To help you understand the concepts we are presenting here on this site and in our forthcoming book, please consider the following definition of ‘brand.’

A brand is the sum of perceptions any given individual or target audience has about the object you are striving to market.

These “objects” can be products, services, concepts, theories, ideologies, candidates, nations, institutions, or even yourself. For the moment, when we use the term ‘brand’ we mean “perception of a product” and when we use the term ‘product’ we mean all objects, services, concepts, ideas, ideologies, candidates, nations, institutions, etc., to which an audience can assign a label and which they perceive as having either a positive, negative or even uncertain value.

Brands can be influenced by marketers, but three things about them are vital to understand:

• A brand, your brand, is owned by your audience.  They determine its value. It lives in their hearts and minds and not, as many suppose, on a piece of paper in an office or an artistic rendition of your logo, company or product name. A brand name, like a logo, only means what you can persuade someone to believe, think, and feel about it. Names, like words and symbols, are carriers of meaning, containers for meaning, and proxies for the meaning that resides in an audience’s mind. You, your CEO, your fellow employees, and your board of directors are one audience that has some common agreement on what a brand means to them and how much they value it. That meaning is never the same as the audience perception.  Your relation to the object differs from that of the audience.  If you forget that, you’ll rue it later as you waste marketing spend.

• Pre-commoditization of your product category, the primary source of brand perception is the merit of the product. Does it deliver at above or below the expectation of the audience? David Ogilvy was on to something in talking about the brand as including “the nature of the product.”  There is often conflict between the different individuals and organizations who contribute to the development of a brand, i.e. marketers, brand managers, agencies, product engineers, designers, on the one hand, and line management on the other. Lack of clarity and agreement results in poor performance. Yet only after a brand becomes completely commoditized—only after there are a multitude of options, all of which deliver exactly the same functional and emotional benefits—does perception based on non-functional attributes alone become the primary driver of branding. Sheery’s “emotional, subjective” understanding of a brand makes sense only at that advanced stage, and takes for granted the understanding of the nature of the product that is the primary content of the brand at earlier stages.  Unless we as “brand” managers can understand and appreciate that our role is complementary to our teammates’ roles on the product side, we will be too blinded by our own brilliance and biased by our own bullshit to see the truth: that a brand is developed in an interdependent partnership with product development and that neither group alone can claim complete responsibility for its health, success or failure.

• Great brands are built by teams that include marketers. At times however, they are incidental to the effort. A marketer’s success is often assured by a great product. Since the human mind nearly always assumes that correlation equals causation, many “great” marketers have had their reputations made because of association with great products. The converse is also true. Marketers are often blamed for brand failure, when in fact the product itself has failed: failed to deliver equivalent or higher value than competing products or failure to be relevant in a world that has evolved beyond its need or usefulness.

A brand is made up of perceptions. A brand perception is any brand claim or promise held in the mind of the audience. The claim may be true or false and the promise may be real or hyperbole. In either case, it is the perception that determines individual or group reality. Perception then determines action, purchase, recommendation, etc.

But perception doesn’t float free from reality.  The nature and quality of the product matters.  Marketing isn’t magic.  If you want to pull a rabbit out of a hat, it helps to have a rabbit.

Casey Jones and Dr. Daniel Bonevac’s theoretical work on how individuals and groups of individuals form perceptions on all subjects, how we as individuals can better understand our own perceptions, and how communicators, leaders and educators in any field can more effectively move other’s perceptions.

This is an important post, both for the Jones&Bonevac Blog which deals with Marketing and the blog at Thought About Thought, which provides a forum for individuals from wildly divergent fields to meet and discuss the subject matter of the attached paper. We are addressing here the nature of thought and perception. We are publishing here a model we believe will allow all of us to better understand and discuss this subject.

This is not a traditional academic paper, nor is it a traditional marketing paper; however, we believe that the model we have created from our perspectives and backgrounds in these fields is unique, and perhaps could not have been created in any other way. We look to publish a final version of this paper in another form at a later date. We will also be publishing an extensive work applying this model to the particular field of Marketing. Between now and then, please feel free to post your comments about this work as they apply to Marketing on our Jones&Bonevac blog, and as they apply to the model itself and its application to other fields on the blog at ThoughtAboutThought.com

View the PDF:  A Unified Model of Advocacy in Perception Space

Excerpt:

We use language for various purposes. We describe the world. We ask questions. We issue commands. We make agreements. And we try to persuade. Marketers and advertisers try to persuade people to buy products. Public relations specialists try to persuade people to have positive perceptions of organizations. Political consultants try to persuade people to support causes and candidates. Executives try to persuade people to work effectively, to agree to a contract, to accept a job, and so on. Parents try to persuade children to listen to them. Attorneys try to persuade people to favor their clients. All those activities have something important in common. Marketers, advertisers, public relations specialists, political consultants, executives, and lawyers, in fact all of us, are advocates either full time or part time. When we seek to convince someone, we are in the business of practical persuasion, of persuading people to change their minds or do things.

You might expect, given the number of people engaged in advocacy and the importance of what they do, that there would be a comprehensive, well-established theory of how to do it. You would be wrong. There is no such theory. People learn to be advocates by the seat of their pants.

We aim to remedy that. This paper is about developing effective advocacy strategies. It elaborates a novel theory that organizes and systematizes the process of constructing persuasive cases in support of desired conclusions.