Brand New Brand Study
Posted by goodmind on June 25th, 2008
Dissecting brand meaning, and what precisely makes a meaningful brand, is popular fodder for the academic disciplines, and better business blogs. It’s also a key component of what we do as market researchers, and we spend a lot of mental energy thinking up new ways to induce consumer definitions of xyz brand, and unpack what said brand “means.”
As such, we’ll be giving this pithy brand map technique from Dear Jane Sample some serious consideration;
Why is mapping exercise this significant from a research perspective? Excellent question, and Grant McCracken has an excellent response;
Noah’s brand tag exercise defines brands in terms of our adjectives. Jane’s project gives us a chance to see how we define ourselves in terms of brands.
This is both halves of advertising’s meaning making arc. Meaning goes into brands. Meaning comes out of brands into us. (emphasis ours)
In a sense, both halves are pretty obvious, or else companies wouldn’t come to us to find out what their customers say/think/feel about their brand/product/service. However, like academics and bloggers, consumers are quick to focus on the theoretical, or abstract meaning that defines a brand. This technique of “brand mapping” seems to ground the definition of a brand within daily life, thus revealing how the meaning (not the brand itself) manifests in actual consumer behavior.
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