Brands
Brands treats a business's reputation as something you can map and manage, using Keller's brand equity pyramid to see whether customers actually feel what you intend them to feel.
The tiers stack upward, each one narrower than the one it rests on, until only resonance is left at the top.
Reach for this when…
- Customers can name you but can't say what you stand for.
- You've upgraded the product but the market still prices you as commodity.
- Marketing and the leadership team describe the brand differently.
How to run it
- Introduce brand equity using Keller's customer-based brand equity model.
- Map current associations on Keller's brand equity pyramid.
- Name the core brand promise and what actually differentiates it.
- Test that promise against real customer perception data.
- Find the gap between intended and perceived brand.
- Design alignment actions across the touchpoints that create the gap.
A worked example
Situation. Faisal Al-Otaibi's furniture firm, Otaibi & Co in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had spent three years improving its craftsmanship but customers still shopped it as a cheap flat-pack brand.
Applied. Mapped up Keller's pyramid, salience was strong - everyone knew the name - but judgments and feelings were weak; nobody believed the quality claim. He rebuilt the showroom, packaging and staff script around the craftsmanship story instead of the price story.
Result. Repeat customers started mentioning 'quality' unprompted in reviews. He raised prices on the new range without losing volume.
The catch
Brand models measure perception, which lags reality by months or years - fix the product and the brand catches up late, if you let it. And a strong brand papers over a weak offer only for a while; eventually the gap between promise and experience gets found out.
If leadership can't agree on the one-sentence brand promise, no amount of touchpoint work will fix it.
Origin: Kevin Lane Keller