Branding Strategy Insider

Identity Crisis - Brand vs. User?

Everyone knows there's a critical difference between Brand imagery and User imagery. A brand's personality tells a story about the product. It tells its target market what to expect. It suggests heritage, quality, flavor, status, effectiveness, attractiveness, service, value, when to use it, where to use it, how to use it, etc. Potent brands create rich pictures in the eye of the consumer.

User imagery, on the other hand, generally refers to one of two possibilities.

For many products, User Imagery often represents the ego ideal of interested people - who I want to appear to be because I use your product; vs. the "shadow" or "not me" among those who reject the product - it's who I don't want to be associated with and therefore would not want to use the product. Often, User Imagery projective questions are used as a way to keep participants honest in their reactions to product. So, for example, if a respondent says she probably will buy a product, but the user imagery is of a "not me" person, it becomes obvious that she was only being polite in her response to the purchase interest question and is not really interested. Car owner imagery is often expressed as this ego ideal or shadow. As discussed later, see the difference between the BMW driver vs. the Mercedes driver.

Other times, user imagery refers to a more realistic depiction of the actual consumer. We have an example of that below in the cough medicine story.

Brand Imagery through Qualitative Research 2

As I shared earlier, a brand image is a condensation of all experiences a person has ever had in conjunction with the brand.  The goal in assessing brand equity is to pull out as many of these as possible, then see how they make up a unified whole.

One type of experience is the experience of the tangible product.  In thinking of your brand image, ask yourself what single component of the product is most responsible for the total brand image? For Mercedes Benz, it is probably the elegant little three-pointed star hood ornament. In research done a few years back on some mainline US brands, these were some of the main contributors to these brands' images:

Brand                       Main Image Source Lies in:

NyQuil                         Little plastic cup
Levis                          Gray, faded look when old
McDonalds                   Fries and mushy texture of Big Mac
VW Rabbit                   Body shape, little wheels and tires

The research here is simple: Just deconstruct the product into its components, and ask a sample of consumers which component "most communicates the feeling of  (brand name)-ness", as in "Levi-ness", or  "NyQuil-ness."

Contributed by Jeffrey F. Durgee, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Assessing Brand Imagery through Qualitative Research

Sidney J. Levy of the University of Arizona was one of the original founding thinkers in the area of brand imagery.  He defines a brand image as "a condensation of all experiences a person has ever had in conjunction with a brand."  The experiences include memorable family stories, odd-looking design elements, tastes (for food products), special usage rituals, unusual sounds, and any other way the product consciously or unconsciously impacts our senses, memories, hearts, and minds.  To assess brand imagery is to unearth these impressions and interpret and integrate them in terms of a unified whole.

How to get at all these pieces?  We will cover this in the following weeks, although a beginning trick is to simply ask for respondents coming to focus groups to each write down and bring in two memorable family stories about the brand.  Assuming four groups, this gives us 80 stories.  The stories are analyzed like literary texts to get at brand characters.  In one story for Dr. Pepper, for example, a teen respondent wrote how he and two other boys "ran away from a bully who wanted to take our Dr. Peppers."  The story reveals the strong taste connection of this brand - but also the timidity and lack of power and bravery among teen Dr. Pepper drinkers, attributes more typical of teen Coke and Pepsi drinkers.  It was three Dr. Pepper drinkers against one bully!  Accordingly, in the groups, the Dr. Pepper drinkers were extremely quiet and timid.

Contributed by: Jeffrey F. Durgee, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute