Phil Cooke

Unifying the Brand – Why it Matters

If you’ve ever been in a branding meeting or workshop with me, you’ve heard me talk about “unifying the brand.”  My contention is that with 90% of major (and minor) organizations, if you look at the website, print advertising, TV promotions and programming, podcasts, and more, they could all be coming from five or six different organizations.  None look similar, often are completely different looking, and only occasionally
do they even get a common logo in there somewhere.

We’ve known for a long time that “impressions” make a difference in the consumer’s mind.  When all your advertising, promotions, and programming has a similar look and feel – or follows a common theme, it makes a far deeper and more meaningful impression in the mind of the audience.

Last year, Time Magazine revealed some interesting news about why we buy.  According to writer Barbara Kiviat, it’s not about product features, or even what it does. (No surprise there).  It’s about name recognition.  As she describes in the article, in their advertising, the makers of the headache remedy “Head On” don’t worry with features, or what the product will do for you.  They just repeat the name over and over again – and according to focus groups – it works.

Read the Time story – it’s fascinating, and reveals the power of brand unity.  The more you point to a name, the more people remember.  When testing peanut butter, the participants in a study thought the contents tasted better from the jar with a name brand.

Name recognition matters.  So what does that mean to you?  Get your name or the name of your organization out there.  In the digital media world, that means YouTube, podcasting, Google video, and other places.  It doesn’t make you any money directly, but it gets your name out there in the marketplace of ideas.  Likewise, use your organization’s name as much as you can – in sponsorships, promotions, advertising – anywhere you can get it.

Why?  Your goal is to make the name memorable, and make it stick.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 5:54 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.