I just met a marketing person from T Mobile and inquired how they measure the effectiveness of direct mail campaigns. He said getting the message across right is a delicate mix of selecting a particular group of people, coming up with an enticing offer of products or services, and making sure what the creative team does builds on T Mobile’s brand message.
They use statistics and long formulas in Excel to see if data is statistically significant. Standard deviations, Bell curve models, the usual sort of thing.
But the brand message, of course, is the hardest bit to measure.
Since Design Kompany is all about building brands, we’ve gotten to know how tough it is for people to think about this in concrete terms. How the people who might buy your stuff perceive you is simply not tangible. You can’t put a yardstick up to it, check out how it’s doing. That’s because a brand is just an impression. A perception. A feeling about a company’s personality. And it only exists in people’s heads.
You can think of a brand as something that earns “mindshare,” as Marty Neumeier terms it in his book The Brand Gap. So direct and solid are some of Neumeier’s ideas on branding that we’ve loaned the office copy to one of our clients.
Here’s the gist of what Neumeier says:
First, a brand is not a logo. Second, a brand is not an identity. Finally, a brand is not a product.
A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organization.
It’s a gut feeling because brands are defined by individuals, not companies markets, or industries. It’s a gut feeling because people are emotional, intuitive beings.
A charasmatic brand is any product, service or organization for which people believe there’s no substitute.–Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap.
How are you supposed to measure something as fuzzy as that? For this, they’ll need to come up with a whole new science. Or maybe they already have? The notion that how we think influences the way matter takes shape is a blip in the matrix of quantum physics.
UPDATE
Read the Brand Gap online here:
Also look for the follow-up book, Zag.
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