Know your ABCs.

New from the Brand Channel’s Newsletter, is the paper on the ABC’s of Branding by Bill Nissim. An interesting piece which attempts to break down the architecture of a brand into three parts, so that Nissim may draw a nifty graph on which to plot a brand. Taking Attributes, Behaviour and Circumstance to be the three characteristics, Nissim suggests that a disciplined approach to managing these will bring about a great brand.

At face value, the characteristics seemed a solid and simple way to approach the branding of one’s next product or service, yet in detail Nissim’s examples seem to be weak and confused. Which seemed in conflict with his paper’s title.

Nissim starts with the first characteristic: Attributes, which is pretty self-explanatory and summed up nicely by the line: “In short, attributes are indeed imperatives in our daily discrimination process and form the basis by which we make choices.”.

The next of Nissim’s characteristics: Behaviour, isn’t however, about the way a brand behaves in all its functions, like I would have expected, but rather how a consumer might purchase a product. Would you be like Tom Peters, in the example he writes, and choose the more expensive brand of salt? “Don’t we all behave in the same way” Nissim asks? Marketers would certainly like us to - but this leaves out all the people that shop on a budget, and paying a dollar more for a branded product sometimes isn’t an option for them. I do think purchasing behaviour is a vital aspect of marketing a product or service - but that isn’t something you can always control or assume we all do in the same way. Whereas brand behaviour is something you can, as a maker of a product or service, get your arms around.

Nissim’s next characteristic: Circumstance, expands on Behaviour a little, by explaining that market conditions may not allow for your product or service to survive. For instance, if you were to offer something too far beyond the mainstream consumers’ current circumstance, they simply will not buy it. I’m not sure I can completely swallow that, typing this on a personal computer, as our world is filled with products that have succeeded in not being just an incremental step in product evolution. But it is true, an incremental step is often easier for the mass market to adopt than a bold, disruptive change, which needs to ‘cross the chasm’ before it can succeed. But Nissim doesn’t allow for this equation and so everyone reading this, who did develop the next Napster equivalent, or Personal Computer: you can’t use this to help you.

Then Nissim uses Southwest Airlines as a ‘practical’ case study, which to me seems like it was a very disruptive service offering within a pretty established market. Offering consumers a great difference in choice, back then, in their circumstances, of how to travel. And he then explains Southwest using the A, B and C characteristics as filters.

Unfortunately it all deteriorates into a mess at this point. Instead of first explaining how a consumer would make a choice to use Southwest in his explanation of Attributes - he describes in detail how Southwest went about to design a new low-cost airline. The next explanation, Behaviour instead uses Home Depot over Southwest, and the final one includes an interesting concept of “under and over-shooting” but leaves me with little connection with his earlier definition of Circumstances. And then he nimbly introduces the next section of his paper with the teaser: “The following section presents this connection theoretically and conceptually.”.

The Appreciable Brand Triad is the section in which Nissim strings together a theoretical model, which you can use yourself, to create yourself a great brand. This model lives on several dimensions, and shows clearly where the ‘perfect balance’ or ‘perfect harmony’ is. So really, all you need perhaps is an interactive model of this Appreciable Brand Triad, plug in the data you have, and try to steer your brand into the space of perfect balance and harmony - because clearly that is where great brands like Southwest and Home Depot live. All the time. Okay, maybe some of the time. For perhaps a few minutes a day. At best.

Nissim’s conclusion does admit that the dynamics of his plotted points on the Appreciable Brand Triad ‘are in constant motion’ and that their locale suggest three previously unmentioned characteristics to a great brand: an intelligently designed business model, proper positioning of ABCs, and flawless execution. So how does the theoretical model help me then?

Overall I was greatly disappointed to read a messy and badly described model of branding, that had great promise of being something simple and easy to adopt. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with suggesting there might be an easy model to use to plot your brand and how to measure its strengths and weaknesses, but once again a perfectly intelligent young man trips over the difference between branding a brand and building a brand. And lightly drops in the importance of things like execution at the end of it all.

Models and oversimplification of complex activities like this, are incredibly difficult to develop, and it is frustrating to see so many people failing to do so. It is made worse for them by using almost no research, and then suggesting there’s some form of perfection to be achieved. Rebranding branding activities also seems like a certain waste of time, self-serving perhaps but how much does it really help?

If you want to simplify business and marketing activities, then keep the simplification simple. Don’t develop quasi-scientific models to lend some academic weight to an activity that is about is easy as herding cats. And remember, branding isn’t brand strategy - but is a marketing term to describe the marking of products.