Communication idea of ​​the brand. Brand communications in advertising. Focus on the right goal

Concept and classification of brand communications

Marketing communications occupy an important place in brand development, since their content influences consumer behavior and attitudes. To achieve its goals, the company organizes an effective exchange of information between its brand and consumers.

Definition 1

In marketing, a brand is understood as a set of signs, symbols and images that reflect information about a company, product or service. This is an image that is embedded in the consumer’s mind through marketing communications, which allows one to distinguish one brand from another.

The goal of brand marketing communications is to obtain positive emotions from consumers of goods and services from information when perceiving the content of the brand.

Brand communications are carried out in various forms and types. Particular attention is paid to interpersonal communications, which are influenced by a number of factors:

• correctness and accuracy of the brand symbol;
• confidence;
• attractiveness;
• confession;
• taking into account interests and needs;
• consumer responses (reviews, comments, recommendations);
• service level, etc.

Analysis of these factors allows us to better understand the processes of interpersonal communications. The following types of brand communications are distinguished:

1. verbal - oral communications;
2. non-verbal - messages sent through gestures, facial expressions, postures, glances, characteristics of voice and speech, etc.

Unlike non-verbal communications, oral communications have such qualities as: efficiency, surprise and the ability to use words and signals simultaneously.

Non-verbal communications play an important role in branding. They help enrich the communication process. The degree of their influence as a means of communication depends on how their content is interpreted by consumers.

Verbal communications convey information about the brand, and non-verbal communications help shape the consumer’s emotional attitude towards the brand. An important element is the presence of feedback, which turns brand communications into a two-way process.

Brand communication process

Definition 2

The brand communication process is the communication with consumers to exchange verbal and written information that is contained in the brand.

This is a rather complex process that consists of several interconnected stages.

• preparation of brand communications: research of the market, consumers, competitors, selection of verbal and non-verbal brand attributes, creation of messages;
• selection of communication channels from the point of view of consumer trust in them;
• conveying a brand message;
• receiving feedback and analysis.

One of the components of a brand’s communication process is its multichannel nature. A large number of messages coming from different sources are decrypted by consumers using “keys”. Packaging, its design and information, advertising on TV or in a magazine, brand name, brand image convey information to the consumer in different ways, and he interprets all messages differently. In this case, the advertiser must stick to one brand content so that there are no conflicting opinions about it among the target audience.

A key problem in developing brand communications is unfocused messages. To attract the attention and interest of the consumer, the company every time offers new information about the characteristics of the product. This confuses the consumer and makes it impossible to understand the true benefits of purchasing the product. Therefore, the main feature that any brand should have is identity. This is a unique set of material and meaningful features by which the consumer recognizes the brand among others.

Features of brand marketing communications

The set of marketing communications that are used to create and develop a company brand is divided into:

• ATL technologies (above the line - above the line) - traditional methods of sales (direct advertising);
• BTL technologies (below the line) – non-traditional sales methods (indirect advertising).

ATL technologies include television, radio, press, outdoor advertising, advertising in transport, cinemas and the Internet. BTL technologies include sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, personal selling, exhibitions, sponsorship.

Figure 1. Brand marketing communications. Author24 - online exchange of student work

Note 1

General classification of BTL technologies:

1. direct marketing: postal, e-mail sms and mailings, telemarketing, television marketing, e-commerce, database development services;
2. sales promotion: stimulating sales personnel, consumers and intermediaries through loyalty programs, promotions, POS materials, visual communications;
3. event marketing: organization of events (festivals, conferences, presentations, anniversaries, etc.), sponsorship, PR events.

In addition, BTL technologies include:

• product placement – ​​hidden brand promotion in feature films, TV series, books, games, songs, etc.;
• use of non-standard media for advertising (ambient marketing) - brand advertising on a shopping cart, on bags, on coffee cup lids, on the floor, sidewalk, inscriptions in the sky, etc.;
• buzz marketing (buzz – “buzzing sound”) is the generation of rumors, the resonance of public opinion after an event.

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Brand(from the English brand - “stigma”) is a complex of associations, emotions, ideas and value characteristics about a product or service that has developed in the minds of consumers. It can also be called the mental shell of a product or service, since a brand is an abstract concept. The physical component, that is, the carrier of the brand, consists of all the elements of the corporate identity: the brand name (a word or phrase), a logo with the principles of its construction, a palette of corporate colors, original graphics of the corporate style, a set of phrases, sounds, a trademark, etc.

A brand as an association in the minds of the target audience symbolizes certain qualities of a product or characteristics of the product manufacturer itself. To do this, the brand must be recognizable. The rights to use it are protected legally.

On thematic Internet resources and in specialized literature one can find many definitions of the term “brand”, but ultimately they all come down to the identification of goods or services by consumers and their attitude towards them. A true brand always includes a set of certain characteristics that make up its consumer value. These are, for example, guaranteed quality, well-known, prestige, general availability, the presence of a sufficient number of loyal customers, an easily remembered and recognizable name and logo.

The very definition of a brand consists of a set of copyright objects (logo) and a brand name (brand name).

What does the brand consist of:

• brand name
• descriptor,
• tagline,
• visual and verbal identification system (trademark, corporate identity, packaging, special sounds, etc.),
• communication media that reflect and convey the brand idea.

Since a brand is an abstract concept, it, of course, cannot be a direct product or service, although it is associated with specific goods and services. Their task is to maintain brand values, which, in turn, plays an important role in developing a brand development strategy.

The brand's tasks include managing the company's actions and communications in order to achieve its planned value position and a positive image in the perception of consumers. Targeted marketing activities to create long-term consumer preference for a product are called branding.

One of the purposes of branding is to convey the experience of owning a brand and to enable the buyer to demonstrate this ownership to others.

The word “brand” comes from the English “brand”, which in turn appeared thanks to the Old Norse “brandr” (“burn”, “fire”). It denoted the brand with which livestock owners marked their animals. Therefore, “brand” is translated as “trademark” or “trademark”.

What is the difference between a brand and a trademark?

The two concepts are often lumped together, but patent experts argue that this is incorrect. Although they have similar meanings, it is a mistake to consider “brand” and “trademark” to be the same term. Although they are closely related to each other, and it is quite difficult to draw a clear boundary in their essence, there are still differences between the concepts, and they are significant.

A trademark is the distinctive sign of a company that produces a particular product.

It must be registered with the relevant department (Federal Service for Intellectual Property - Rospatent). The owner of the trademark has the right to place it on the packaging or directly on the product. After registering a trademark, a certificate is issued confirming the owner’s right to its sole use. In other words, we can say that a trademark is a certain invented “image” of a product.

Whereas a brand is a trademark that has been able to be deposited in the minds of the consumer, that is, it is its visual image or, in other words, the intellectual part of the product or product being manufactured.

For clarity, we can give an analogy with people's names. Thus, the full name officially registered and recorded on the identity card is a trademark, and the name of a popular person who is known to a large number of people is already a brand. Both the trademark and the brand make it possible to distinguish a product from other similar products on the market. But if the brand is firmly fixed in the consumer’s mind, then the TM may not be deposited in it at all.

It is important to understand: any brand is a trademark, but not every trademark can become a brand.

According to experts, a trademark has the right to be called a brand if more than 20 percent of the target audience has a positive attitude towards it. But, of course, this is an approximate figure, since this indicator is individual and depends on certain factors, such as market competitiveness, for example.

What products can be called a brand?

Obviously, theoretically, absolutely any manufacturer can make its “name” or product considered a brand. These may be consumer goods; companies from the b2b market and the services market; retail companies; products that exist only virtually on the Internet; as well as people and public organizations. However, not everyone can do this. The honorable name “brand” must be earned by offering consumers quality products and services.

Merkulov Sergey Alexandrovich 3rd year graduate student, Department of Economic Theory, Moscow State Technical University. N.E. Bauman, brand manager at PepsiCo

Recently, brands have played an increasingly significant role in the Russian economy. Two-thirds of the population (67%) rely on trusted brands when choosing a product. A majority (51%) believe that branded products are better than unknown brands. It is difficult for Russian manufacturers to compete with Western brands, because they lack the experience of bringing successful brands to the market. The launch of a Russian brand, accompanied by high advertising support, is most often characterized by a short brand life cycle. Advertising is widely rotated on the country's central TV channels, store shelves are crowded with an excess of goods on sale, but after a year or two, consumer demand sharply declines and the brand gradually begins to disappear from the market.

Most brands do not even have time to leave their mark in the minds of consumers, leaving no signs of their existence. What is the formula for success in launching, developing and maintaining an effective brand?

In most international companies involved in marketing goods and services, each brand has its own architecture (the terms Brand Wheel or Brand DNA are also found in the literature). It briefly formulates the main principles on which the brand is built: key consumer understanding (or insight from the English insight), a unique offer, functional and emotional benefits, supported by facts and reasons to believe in them, the personality and values ​​of the brand. During my work in the marketing department of Heineken, we used the brand architecture format presented in Figure 1. This format is an adapted version of the options proposed in the works of A. Ellwood and V. Mamleev.

Rice. 1. Brand architecture

Brand architecture is necessary to design consumer communications, i.e. promotional messages delivered through any type of advertising or marketing technique, with the aim of building a relationship between the brand and consumers. What is put into it by brand managers becomes the main reason for consumers’ interest or indifference to the brand. The development of brand architecture should be preceded by the conduct and analysis of marketing research, analysis of the competitive market, as well as an understanding of the properties and qualities of the product to be released. The fundamental principles on which the brand is built must be determined before the product enters the market. At the same time, they must remain unchanged over a long period of time, determining the advertising strategy for promoting the brand.

As various studies show, from 50 to 85% of the success of any project depends not on the strategy itself, but on the quality of its implementation. Therefore, it is not enough to correctly assess the preferences of the target audience and formulate all the advantages of the new product in the company’s internal documents when approving the business plan. Even the most effective strategy can fail if the ideal plan for its implementation is not defined. For advertising campaigns to be successful in the long term, a brand must be consistent and focused in all its advertising messages across any potential consumer communication channels. At the same time, the main task of the brand manager becomes to translate the brand architecture into a set of coherent and focused advertising messages that, over the course of several years, could work towards one main idea of ​​the brand, thereby building a clear and understandable image in the eyes of consumers. So how, in an environment of fierce competition and limited advertising opportunities, can you identify the right moments and points of contact between the brand’s advertising messages and the target audience? When is it necessary to convey the qualitative advantages of a product with dry facts, and when will it be more effective to connect the main added value of the brand - its emotional component? In recent years, a large number of recommendations and manuals have appeared on conducting marketing research and creating brands based on the analysis of the data obtained. It is surprising that the topic of long-term brand support is still very narrowly discussed, because consumer loyalty is not won immediately and requires constant efforts to maintain it. No matter how labor-intensive and time-consuming the process of gaining the trust of the target audience is, just as quickly brand loyalty can be lost due to incorrect or ill-considered actions.

My experience working for the Heineken company, which owns both the world’s leading brands Heineken and Amstel, as well as the popular Russian brands “Okhota”, “Three Bears”, “Bochkarev”, etc., helped me answer this question. To determine how to most effectively use the elements brand architecture to formulate key brand messages in advertising campaigns, we studied best global and local experience. Our study included both successful Western brands (Apple, Nike, Red Bull, Lipton, Gillette, etc.), as well as trademarks that achieved brilliant but short-term success and very quickly lost their positions (“Dosya”, “ Dovgan”, “Solodov”, etc.). For each brand, all possible types of communication with consumers were collected and systematized over several years: from TV commercials to simple promotions with a gift for purchase and press releases. Based on the collected data, we reconstructed the architecture of each brand under consideration and analyzed the principles of its use in advertising messages. The results of the study showed that all brands that increased sales volumes from year to year and became more recognizable and loved by consumers used a similar principle of building relationships with consumers. All elements of brand architecture were used in advertising communications with a certain consistency and completeness. The same brands that were losing market share, losing sales volumes and ceasing to enjoy the trust of people did not act according to the identified principle, which was called the communication architecture of the brand. In collaboration with creative and strategic marketing agencies, a guide was formulated to plan the development of the brand image in the minds of consumers over the years ahead.

Brand communication architecture is a structured approach through which brand pillars are translated into coherent, focused and consistent brand messages in consumer-relevant modes of expression. These messages are conveyed to the consumer by any possible elements of the marketing mix in order for the brand to occupy a niche in the market according to its positioning.

Communication architecture consists of a central communication message that determines the direction of three fundamental and universal types of brand communication messages: rational, emotional and experiential. These three messages together should give the consumer a complete and clear picture of the brand's image, build a relationship with the brand, and create a basis for belief in all the rational and emotional benefits the brand offers. This approach provides focus and clarity when planning each brand communication, as well as ease of post-evaluation of the advertising campaign on qualitative characteristics. The central communication message is based on the brand's unique proposition. Thus, it turns out that all advertising communications with the target audience, despite different creative incarnations and slogans, are initially connected with each other and work towards a single message from the brand.

A rational message must communicate tangible, distinctive functional and rational features of the product and brand that can be proven by facts. It is important that the rational message is aligned with the consumer's key understanding and thereby meets consumer needs and even anticipates expectations.

An emotional message should speak about the brand’s values, its personality, and its perspective on the world. Very often it reflects the views and values, character and lifestyle of the brand’s target audience. This message should be a distinctive feature of the brand image and inspire consumers to build a relationship with the brand.

An experiential message is a statement of a brand's lived experience that explains, demonstrates and introduces the consumer to the world of the brand. In this case, advertising communications should convey not image-based, but tangible components of the product and brand that the consumer can feel, smell, touch, examine, and hear.

Ideally, brand promotion on the market should consist of precisely these separate messages in advertising campaigns and in exactly this sequence.

To better understand the components of the communication architecture, it is worth giving a specific example of the Dove brand (skin care products), presented in Figure 2. In the brand’s advertising campaigns in recent years, regardless of the type of advertising medium and the nature of interaction with potential consumers, a single communication message can be traced "Dove for real beauty." According to the given theory of brand communication architecture, the first stage would be to talk about the functional advantages of the product itself produced by the company. It is necessary to provide facts confirming the unique qualitative or differentiating advantage of the company’s products over competitors’ products. The second step is to create an intangible attraction to the brand on an emotional level, using the secret desires and thoughts of the target audience. The brand makes people believe that their emotional needs are being satisfied, which objectively cannot be realized by the simple qualitative characteristics of a particular product. The final stage of the advertising campaign allows the target audience to unambiguously associate the first two messages with the image of the product being offered to their attention and consolidate the achieved effect for a long time.

Rice. 2. Brand communication architecture

With the communication architecture shown in the example, Dove in its advertising begins to talk about the unique ingredients of its cosmetics, which incredibly highlight the natural beauty of the consumer. In the second wave of the Dove advertising campaign, it inspires women with the story that each of them is unique and beautiful in their own way. And it finally consolidates the brand image with promotions with product samples, when consumers can try all the company’s products for themselves, as well as by organizing a variety of scientific conferences and seminars on beauty and how to care for it.

After such a focused and consistent advertising campaign, a clear and distinct idea of ​​​​the brand image is built in the minds of consumers, and the main idea of ​​​​the brand and the central communication message - “Dove for real beauty” - is deposited in the subconscious. Consumer understanding of the brand, in turn, leads to high loyalty, that is, to the most cherished goal of all marketers.

Figure 3 clearly shows how brand architecture and brand communication architecture are related. The brand's unique proposition is the basis for the central communication message. This ensures that the main idea and message of the brand is reflected in any advertising campaign of the brand. The central communication message does not have to be a common slogan for all communications with consumers over the course of several years, although such cases do occur. The main thing is that slogans formulated differently for advertising purposes, from different angles, but work for the same idea. A rational message must convey to consumers the functional benefits of the product. An emotional message conveys both the emotional benefits of the brand and the character and personality of the brand. The experiential message should be based on key knowledge about the consumer and communicate exactly how the brand will help the target audience realize their life needs.

Rice. 3. Relationship between architecture and brand communication architecture

It must be added that it is precisely this order and sequence of messages that is necessary for the most effective and understandable delivery of the brand image, collected in the brand architecture, to the consumer. If all stages are carried out correctly, in the mind of the consumer, after a sufficient amount of time and advertising contacts, a feeling of understanding of the brand arises, almost at the same level as that of the brand manager at the stage of creating the brand architecture.

In some cases, depending on brands' advertising budgets, it may not be possible to deliver even one of the communications messages for even a whole year. In this case, you need to understand that creating a brand is a very important and painstaking process, rushing through it can only do harm. Putting too much information into one commercial can lead to negative results. The information will be incomplete and crumpled, and trust in such a chaotic set of data will be reduced to a minimum.

There are cases when brands, even with a rich history and multimillion-dollar advertising budgets, launched in new markets and carried out territorial expansion, spent several years just to go through the first stage of conveying a rational message to the consumer. A striking example of such cases on the Russian market is Lipton iced tea. Having first entered the market in 2003, the brand has consistently communicated the product's functional benefits to consumers based on the benefits of its hot sibling, using only rational messages linked to one idea. It was only in 2010 that the brand decided to start using an emotional message by using Hollywood star Hugh Jackman in its advertising. The actor, although it has nothing to do directly with the benefits of drinking hot tea, carries the same emotional message as tea does functionally - cheerfulness.

In order to more universally show how long it takes to change the focus of an advertising campaign from a rational message to an emotional one and then to an empirical one, instead of a time scale, the degree of consumer involvement in the brand is taken. Figure 4 shows the optimal proportion of a brand's messages depending on how close it manages to approximate the target audience's loyalty. At the stage of launching a product on the market, it is first necessary to achieve a certain level of brand awareness. At the same time, consumers first need to learn about the rational benefits of the brand. If a product has the required set of functional properties or is of similar quality and costs less than competitors, this will cause a wave of trial purchases. After this stage, it is necessary to begin to form an emotional connection with consumers, moving on to communicating the emotional benefits of the brand. And once the connection with the target audience has already been established, achieving trust and ultimately loyalty to the brand becomes the task of experiential communication. At the same time, an element of emotional message is present in all communications with consumers at the level of character and personality of the brand. After all, both rational and empirical messages can be conveyed seriously or with humor, intelligently or bluntly, etc., depending on the properties that are prescribed in architecture.

Rice. 4. Dependence of shares of brand messages on the degree of involvement

This model, of course, is conditional and may have exceptions, but it helps to visualize the ideal model for the development of brand advertising messages. In the first stage, people must hear about the new brand, then try the product or service, after which a connection between the brand and the consumer is created. With a positive consumer experience, trust in the brand arises, and if it does not break its promises and exceeds expectations over a sufficiently long period of time, loyalty arises.

For the success of any brand, of course, it is necessary that the product offered to the consumer has a certain level of quality and a set of characteristics necessary for its category. At the same time, skillful use of communication architecture will ensure maximum efficiency in promoting a brand to the market and, as a result, an additional competitive advantage.

Marketing research agency GFK-Rus. The impact of the crisis on the consumer habits of Russians. 2009

Pertsia V. Mamleeva L. Anatomy of a Brand. - M.; St. Petersburg: Vershina, 2007. - P. 251.

Ellwood Ian. Branding Basics. 100 techniques for adding value. - M.: FAIR PRESS, 2002. - 336 p. - P. 140.

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