Branding takes advantage of the natural way our brains work.

The brain tries to be efficient when confronted with new information.

What you see here looks like a blue square, a yellow circle, a purple triangle, more yellow circles, and so on.

However, while you’re seeing the seemingly random shapes above, your brain is trying to do this:

The brain makes sense of information by grouping and forming associations.

Your brand will be sorted together in customers’ brains with the things that surround it — the things your brain associates with it. Aflac’s commercials pair the company Aflac with a duck that has the voice of Gilbert Gottfried, over and over again. So the brain says, “Aflac goes with funny-voiced duck.” If you laugh at Aflac’s commercials, then your brain also says, “Aflac goes with laughter, with feeling good.” These associations to feelings are what advertisers are trying to build. Good branding finds ways to pair positive emotions with your company, over and over again, until customers’ brains sort the feeling and the company into the same group.

This is why it’s important to be consistent. Your brand must say the same things over and over and must be paired with the same traits over and over, to ensure that those traits, attributes, and messages are associated with your brand in your customers’ minds.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Brand Basics. 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.