Brand Intimacy: A New Paradigm in Marketing

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT BRAND INTIMACY

With Brand Intimacy, brand experts Rina Plapler and Mario Natarelli unlock a powerful inner truth about brands—that the best ones create intimate, enduring bonds with customers that leads to revenue growth and value. Powerful and insightful, Brand Intimacy brings a fresh, new perspective on how to build brands and strengthen customer bonds in today’s hyper-connected world. The book blends science, analytics, psychology and research along with simple, practical examples to help brand owners and brands achieve their goals.

—Jonathan Bell, Managing Partner, WANT Branding

We are in a new age. It is critically important to discover how our decisions are made, whether made about brands or our role in society. This book illuminates and quantifies the importance of emotion in the decision process and provides a winning construct to achieve emotional brand intimacy.

—John Diefenbach, Chairman, MBLM, and Former CEO, Landor

MBLM’s insights and creativity helped us strengthen our brand and improve the way we connect with consumers.

—Giorgio Galli, Design Director, Timex Group

A must-read that captures the importance of appealing to instincts and emotions to build powerful brands.

—Fran Gormley, Adjunct Associate Professor of Marketing, NYU Stern

A great look at what inspires people to engage with brands and how to use that to your advantage. Brand Intimacy, both the book and the concept, is important for marketers to understand and for brands to use wisely.

—Sami Main, Digital Media Reporter, Adweek

Critical reading for any marketer or business leader. Brand Intimacy should change how marketers think about everything.

—Jill Malandrino, Global Markets Reporter, Nasdaq

For those looking to grow their brand and their business, Brand Intimacy is a must-read. It is a thoughtful examination that questions our current thinking on marketing, while offering a better solution, borne through careful examination and consumer insights.

—Hamza Mustafa, CEO, PCFC Investments

Brand Intimacy is a comprehensive guide to brand building for any modern marketer or business executive.

—Richard Rubenstein, President, Rubenstein PR

This book is amazing and scary. It demonstrates how businesses are run is not how we manage brands. Aligning an organization, prioritizing emotion and thinking of brand relationships like human ones demonstrates a far more compelling approach than most business books espouse.

—David Spencer, Strategic Advisor, Golf in Dubai

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BRAND INTIMACY

Text copyright © 2017 Mario Natarelli and Rina Plapler

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN: 978-1-578-266-852

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Cover and Interior Design by Hui Min Lee

Author photographs by Mike Sheehan

Printed in the United States

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

eBooks created by www.ebookconversion.com

To Daniel Kahneman, who changed

the way we think about thinking.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Why This Book And Why Now?

1.0 Context & Understanding

1.1 The Power of Brands

1.2 Paradigm Shift

1.3 Approaches and Models

1.4 Understanding Intimacy

1.5 Discovery

2.0 Theory & Model

2.1 Definition and Model

2.2 Model: Users

2.3 Model: Archetypes

2.4 Model: Stages

2.5 Model: Brand Intimacy Quotient

2.6 Model: Rankings

3.0 Methods & Practice

3.1 Value and Return

3.2 Failures, Perspectives and Lessons

3.3 Building More Intimate Brands

3.4 The Brand Intimacy Platform

Conclusion: The Power of Intimate Brands

Appendix

10 Ways to Assess the Intimacy of Your Brand

References: Endnotes

References: Image Sources

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

WHY THIS BOOK AND WHY NOW?

After more than two decades branding companies, countries and people around the globe, we have realized that growth, in some shape or form, is at the core of all our clients’ needs, and that brand could be an extremely effective and powerful tool to facilitate demand. While desire for growth remains constant in today’s increasingly interconnected world, the challenges vary. Take political disruption, which can birth populism and an anti-establishment ethos. This creates a polarized population with highly charged views that can affect trade, supply chain optimization and globalization. There’s also organic growth: for the past decade, countless companies have optimized costs and stripped down any and all aspects of their businesses to the extreme in order to save costs and maximize profits. But what’s next for them? How can they find new growth? We see technology transforming everything we do in our work, at home and at play. Companies face fast-paced cycles of innovation with steep opportunity costs and profound risks that can render them extinct—quickly. Last, demographics are shifting and with them, the familiar associations and behaviors of now-aging boomers are changing. A new demographic is emerging—millennials, an entirely different generation who require new understanding to effectively reach.

What can businesses do to advance? And what role does brand play?

Brand can be a key asset in framing opportunities; however, it requires thinking about brand in a different way than traditional marketers or business schools suggest. It requires a new paradigm designed for today’s times.

How did we arrive at this new way of thinking? We spent nearly a decade conducting qualitative and quantitative research with more than 12,000 consumers in the U.S., Germany, Japan, Mexico and the UAE. We fielded and interpreted over 20,000 qualitative brand stories that comprised 2,000 pages of verbatim responses explaining how individuals form relationships with brands. We turned to quantitative research and, over the course of several years, analyzed 100,000 brand evaluations. Through factor analysis and structural equation modeling, we were able to better understand which levers need to be pulled to build bonds between brand and consumers. We built a data engine to compute, compare and dynamically render rankings, head to head comparisons and detailed brand scores. We have applied our new paradigm to create brands and to reignite established ones. Each year, since 2015, we publish an annual study on intimate brands and their impact.

But let’s take a step back.

We are all shaped by brands, whether we realize it or not.

The process starts in life with toy trucks and princesses and only continues as we age. The cars we drive; the household items we prefer; the food we eat; the clothes we wear; the places we travel; the sports teams we follow; the celebrities we admire; the companies we trust; the politicians we elect—while the average person may not think about these as brand choices, marketers have spent decades working hard to create perceptions and the associations that make us want to try or purchase one brand over another.

Whenever we ask people to share with us the brands they are intimate with, many times they will initially respond with, None. But then you start asking them about their car, their camera, their phone, their sneakers, their favorite drink . . . and all of a sudden, they discover themselves to in fact be passionate advocates for brands they favor.

In other words, we are more attached to brands than we realize.

That is because brands are much more than a name, a logo, or a jingle. Yes, they are business assets that create value for the companies that represent them; and yes, they can be products, services, people, and places; and yes, they can drive demand, command price premiums and increase loyalty. But they’re more than that; or at least they have the potential to be more than that.

So, with so many books out there already that talk about branding, why another one?

It’s simple. We have found that approaches to branding have largely stagnated. Most feature models, structures, and thinking from decades ago. Those ideas were leading and advanced in their day, to be sure; but too many things have changed for these approaches to be relevant, much less cutting edge. Think about it: practically speaking, could you use a computer from the 1980s today? You could probably still benefit from its functionality; however, it would be very limited in what it could do. It would not align with any new software, nor sync with your other devices, and you’d likely have some compatibility problems when sharing files. It is essentially the same principle with marketing. Why use yesterday’s thinking for today’s (or tomorrow’s) challenges?

We now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that people make decisions and process information based on emotion and intuition.

That is relatively new information, which comes from advancements in neuro­science and behavioral science. It’s a far cry from prevailing sentiment that defines us as thoughtful, rational beings; yet most marketers and business leaders have neglected this insight, and continue to ignore the most powerful component of brand building and growth: emotion. Rather, most continue to overestimate the importance of rational, hierarchical-based thinking, founded on what we now know are faulty decision making constructs. In essence, they are misdiagnosing the marketplace and, as a result, are providing the wrong cures.

And we wonder why results don’t change.

As big a topic as emotion is, decision makers are slow to change. The proven and established is safe; the new and daring, a bit more precarious.

So, yes—another book about brand, but not just another book. A book for winning in the marketplace of today. One based on very different thinking. One that represents a new paradigm. One that is dedicated to building bonds with customers. One that translates the academic perspective of intimacy into an instructive and inspiring marketing model for building successful brands. One that is proven to increase growth and profitability.

Welcome to the new world of brand intimacy.

1

CONTEXT & UNDERSTANDING

An overview of early inspiration,

the evolving marketing landscape,

existing branding approaches and

initial qualitative findings. Here we

outline why yesterday’s thinking is

not designed for the present and

why brands must change.

1-1

THE POWER OF BRANDS

We believe in the power of brands. The power to inspire, align, and endure. But we’ve also witnessed many that fall short, miss the mark, or simply fade away. As partners and practitioners, we’ve been building brands for decades across geographies, industries, and organizations of varying types and sizes. Along the way, we’ve continually searched for fundamental truths about what makes a brand successful, compelling, and memorable.

At their core, we believe brands are best described as a relationship—a bond, built on values, beliefs, associations and performance. And, like any human relationship, brands are complex, dynamic, and often hard to manage or bend to your will. This is a vastly different way to conceptualize this highly abstract thing called a brand. The term itself­—brand—has been distorted to mean everything from a name or logo to your reputation or a company’s outbound message or campaign. Though all of these components are integral to a brand, focusing more on the bonds created versus the inert representations is a pivotal new consideration.

The practice of leveraging brands to promote or sell products and services has for decades treated brands in a very static way. There is a tendency to use more rational and pragmatic methods to create, measure and manage them, which seems at odds with the very emotional nature of what attracts us in the first place. Over time, we began to suspect that there had to be a better way to understand, shape and manage brands. This thinking has led us on a two-decade long journey, drawing from the many lessons we’ve learned from the brands we’ve played a role in creating and also those we admire from afar.

Together with our partners at MBLM, we’ve witnessed the evolution of branding through the decades, and have had the privilege of building and shaping some of the most reputable brands in the world. Through each decade we’ve summarized the seismic forces that were shaping brands in fundamental and profound ways.

In the 80’s, the very notion of brands as assets to be leveraged gained prominence with major (mostly Western) companies. Fueled by mergers and acquisitions and companies’ expanding footprints, in the 90’s brands became increasingly globalized, crossing borders, cultures and demographics.

In the 00’s, the internet revolution began its digital impact on all things marketing and brand related. The phrase from bricks to clicks sums up the fervor to imbue brands with digital relevance. In the 10’s, technology continued to drive innovation and breakthroughs for brands. Data, advanced algorithms, social media and mobile adoption are just some of the forces that have made brands more enabled and more pervasive than ever before.

We believe there is still a new next stage of transformation for brands; however, before we go there, let’s take a more detailed look at some compelling brand transformation milestones through the years. We’ve selected these examples to illustrate the power and potential in brands. These will also help chart the course of our experience in shaping brands to solve significant business challenges. Most of