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“Branding is the thing that you do. Brand is the thing that we’re all trying to value and define … Brands that are good at branding have such a clear idea of how they want people to see them.”
– Christine E. Looser Ph.D

 

Christine Looser, Associate Professor, Minerva University

 

On the meaning of branding

“There isn’t a perfect way to brand things,  (but) there are structured ways to craft a meaningful brand.

I found branding to be this really interesting field where we’re trying to make inferences about an organisation […]  and I saw a lot of deep connections between what I studied in grad school called mind perception — how we sort of make up the mind of another human with how we sort of make up the mind of an organisation — and I think that is what a brand is. 

[You have] to see branding, not just from a brand perspective. There’s no branding textbook. Humans evolved to perceive other people. So you have to talk about evolution, we have to talk about cultural transmission. And then I give them an approach to thinking about branding in this sort of scientific framework, which is the idea that when we’re perceiving brands, sometimes we try to establish relationships with them, and we try to anthropomorphise them.  And then I say, the reason we probably do that, for these cultural transmission reasons and these evolutionary reasons that we sought out other minds, and that’s actually a pretty good place to kind of talk about why we even perceive brands in the first place.”

 

On what good branding is

“I think what really strong brands do […] they have such a clear idea of how they want people to see them, and they do all of these things to make that perception consistent.  That’s what I think good branding is – if you can homogenise the perception of your organisation across many different people, then you have good brand equity.”

 

On branding vs. marketing

“[…] marketing is a series of levers, you can pull the route customer behaviour.  So we often think in terms of marketing campaigns, I will do this one thing. I also need to do marketing research and  I need to understand my audience. it’s also trying to understand the competition, you do a competitive analysis, all those fall under marketing.  Branding is a newer concept, and it came from having undifferentiated products that needed a way to differentiate themselves.  

I think if we step back and think about the way organisations are using branding today, and as a much broader version, that brand is how people are perceiving your organisation, it’s the mind of your organisation, it’s this feeling that people have you understand that it’s a lot broader. […]  Only recently, are organisations being able to harness the power by bringing it out of marketing and saying marketing is a way that we can do branding, we can also do branding in many different ways.”

 

On the power shift of brand perception

What has been amplified through the use of social media is the opinions of other people influencing my own perception of what an organisation does. So I wouldn’t say that there’s any more or less control systematically, it’s just that one thing that contributes to what a brand is, which is my perception of other people’s perceptions, has way more ability to reach my brain and influence what I’m going to think about the organisation.

Trustworthy brands vs. untrustworthy brands 

 If you’re leading an organisation and you can make customers feel seen, you can bring them into a relationship, that’s going to establish trust, and that’s gonna make people really want to interact with the organisation.

It’s that feeling of trading off vulnerability for positive expectations, and the way organisations can harness that, is by letting people know that they should be able to expect positive things.

A brand is trustworthy, when it is consistent. And its messaging, it’s very clear about who and what it is, it’s very clear about its value proposition, it’s very clear about how it’s going to treat customers, and what to expect from it. Those expectations are good. I can look at exactly the same brand (as another person) and have different feelings of trust. But if that organisation is really good at branding, it’s going to be able to make a diverse audience feel trust, or they’re going to niche down.  So they’ve homogenised their audience, they’ve made them all very similar, and then they know how to speak to that specific audience.

 

Questions from our conversation

[1:03]   Thinking about how difficult it is to define branding, would you say that the question, “What is branding?” might be the organisational akin to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”

[1:35]  Maybe you can let us know how you got here and how you ended up having this conversation (with us) here today?

[3:56]  How did you make the connection between your studies and how did that happen?

[7:35]   You mentioned that you were an Associate Professor at Minerva University. What is Minerva and what makes the educational process or approach a little bit more unique?

[11:08]   Have you noticed any key differences between the students who have gone through the Minerva educational process compared to other students?

[12:40] If someone were to come into your branding class on the first day, how do you kind of kick that off?  What’s the first thing that you talk about?

[14:34] Why do you think we’re having such difficulty defining what branding is?

[21:09]  Customers are able to form what the organisation actually stands for, as opposed to the organisation being able to do that in their own hands.  Do you feel like there is an actual shift there?  Or do you think that it’s just quicker and that organisations haven’t had control this whole time?

[23:00] Do you think that there might be universal underlying elements that could make a brand trustworthy more so than a brand who isn’t?

[27:34] What is top down branding and bottom up branding?

[30:51] The way you’ve described that makes it sound like there’s an overlap in branding and then organisational culture. So where would you draw the line? And the difference? Or would you say that the lines are kind of blurred, and they’re pretty much the same?

[34:42] When it comes to branding, where have you noticed that most organisations fall short? What is something that is missing, and what is the gap? 

[35:32] Do you feel like it’s perhaps less important to have that universal definition, as opposed to having an organisational definition of what branding means to the organisation?

[37:58] Oftentimes, when you do a Google search on branding, marketing comes up as well. Where is that line in the difference? And why does that get mixed up so often? 

[39:55] What is the one thing that you would say to people in leadership positions who still are kind of on the fence about branding?

[41:36] What was your first impression of More Space for Light?

[46:51]  When you started (at More Space for Light) what aspects of it did you talk about, and then realise that it had to actually be in more conversations than just your brand strategy meetings? 

[1:01:10] What do you have more space for in 2021?

 

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About The Future Of Now series

Our goal at More Space For Light with The Future of Now (FON) series is to build a community of like-minded passionate professionals. We intend to bring together like-minded professionals to share, inspire, and explore new opportunities for growth. So you can discover new ways of working to bring back into your organisation.