BRANDING AND PROPOSITION TESTING

Working with brands is like working with people.

Good relationships involve commitment, willingness to change and renew, preparedness to take risks and enjoyment of each other’s company.

On this page:

• Brand as public property
• Relationships
• The systemic approach to branding
• Reports on the effect of a branding constellation
• What you can do

When a brand becomes well known and trusted, it becomes, in a way, public property. Messing with such a brand can be dangerous. (i.e. the Coca Cola example in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink”)
A brand like this is comparable to a hidden stakeholder of the organisation and needs to be considered. Change to a brand is only possible if the target group that has supported the company for many years is considered and acknowledged.
Conventionally this is done through consumer research – but do they really give insight? Questionnaires are uncertain. What people actually do often does not match the intent they have previously indicated. Our view is that brands are significant elements to be taken into account in any organisational system. Existing target groups are hidden stakeholders.
People react to products and brands emotionally. Buying decisions are essentially made from the limbic brain, the brain stem through which all information must first pass and where the emotional response originates. Rationalisation, which takes place in the frontal lobe, only comes after a product has been effectively ‘bought’ by the limbic brain. When creating a brand that is what you as a brand decision maker, marketing manager or other expert in the field of branding are aiming for, an emotional response by the public. Emotional response can be recognised using emotional intelligence. It can also be anticipated with systemic awareness (link to heading in systemic organisational consulting) and tested beforehand with systemic organisational constellations, thus expanding your emotional intelligence to systemic intelligence.

Have you considered there is a relationship between your product or service and the customer? And that that relationship can mirror what is happening inside the originating enterprise? Accordingly, have you considered that if you improve the relationships within your company, your product will sell better too?
Based on this assumption, a brand can represent the link between different elements of your company, and the following relationships need to be considered carefully:           

• Product – your company
• Product  – target group
• Target group – your company
• Departments within your company

Other relationships that are important for creating a successful brand are between:

• The brand
• The product
• The manufacturer
• The channel
• The customer

The systemic approach looks at relationships, not just between people, but also between other, more abstract elements of your organisation, such as brand element relationships discussed above.
We have a tool that can create images of, and possibly influence, these relationships: systemic organisational constellations. They can be used to explore and test brands and propositions, such as to:
Create different scenarios and compare them before making a decision
Find out where and under what conditions scenarios improve the relationship between important elements of your business
Discover factors contributing towards a successful brand
A systemic branding constellation works well on a specific design question, where several alternatives can be tested.

Wim Jurg at the Open University of the Netherlands is conducting research for a PhD thesis on the usefulness of systemic constellations to identify branding opportunities. He has published several articles on this subject.
Most of the informants for this research project were completely new to the systemic constellation approach. The quotes below were written by brand managers and consultants, some six to twelve months after having done a constellation and are published in “Fields of Connection” by Jan Jacob Stam

Quote is from a marketing manager of an established national brand:

“The emotional aspect was very surprising for me. We tend to think we are rational, but it was clear that emotional factors are also involved. And, what was made very clear in the constellation, was that these emotions were mainly connected to power issues within the company. The particular benefits I gained from doing the constellation were that I began to ask myself very different questions about the brand. Questions that I would never otherwise have come up with on my own. It was as though I was thinking in a completely different way, like being in a fourth dimension: looking from the outside at a situation that you are very personally involved in, and where you feel directly responsible and where there is also a very large company involved too.

I see two fields where constellations could be applied in my particular profession: firstly in the phase before we take decisions or, for example, give an advertising agency a particular account to work on. From the quality research available through a constellation I can see more clearlywhat elements are involved, what outside factors are playing a role and which of these are fundamental to the consideration of the whole. It is particularly relevant that we often see in these constellation that internal issues within a company are playing a role in the decision making about a brand.

Secondly I can see constellations being very useful to use in the whole process of creating different scenarios. The critical question for me is to what extent the choice of representatives and their responses in a constellation can be influenced by subjectivity.”

Fields of Connection, p. 131

Quote is from a brand consultant:

“This method is useful in the whole process – from the very first decision to the last. The one condition, however, for using this approach is that you must be willing to take  a wider perspective than just the actual project you are working on itself. Apart from this, it seems that the constellations are very helpful to me when you get stuck with something and want to take a look at what is going on. It also seems useful for an initial stock-take, when you are starting to consider a particular question such as: what is the present situation and what do we have to take into account?
The method works fast and allows for openness. In fact, I feel it is necessary that the constellation is conducted in a positive atmosphere where openness is permitted.
During a constellation a kind of collective intelligence is at work to solve complex questions that are often too complicated to be resolve with the normal analytical thinking.”

Fields of Connection, p. 133

We facilitate systemic branding constellations!
Contact us for a preliminary conversation, or to book into one of our workshops and witness first hand the revelatory powers of systemic constellation work