So what we're, what we want, where we.
Let me tell you where we want to end up and I'll talk about how we get to it.
We want to add up, end up with the 30 second speech, as I said,
the elevator speech. Or a brand mantra.
And a brand mantra may be three words; but
I want to get down to the right three words.
And so one of the things you do is whe-, when
you're creating a brand and thinking about a brand or thinking about
a product category, there's a lot of market research that you can
do to try to figure out what's going on in customers' heads.
And how do they think about the category,
and how do they think about different brands?
And one way
you can think about it, in order to figure out again, what's the essence
of the brand, what's the brand mantra, is to develop what's called a mental map.
And what a mental map is a kind of a graphic, with
circles and arrows and things like that, of what the brand is.
And it's kind of a, a thought association process.
You ask the consumer what comes to mind when you think of the brand.
And then there's lots of different ways
to do this and I'll just show you one.
But there are a lot of different ways, and you write down what the
brand is, what the essence of the brand is from the consumer point of view.
What the different associations are.
And how those associations lead to other associations.
And some people call this mental map, some people call them schemas.
and there's a lot of different techniques you can do in these mental maps.
You can, the size of the circle can be how often that association is named
by different people.
The lines that connect one circle to another
circle can be the strength of those associations.
But essentially what you're developing is, sometimes it's
called a semantic associative network or a mental map.
You're developing a picture of the thought
and associations that come up with the brand.
And so what I'm going to show you here is a mental map of McDonald's.
You start out
with what differentiate McDonald's, you think about the golden arches, the brand
name, and then, and this is just one person's thought process, you
come up with things that are characteristic of the category, and so
those are the red circles, so McDonald's makes meals, it provides services.
It's you know, family food, family fun.
It's good value, and then the
yellow circles here are the associations with each one of these points of parity.
Actually.
Frame of reference characteristics that are unique to McDonald's.
So McDonald's has certain meals. What are the meals that McDonald's has?
Well, it gives hamburgers, it has breakfast, it has fries.
What are the brands associated with those meals?
Egg McMuffin, a Big Mac.
What's the quality?
Well, it's always consistent, it's fresh, it's
good-tasting.
and these, this is one example of the mental map.
There's lots of other ones that you can come up with.
But you can see the idea here is that
you have circles and lines that connect these associations.
You can do this in a lot of different ways.
You can do it, the closest ones to the core are
the ones that are top of mind, that come up first.
The ones that are further away, you know, come up after a time.
And so there are a lot of things, but what I'm
trying to get here is all of the thought associations that come up with a brand.
And then what you want to do is do this over several
customers, and do it in market research stages, several different ways.
And essentially, you want to take all these different
abstract phrases and concepts that are out there.
And figure out which are the most important maybe
five to ten, which are the very most important.
And so, what you're doing is,
you're starting with the mental map or the associations that people
have with the brand or maybe that with the category and depending
upon how well known the brand is you might do it at
a category level, you might do it at a what if level.
You might do it at a prototype level, a concept level or the brand level.
But you have this big mental map and then you want to hone
down that mental map to the core brand values which are the five or
ten critical brand values that are important to that brand.
And from that you then want to reduce those five or ten to the
key concepts that are going to be the DNA of the brand, the brand mantra.
So, the brand mantra is defined as the heart and soul of the brand, the DNA.
It's the brand essence, the brand promise.
And, and it's again goes back to that elevator speech.
It's just really
what people think of as the core of the brand.
It's very important to know this brand mantra because
everything you do within this brand mantra, all your products
that you come out with, all your new products,
all your advertising has to all fit within the essence.
The customer's going to know the brand mantra,
the employees are going to know the brand mantra.
You really want if you have a very, very strong brand
it's very crystal clear what that brand is and what it means.
And it characterizes everything that's done under
the brand name, and that's very, very important.
It's particularly important nowadays as you go online, offline, websites, phones.
Your brand is on lots of different things, and
you really want to make sure that the heart and
the soul of the brand is consistent across all
of these different media, these different platforms, these different products.