get results without painstaking preparation and ongoing development organized to create, foster, and enhance a relationship over time.

Story
Developmental psychology and brand management both deal with the way that human beings grow and form lifelong relationships anchored by a core social identity. As children begin to become aware of others, they must develop social skills. They must learn how to play nice. Psychologists familiar with this critical socialization process indicate that children socialize through storytelling. As a young boy, I recall playing “build a fort” and I was particularly pleased when I could get other boys to join with me in the storyline I was creating as we built the fort. Occasionally, young girls might convince me to play “house,” taking the role of daddy, baby, etc. From a very early age, we learn that stories provide social context, pleasurable engagements, and reciprocity: I’ll play in your story if you’ll play in mine.

Brands operate in an identical fashion. Every brand tells a story. Some stories speak to a broader set of desires and needs than others. In all cases, the story gives meaning to the relationship and its evolution over time. Ultimately, the best stories transcend the buyer-seller relationship. Not for a minute do we forget that transactions make the world go around. But the context of those transactions—the brand story—can uplift the transaction into a lifelong, heartfelt affiliation. Some of these brand stories become “our” stories. They define our core identity and serve as badges of belonging and currencies of value that we share with other people, where the mere act of referral becomes an expression of love or concern. The most beloved brands in the world do the heart’s work, serving as currencies of affiliation, love, and caring. But whether beloved or simply respected, a great brand tells its story in ways that evoke deep, visceral responses from people who subsequently come back for more and advocate brand use to family and friends.