Welcome to the brand room

As media channels proliferate, it’s harder than ever for marketers to determine how best to deliver branding messages along the path to purchase. Where are people most receptive to messages, and how can brand touchpoints work together in the most effective way?

Big data means that media planners know more and more about how and when messages are consumed, and developments like programmatic buying bring increasing sophistication in getting messages to target consumers at an appropriate time and place. But these developments don’t necessarily make life any easier; along with more information comes – inevitably – more complexity.

Taking a step back from this, and looking at media consumption from the perspective of brain response, can be helpful to give a simpler way of thinking about how different types of media interact and, therefore, their role during a purchase journey. Specifically, we use the analogy of the brand room to think about this.

In our heads we carry networks of associations for the things that we encounter in our lives. As we gather new information about brands, our associative memory links it to our existing knowledge and our brand networks grow. We can think about these networks as “rooms” in our heads, with one for each brand we come across. Some of these rooms, for familiar and loved brands, will be well-decorated and furnished with lots of associations, and the feeling of the room will reflect all our experiences and impressions about the brand.  Rooms for brands that we know less well will be more sparsely furnished. Advertising, along with other brand touchpoints, plays an important role in helping to furnish or re-decorate brand rooms by giving new information or changing perceptions of the brand.   

However, the brand rooms in our heads are not usually foremost in our consciousness; we don’t go around thinking about brands all the time, so the room is often in darkness. In order to illuminate all those hard-won associations in the critical moments when purchases decisions are being made, brands need to illuminate the room by identifying triggers that can act as a light switch, illuminating the room and bringing brand associations into play.

Brand logos are the most obvious examples of these triggers, but any aspect of brand iconography, and key elements of specific pieces of brand communication, have the potential to act this way. In our brain research, we identify these as “iconic triggers™”.  These may be shapes, colours, sounds or images that are appropriated by a brand, and they evoke the overall feelings associated with a brand when people see them again by lighting up the brand room.  These triggers are key to leveraging the impact of branding and brand communication along the path to purchase and across media.

The brand room analogy doesn’t address all the challenges of our infinitely complex media landscape, but it does set up two key implications for marketers and planners. The first is to identify the triggers that work for a brand and to deliver them consistently across media and channels.  The second is to form a clear view about the role of any piece of brand communication: is it going to furnish the brand room? If so, it needs to deliver new information or build emotional associations that will make that room a more comfortable and compelling place. Alternatively, is it going to act as a light switch? If that’s the case then communication needs to be single-minded, focusing simply on delivering one or more brand triggers as clearly and strongly as possible. 

Neuro-Insight is a market research company that uses unique brain-imaging technology to measure how the brain responds to communications. http://www.neuro-insight.com/

Read more from Heather Andrew here.