From the title I suppose you’d be expecting an essay on the benefits of Calvin Klein over Dolce and Gabana and I’d be very willing to oblige as I consider each of them to be very close to me as we’re personally in touch on a daily basis. No, this discussion is far less intimate but does indeed cover a comparatively emotive issue – that being TASTE. (referring to fashion, fancy or fondness and not flavour, the latter could land me in hot water)

So I’ll hastily move on from underwear and get to the point, but first a question.

What is it about Marmite^® that you either like or don’t like?

You may, if you wish, list these for yourself or you could choose to tick, cross or circle from the list below:

• The flavour
• The smell
• The colour
• The cost
• The label
• The adverts
• The jar
• The image

The list is far from exhaustive but it will serve its purpose in demonstrating that there are many characteristics to a brand that contribute to its likability, or otherwise. And one doesn’t need to like everything about the brand for it to retain a degree of desirability. When all’s said and done a brand is something for consumers to generally like and therefore buy, or generally dislike and therefore not buy. So how do you make ‘em like it?

Here we are at my first point.

1. Remain OBJECTIVE, allowing the customer to be SUBJECTIVE.

Forgive me if you feel patronised here but I feel compelled to give you the dictionary definitions of these two words: ^*1

ob·jec·tive – adj not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts.

sub·jec·tive – adj placing emphasis on one’s own moods, attitudes, opinions, etc.; egocentric.

Now we have entered the pure, detached and unemotional world known as ‘OBJECTIVITY’. A clean, cold and crude place where clarity is in control and emotion is excluded. It’s the cutting room floor of a film editing suite, where spectacular scenes created at huge expense are cruelly and callously cut, clipped and cauterized in order to distil 9 hours of reel into 90 minutes of movie.

In this world you’ll make decisions about your brand that will be crucial to its success. You’ll begin to establish the fabric and the embodiment of the brand that’ll result in a level of understanding so deep and precise that success will be virtually guaranteed. The result will be a document that answers any and all questions relating to the very substance of the brand and one that is beyond importance to those you may invite to help in its creation – like me, the brand designer.

Here we are, finally you may say under your breath, at the subject of this discussion and my second point.

2. The anatomy of a designer brief.

In other words, how to describe (1.) the nature of the brand that you’re creating and, (2.) the nature of your prospective customers who will desire it, need it, be compelled to buy it, experience it, love it, proclaim its existence to others, relish it and devour it… Phewww, the expectations are so high!

Describe the future customers for your brand, as you perceive them, in terms of their: age group; gender; marital status; beliefs (societal, political if you want or even religious if your product is, for example, Kosher or Halal approved) and demographics [the politically correct term for politically incorrect boxes such as wealth, class, education and origin]. Some information about your competitors is also a pre-requisite as we go forward and destroy them with science, design and marketing supremacy. [written with tongue in cheek!]

For what comes next I must utter an apology, that being for my loss of OBJECTIVITY from this point on. I know I’ve just elevated this state of mind to pole position in the Formula1 of brand commandments but the very nature of designers mean that we’re way too emotional to be purely OBJECTIVE, otherwise we’d be accountants or programmers. My eyes prick with tears as I write.

Designers are generally endowed with lashings of empathy. We’re afforded a deep understanding of the emotional state of mind of others, we ‘get it’ or can put ourselves ‘on the same wavelength’ as a potential customer described and defined objectively in the brief.

As a result, respectable designers will interpret this collection of characteristics and present you with a range of design possibilities that each explore a ‘route’ down which the brand could travel, pleasing your irrational and emotive customers and causing them to buy your product. To keep things as illustrative as possible here’s a list, again non-exhaustive, of these ‘routes’ that may be relevant for food and drink brands:

• Fashion / Image
  Appealing to customers who’d describe themselves as fashionable. They might wear the latest clothing styles and follow the latest trends. They’d be conscious of their image and the way they present themselves to others. Their motivation for buying something will depend on how it makes them look to others.
• Ethics / Ecology
  Fairtrade chocolate would be an example of branding based on ethics. A customer might buy it because they want to do something good because by doing something good, they feel good.
• Taste
  This type of customer doesn’t care about anything else except the taste. You could wrap it in newspaper as long as it tastes good.
• Connoisseurs
  These would be customers who know a lot about what they’re buying and, if they had the time, could probably do it just as well themselves.
• Adventurous
  Those who are willing to cross the line, who are happy to take a risk because it’s something new.
• Provenance
  “If it’s not grown in Britain, I don’t want to eat it!”

I feel the need for a quick summary, so here’s where we are so far.

The details of the product, its customers and the marketplace that you’ve so eloquently and objectively described in your ‘designers brief’ will result in the brand designer exploring different branding routes that present the product in a variety of ways appealing to the type of customer that you’ve described in the brief. [breaths in deeply before loss of consciousness]

Oh how I do dislike boxes though! I resent being labelled as one thing or another as we invariably are these days as technology takes over our lives. Let’s face it, computers think in 0’s and 1’s so how can we expect the poor blighters to understand when we might prefer to be a ½.

With this in mind the list of routes above is really intending to describe the dominant characteristic of the largest section of your customers. There’s no reason why an Organic, Fairtrade chocolate bar that donates money to saving the Ecuadorian rainforest can’t be fashionable and made of tasty Swiss chocolate! (see my website and Organic Meltdown Chocolate by Brandstand as an example). But like any personality there must be a dominant message, one that is apparent above all the others, otherwise you have a product that’s schizophrenic and in dire need of a rebrand.

Please forgive me if this sounds so complicated. It’s actually a hell of a lot of fun and we’re most certainly allowed to be emotional about this whole process. But woe betide those who ignore my third point:

3. Anything goes, apart from the no-no’s!

Let me explain.

You’ll have contracted a designer because you value their skill, their experience and their portfolio. So here are a few tips how to get the most out of us:

1. Do allow yourself to be inspired by your designers’ ideas that may lay outside the box and that you may not have considered.
   Don’t be too prescriptive about the design of your brand. If you took a picture of Angelina Jolie to the hairdressers and said you want to look like that you’d probably come away disappointed. [analogy for the girls in this case!]
2. Do decide beforehand how many design routes you want to follow and how many different designs you’d like to see within each route.
   Don’t endlessly send your designer away to come up with another design; it can be expensive and fruitless.
3. Do be flexible for change along the way. As many a seasoned traveller will tell you, the journey is as important an experience as the destination itself.
   Don’t reject change outright as you may be missing a valuable opportunity for your brand.

Throughout this piece you’ve been presented with choices. And that’s what branding is all about. Your choice as to what you’re going to offer to the marketplace and your customer’s choice between your brand and the next.

For me, I prefer Dolce and Gabana because of the image but I prefer Marmite because of the taste and certainly not the other way around.

^*1 – source: dictionary.com