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Nation Branding: Bankrolling You and Me

Angelique van Engelen - 10/3/2005

Why do we take so badly to manipulation by people around us, but are totally ignorant of similar communication tactics when they are unleashed on us by way bigger, impersonal, forces also claiming our mental space?

The answer is simple; the sway major product brands manage to hold over us is intriguing because it affects us in ways we find rather pleasing. By stating this, we've caught the essence of branding in a few lines. There's a 'you and I' communication at the heart of all branding activity that's intricately interwoven with our deepest desires. The two-way process has dynamics shrowded in mystery because the marketer and the consumer actually never meet face to face, despite their communication on a high, deeply personal level. It is all the more intriguing also because it's the consumer that willfully chooses to be enveloped by the elusive yet present -therefore slightly dark- force that attempts to connect to him/her through creativity.

Consumers hardly ever get to see advertising agency office walls clad with metres of sheets depicting flow charts with prognoses and targets that aim to reach the hearts of the millions of people purchasing the products. None of the recollected messages that actually linger in consumers' minds are anywhere near as intricate as the elaborate logic behind them. They are at most scraps of memory-triggering thoughts. But even a hint of evidence trickling through into real life makes the marketer incredibly proud nevertheless.

The psychology involved with branding is very complex but it's not entirely a waste of time to picture its most decisive moments as a marker on a line stretching from A to Z. A being the human feeling of absolute despair and Z insurmountable greatness. With human feelings as complex as they are, the general experience branding marketers are interested in is to get the lights to flicker around point Z by means of something that's either unusual, memorable or shocking. The closer we get to Z, the more likely it is that the trigger they've invented demands some activation of our brain.

Brand marketers have a good grasp of the entire spectrum of human emotions and simply reproduce what they perceive will be our conduct into campaigns mimicking these feelings and exaggerate them a tad. Everyone agrees that most personalized brand images are believed to be more effective than impersonal imaging to sell products. This is logical. We all rather read a romantic novel than a user manual on microwaves. The brand, once established, will be further strengthened as marketers adapt it further to descriptions of their personal experiences with the product. The major dilemma marketers faced with the task of personalizing a brand is how to encapsulate human anticipations of benefit in a natural way.

Appealing to a person's belief that by using the product they will benefit somehow has to do with an alignment of the product's scope with the appropriate human feelings. This is not always obvious. It is difficult to think up ways to make people feel great about for instance tooth brushes or yellow post-it notes that are more than simply practical but also involve the emotions. Often marketers will try to make a product appealing by highlighting perceived social or affiliation benefits too. 'Use this and you'll be like the rest of us, successful human beings', the idea conveyed is. The message 'buy this product, it's a great functional tool' pales by comparison. It is a lot easier for competitors to imitate a successful product marketed on such a flimsy basis than one that involves complex emotions. Differentiation by any other means than the purely functional is what makes brands what they are.

The actual branding exercise, addressing human feelings of wanting to be wealthy, to be happy, to be intelligent, to belong, to have an everlasting, moving, touchifeely -whatever's the mindset- life, often boils down to a recreational exercise. The more accurate the emotional triggers are reproduced, the more successful the brand is likely to be. The marketer will do whatever he can to try to access the consumer's frame of mind and discover the world through the consumer's eyes.

This is a precarious task because how others see us often does not match how we see ourselves. We all tend to have a view of ourselves that is slightly different from what we broadcast to the outside world. Brand associations are designed to connect with our mind's blind spot. Marketers are taking full advantage of any vacant mental space they know of. They simply step into it and have a ball at trying to inflate it beyond proportion, engaging on as many levels as possible. Human emotions being key in this game. The best brand campaigns are successful at playing with people's subconscious in ways that even surprise the marketers themselves. The expert researcher into blind spots is Emily Pronin, who actually coined the phrase 'bias blind spot' and managed to convince the world that it's a cognitive bias we all tend to maintain which makes us believe that we're "better than average" for possible positive traits and "less than average" for negative traits.

The ways to access this information are manifold. They include visualization, free association, and recognition of commonly used terms for feelings. Marketers find information that's the result of a provocation most rewarding. Evoked emotional responses are believed to be highly valuable because they contain information that is not immediately obvious otherwise.

Claims to posession of the hidden dimension are often exaggerated, but then marketers talking about branding would not be doing their job if they didn't market themselves. Stories that branding experts tell us are tales of intangible realities combined with tangible products leading to business transactions that are slightly out of our control, but don't control us.