Brand loyalty is something that most marketers want to achieve for their brands. But it's a bit of a paradox in that although they want it, and sometimes they want it very much, many of them can't really define what it is and they don't understand how to get there. As a result, few brands ever achieve true brand loyalty.
In this presentation, we'll talk not so much about what brand loyalty is, but what it's not as well, so that you can start to form in your minds a concept of what brand loyalty could mean to your brands and to your businesses. We'll cover the following topics. First, we'll discuss brand key brand related terms and how the definitions of some of these terms are changing, which makes communication about branding difficult even within the same industry or even the same company.
We'll talk about what brand loyalty is, but mainly from the perspective that it has different meaning to different people. What we do know is that brand loyalty is important to marketers. So we'll try to figure out why this is the case, and maybe this will spur some questions as to whether it should be as important as people make it. We'll explore why brand loyalty is hard to achieve and why marketers are fooled into thinking that they have brand loyalty when they really don't.
And finally, we'll map out how marketers can move their audiences closer and closer toward brand loyalty and talk about how even if they don't achieve it, they'll still likely be extremely successful. Let's start by discussing some key brand related terms and how they relate to each other. And again, it's important to keep in mind that the meanings of some of these terms tend to differ slightly across industries and even across companies.
And also that these terms and the meanings are changing over time as various groups begin to discuss them and pay attention to them in their marketing efforts. Let's start with brand. A brand is, in its simplest terms, its identifier.
It helps us to distinguish one product from another, or one organization from another, or even one person from another. Consider a commodity like simple table salt. your choice of brands in the United States will most likely be between Morton brand salt versus whatever your grocery store private label brand is like Publix or Kroger or Great Value for Walmart or Signature Kitchens for Albertsons and if you took two or three of these brands and poured them into a dish to do a blind taste test you wouldn't be able to tell the difference because it's just salt simple sodium chloride or NACL if you remember this from your ninth grade chemistry class. The brand helps us know if we're purchasing Morton salt or if we're purchasing another brand because without that identifier we just wouldn't know. Now brands also provide much more than just identification.
They give us information regarding quality and service and familiarity and emotional connections which leads us basically into some of the other terms now. Brand identity is generally considered to be the recognizable elements of a brand, which would be the visual and the auditory features that help distinguish the brand from other brands in the audience member's minds. This includes the logo, colors, visual design features, mascots or spokespeople, and even audio branding such as sound logos.
For example, see if you can recognize a few of these sound logos. You may have recognized that as the AT&T sound logo. Let's try another one. Now if you owned a computer long, long ago, you would recognize that as one of the Windows sound logos. Let's try this one.
Or maybe this is your phone carrier. Or you may have owned one of these phones. If you're a movie person in a theater, you may have heard this particular brand or sound logo. And yes, that was 20th Century Fox. This next sound logo actually is from theaters as well.
Take a listen and see if you know which brand it's associated with. And if you guessed that that was Lucasfilm's THX sound system, you'd be correct. So whether it's logos, colors, visual design, or even audio branding such as sound logos, the idea behind having a strong brand identity is that your various audiences can recognize your brand even when your brand name isn't present.
But just because you're recognizable or you're recognized doesn't mean that the meaning behind your brand will be clear. and that's where we come to brand image. Brand image is how your various audiences perceive your brand. This has the potential to vary across audiences whether you plan it that way or not.
Although there are a lot of marketers out there who are under the mistaken belief that your brand image has to be consistent across all audiences, that is not the case. It's okay if your truck brand is considered to be carshow worthy to one set of customers who desire that in a vehicle while at the same time be considered tough and rugged for the set of customers who want that in their vehicles. To try to be both to each audience probably would end up being both less effective and less efficient with respect to the cost of your marketing efforts.
The key is to determine the brand image that works best with your audiences, keeping in mind the context of your marketplace, your competition, your abilities to deliver on the perceptions that your brand images are portraying. The next set of items, brand personality, brand persona, brand voice, and brand tone, seem to be slightly evolving in meaning as more and more people discuss them and as a result of more people trying to control them. Brand personality.
is the personification of your brand to some degree. It's the set of traits that someone could attribute to your brand. Is your brand caring or serious or sophisticated or fun-loving? Are you known for being innovative or dependable or value-driven?
A brand personification, Persona is to some degree taking the idea of brand personality a step further. Could you build a mental visualization of who your brand would be if it were in fact a human? Brand voice is how your brand communicates in writing, in sound, in imagery, in music, etc.
Do you communicate to your audience formally, informally, in a lighthearted way, in a funny way? What would your target audiences expect from your brand with respect to communication? Tone is like...
voice but is more situational. For example, even though Denny's, the diner style restaurant, has a fairly fun-loving and even silly voice on their Twitter account, if they need to say something serious about a social issue or a tragedy, they change their tone for that communication to show their respect for the issue or the event. Brand voice and tone contribute to brand personality and all this ends up becoming part of the brand image. Brand equity is the value that the brand either adds to or subtracts from the product or the organization.
Consider some people who are shopping for clothing at a discount store like Ross or Marshalls or TJ Maxx. they see a clothing item they're interested in and then notice the brand on the label. If that brand name enhances their desire for the product and the associated willingness to pay more money, then it's a clear indicator that the brand has positive brand brand equity to that person, to those people.
If they see the brand and their opinion of the brand or the product drops, if their opinion of the product drops, the brand has negative brand equity, at least to those consumers in that situation and at that moment. You might feel very positive toward a brand for a given situation or for a particular product category, but feel negative toward the brand in a different situation or when that brand is associated with a different product category. Strong positive brand equity can help a business charge more money for their products, sell more volume, and even to reduce costs. The cost reductions can come by way of getting better deals with suppliers, perhaps hiring employees for less pay because they're so excited to work for your company, and even avoiding marketing costs because the brand has strong and favorable organic buzz. Brand equity can be used to leverage the brand this could be done through getting deals obtaining prime retail shelf space negotiating favorable co-op advertising and other ways another way to leverage brand equity is through brand extensions brand extensions are when you use the power and image of your brand to enter into new products and in to offer new products and to enter into new product or business categories it could be like Nike, moving from athletic shoes to more casual shoes, and even moving to sports and non-sports clothing, or even to other products like watches or sunglasses.
Or athletic shoe brand Adidas, who has extended their brand to water bottles, wallets, headphones, and even colognes and body lotions. Typically, brand extensions should capitalize on the company's knowledge of the product category, the geographic marketplace, and the specificity of the product. or most importantly the target audiences.
Brand architecture is how various products or brands are arranged within the organization's and brand structure. For example, Procter & Gamble has multiple brands that are well known to consumers even if the consumers don't understand that P&G is the parent brand. The large automobile brands have sub-brands that allow them to maintain the overall image of the parent brand but also at the same time allow distinctions for the audience's idiosyncrasies with respect to the types of cars they prefer. But sometimes brand extensions can affect the brand architecture in a way that doesn't work if the buyers aren't completely aware of that architecture or its history. This can cause dilution of brand meaning, where that brand doesn't have the concentrated meaning it once had because the brand is expanded into new areas and now has a brand image that's expanded as well.
Consider a brand like Virgin. What does it mean with respect to product category or quality or feeling or delivery? It's hard to know because each Virgin product, some now not even controlled by the original parent company, each product has a different meaning to the different audiences for those product categories. Let's look at another example of brand extensions and how This attempt to extend the brand has caused or has changed the brand architecture and out of necessity has diluted the concentrated focus of the brand.
Just like adding water to a chemical solution dilutes the solution so that it's not as concentrated. This doesn't necessarily mean that the end result is bad, but only that it's not as strongly concentrated or focused as it was originally. Let's consider the Arm & Hammer brand and its flagship product, baking soda. So when I grew up, I grew up with Arm & Hammer baking soda. My mom used it to cook, to bake, and that was the only Arm & Hammer product that we knew of, was the baking soda product.
And they did talk about how baking soda could be used for multiple purposes. for example they would mention that you could use it as a mild abrasive for cleaning something on your stove top or on your counter top. They mentioned that it was good to get rid of odors and so you could open a box and put it into the refrigerator.
an old box down, you know, the product down the drain and get rid of odors that way. I remember one time as a kid, we didn't have any toothpaste that morning to brush our teeth. And my mom said, oh, go ahead and use baking soda. And we did. And we foamed up on the mouth like we had rabies.
And it was very gritty. But apparently it worked. And so the idea of baking soda having these other benefits or other things that you could do with it was something that Arm & Hammer wanted to capitalize on.
So initially what they would do is they would have ads that would talk about all the different ways that you could use baking soda. And that was great, a good start. But eventually they decided to add in other products. Well, these products made sense because they, in essence, featured the benefits of what baking soda had.
So, for example, when they came out with their toothpaste line, it made sense. If you could have brushed your teeth with baking soda before, Then it makes sense that now you could brush your teeth and it talks about how it's powered with baking soda and the idea is that for those people especially who had grown up with baking soda, Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, this was a sensible brand extension. Another sensible extension was the idea of deodorants. If you knew that baking soda was good at deodorizing, then you might feel comfortable with the idea that, well, if it deodorizes...
the smells or the odors in the fridge, then maybe it can also deodorize your own odors as well. So again, people might feel comfortable with that. And then finally, because baking soda could be used used as a mild abrasive, then the idea of using it in a detergent made sense as well.
And so with these three extensions, and there's other extensions as well, they make sense to us. We look at this and we understand that with this particular architecture, that it comes from that baking soda at the beginning and the architecture makes some sense to us. It has, however, caused brand dilution. because now the brand doesn't mean what it did before with respect to being concentrated only on baking and we'll talk about some other issues with this in just a minute finally this all speaks to the idea of rebranding and repositioning and although many rebranding discussions involve mainly aesthetics focused on brand identity rather than brand image a serious repositioning can take years and could happen happen with or without strategic planning. In the case of Arm & Hammer, the brand clearly is not the baking product brand that it used to be.
It's much more, and they make more money because of it. One concern with this would be how people would view the brand if they did not understand the brand architecture. Consider a younger audience who knows one or more of the extension products but doesn't know anything about the baking soda connection. What would be their feelings about having a toothpaste brand that was in their minds the same as a deodorant brand?
Would you buy Right Guard toothpaste or Secret toothpaste or Old Spice toothpaste? or would you buy crest or close-up deodorant what about the disconnect between deodorant and detergent would you buy tide deodorant or perhaps even worse between detergent and toothpaste Does crest detergent sound odd to you? Does tied or gained toothpaste seem like something you want to put into your mouth?
You can see that without an understanding of the brand architecture, the brand has lost some meaning and even can create odd feelings in the acceptability of consumers regarding the product extensions that the brand has created. They all made sense with the parent baking soda, but without it, the meaning is diluted. Let's talk about brand loyalty and why it's important. Brand loyalty can be considered as an attitude.
In other words, it's how you feel about something, how you feel about the brand. We can look at brand loyalty as behavior. In other words, regardless of what the attitudes I have toward the brand, if I'm not getting something, I'm not getting anything.
out of it as the company then what's the point to us so maybe we look at it as how people act toward the brand and that might be a way that we want to either define or measure brand loyalty for certain brand loyalty is what we might call an idiosyncratic condition in other words it's personal that means that each person has their view of brand loyalty if i were to ask you are you brand loyal and i was to ask somebody else are you brand loyal to a particular brand your loyalties toward those different brands are probably very different even though you're both saying you're loyal When it comes to measuring brand loyalty, we could look at behaviors such as purchase patterns. We can look at opinion surveys and try to use those to assess whether or not someone has some type of brand loyalty. We could get even deeper, look into in-depth interviews and really try to understand what is it people feel.
Or we could use experimentation. We could try to manipulate a situation where we can look at how someone would feel toward something, whether it was a shirt or it was a... clothing item or whatever it was and then whether it was even the brand of the manufacturer or the brand of the retailer and how that might affect whether or not that brand had equity and whether or not there was some degree of loyalty if you were start to change the price of something and raise the price could we get people to still buy the product even as the price went higher and higher and higher because of brand loyalty and not because of something else which we'll discuss in just a few minutes.
Also, we have to consider that there are degrees of brand loyalty, that sometimes people are much more loyal to a brand than others would be or much more loyal to a brand. more loyal to one brand than they would be to another brand so let's go and look at a little bit of this concept of using purchase patterns to infer the degrees of brand loyalty so let's start with our first purchase pattern let's say that someone's buying brand brand A over and over and over, whether this is weekly or daily or monthly. The idea is that perhaps every week someone's going into the store and buying brand A.
There are a lot of marketers out there who are going to feel very comfortable with the idea that this is a representation of Brand loyalty, but it's not necessarily what if it's merely brand inertia This is the idea that someone's going to buy the same brand because of habit or because of familiarity And they'll keep on buying that brand until for some reason something knocks them off course just like in physics a object in motion stays in motion in that direction until there's some other force that acts upon it well in this particular case maybe someone buys that same brand But then one day they walk into the store and that brand's not available There's a stock out and then they try another brand and they like that brand or maybe they walk into the store And there's an a person they're offering samples and they try the sample and say wow This is really good and then all of a sudden they switch So this could be a case then where those purchases of brand a were not at all due to loyalty But we're due to some other reason and now they could switch to be perhaps just as easily What if we saw a pattern like this? this where we see someone that's purchasing brand A for a while then brand B for some time period then C then D then maybe back to A and so what's happening here is and this could be a case of what we call either a shifting loyal or loyalty switching. Now truthfully it doesn't seem very loyal if you're going to switch loyalty but perhaps you're loyal for a short period of time but again not necessarily loyal to the brand, but perhaps loyal to something else. You'll see this a lot of times with purchases such as shampoos, where people have this idea in their heads that perhaps you shouldn't use the same shampoo for more than two weeks at a time.
So they'll buy another brand of shampoo. and they'll switch back and forth between their favorite brands of shampoo. Also this could be a case of testing or buyer experimentation where someone says I'm going to try brand A and then I'll try it for a while then I'll switch to brand B and then you're just trying over time until they finally find the brand that they really like.
It could also be a case of variety seeking behavior where someone buys something they enjoy it but now they want to switch to something else. They want to change restaurants or change yogurt brands or whatever it happens to be because they want to try a different variety of brands or maybe even a different variety of products. What if we were to see a pattern like this where we see people buying brand A then A then B then A then B then A and B together.
and then a so we can see where sometimes people are buying the same different brands at the same time well this could be due to several things it could be that they're a split loyal or dual loyal or multi-loyal loyal meaning that they like two brands and then whenever they run out they'll buy either one of those brands or buy the other brand it could be that this is a person buying for multiple people in a household and so they buy brand a brand a brand b and there are times when they buy both brands because they have people in the household that like two different brands so it's hard for us to actually infer brand loyalty just by looking at purchase patterns maybe a better route for us is not necessarily to know yet if we have brand loyalty but to work on some type of a path toward what we think should be brand loyalty so let's take a look at the brand loyalty hierarchy so to start this hierarchy we'll start at the bottom and we'll say that Before we can have some type of a, usually before we want to talk about building our brand, we want to make sure that we have availability to the target markets of that particular brand or product. This isn't always the case. The next step is brand awareness. But let's think of two of these together. It's possible to have brand awareness before we have availability of the brand to the marketplace.
I remember when I was in grad school, I remember seeing an ad on TV, and the ad was for Red Lobster for that restaurant. restaurant. And I got excited because there was a sale and I thought, wow, we can go eat at Red Lobster. And I checked around and I couldn't find a Red Lobster anywhere in town.
And this was a long time ago before I could just Google it. And eventually someone said, you know, the nearest Red Lobster is like an hour away. And so if you want to drive that far just to get this deal, then that's going to be a long way to get this deal.
Well, it moved from a consumer question for me trying to find the Red Lobster restaurant so I could go eat. to more of a marketing question. At that point then, I was curious.
I called up the company and asked, why would you advertise on television for this special deal when you know that there's no restaurants nearby? And of course their answer was a very simple one. We purchased the the commercial time in bulk in a certain region and it doesn't pay to drop certain locations out.
It was more cost effective just to advertise in a blanket kind of a... area. So, but what this made me think of was the idea that we're not just building some brand awareness and maybe some brand desire, but we may also be building a desire for the actual product itself. If all of a sudden I felt like, wow, now I have this desire to eat seafood, but that brand's not there, they could have inadvertently moved me to go try another brand of seafood, another restaurant.
And then as I become you know familiar and perhaps brand loyal to the other brand even when red lobster comes to town i've already switched over so you have to be careful on occasion of creating this awareness and creating this desire for your brand if you're not able to actually offer it to the people in those markets let's talk about brand awareness with brand awareness there's a couple things we think of sometimes as far as testing this and that is recognition and recall for brand recognition It's merely the idea that if I mention a brand, you might understand what that brand is. So if I said that Dell Computers, and you said, yeah, Dell, I understand that brand, or IBM, or Apple, and you hear that and you say, yes, I recognize this brand, we could do a recall test, and that's a little bit stronger of a test. And there's an aided recall test and unaided. So unaided is the strongest test of brand awareness. And what I could ask is, well, name some brands of over-the-counter.
pain relievers. And so if you said, well, Aleve and Excedrin and Tylenol, and you might think that these are the brands that you'd come up with. And it could be that I give you some type of an aided recall test, where maybe I say that maybe there's a brand out there that is in particular for back pain. And you might think, oh yeah, there's a brand called Doan's Pills. And you wouldn't have thought of that brand without that prompt, without that aid, the aided recall test.
What if I said that there's a brand out there that comes actually in a little paper packet and you tear it open and it's in a powder form instead of being in a pill form. And there are a couple brands, BC Powder and Goodies, that are out there and they come in that packet. And so with that information, then perhaps if you knew that brand, you would be able to recall that brand, but with an aided recall test rather than an unaided test. Well, once you get to brand awareness, then...
We're going to start to understand more about that brand. In other words, we don't just know the brand, but we start to understand the brands or the product that goes with that brand, the features and attributes. So, for example, with the BC powder that comes in a little envelope for a pain reliever, you start to think, well, what are the attributes or features? Well, it comes in a powder instead.
I could mix it into a drink and I could drink it that way instead of taking a pill. But knowledge of the brand attributes and features doesn't do us much good. Unless we have knowledge of the brand's benefits.
In other words, how do those attributes and features help me as a buyer? How can they help me to fulfill my needs or my desires? So if someone were to talk to me about a cell phone and tell me, well, this cell phone's got some really great graphics and it's great to do games, I would say, well, that's interesting.
That's an attribute or feature. But for me, it's not a benefit. I have never Never use my cell phone to play a game.
So because of this, it's just not something that I feel is a need or desire, and therefore it's not going to be a benefit. After understanding the brand's benefits, now we're also in the realm of developing attitude toward the brand. Now, let me warn you. The attitude to the brand is not only going to be developed after knowledge of the brand's benefits. The truth is, once you actually hear the brand name, you're probably developing some type of attitude toward that brand.
If I were to tell you about a brand that's called XZZ45 and then tell you about another brand that's called ABC123, already in your minds, just with these letters and numbers, you're going to think something about those brands. And if I told you that one of them was some type of a child care center, then most likely you'd say it's the ABC123. If I told you that the other one... was some type of industrial cleaner, then you would think, oh, that makes sense. It sounds like an industrial cleaner brand.
So brand awareness, once we have that brand awareness and have the brand in our heads, we'll start to develop attitude. But a lot of that attitude really starts to form when we understand the brand attributes and features and understand how those attributes and features can help us. In other words, what are the benefits to us? When we're talking about attitude, let's talk about some ways that attitude is perceived by psychologists and by consumer behavior marketers as well. So there are three parts of attitude typically.
It's called the tripartite model. And what this is is that they talk about the cognitive, the attitude, affective and then the cognitive. So let me go through each of these. The cognitive is that part of the attitude that's considered the information, the data. In other words, it's the facts about that brand.
So this is the part of it that we can look at objective, fairly objective information and understand that will help us form that cognitive attitude toward the brand. It doesn't necessarily mean rational. And the reason why I want to make this in. this clear is because the affective portion, affective is basically emotional.
Some people say, well, cognitive is rational and affective is emotional, but that implies that emotions are not rational. And emotions are absolutely rational. Because you care about somebody, you do something for them. And so caring and love and fear, all of those are rational emotions. And so as a marketer, we have to think of the cognitive the part that's the the data and the facts the affective which is emotion and consider both parts of that attitude toward the brand the last one the cognitive is more behavioral in other words there are some people who say that there's a behavior toward the brand that may be more telling than the the feelings of uh toward the brand or the attitudes toward it from the cognitive perspective in other words if even if i say i like the brand or i feel positive toward the brand If I don't purchase it, then why is that?
That's not going to do much good for me as a marketer. So it has to make sure then that we think of all three. Now typically it's the top two, the cognitive and affective, that people consider in marketing.
And the truth is that focusing on the emotional side of the attitude toward the brand is often much more likely to result in long-term positive attitude toward the brand, long-term preferences, and even long-term. brand loyalty. After talking about the attitude toward the brand we consider the idea of whether or not this brand would be included in what we call the evoked set of brands. What this means is that if I were to say are you going to go out for dinner or go out for lunch and to a fast food place you might think okay fast food place and then in your head you start to think about the various brands the various restaurants you could go to and maybe it's McDonald's and Burger King and and Taco Bell and Subway and a few others.
These would be your evoked set. So regardless of what you feel about those brands, they are the ones that pop into your head. And because they've popped into your head, it limits other brands from popping in. So for example, you're typically going to think of five or six or seven brands and not necessarily think of others because those brands are taking up that psychological space in essence.
From there, we think of our consideration set. So what if you never really liked McDonald's? You don't like going there at all, and you have no intention ever of going, and so it's not really one that you would really consider. But yet, when we say the words fast food, you just think of it automatically because it's been in your head for so long.
So what's happening is McDonald's is taking up a space in that evoked set, and it's stopping something else perhaps from getting into the evoked set, which then can't get into the consideration set. the consideration set or the set of brands that you would truly consider choosing from when you want to go ahead and purchase a product from there and in fact and even before that time you're starting to develop a brand preference or ranking so you have this attitude toward the brand and if that attitude is much more favorable than with toward other brands then you're going to have this brand preference toward that particular brand now this could be situational it could be something that changes over time obviously But at some point you're starting to have this brand preference and so maybe you're saying, well you know I'm thinking about these different brands and I think I really want to go to Subway and that's where I want to go or maybe it's Burger King, whatever it happens to be. Or maybe it's a situation one where you think if I'm leaving the office and it's one o'clock in the morning then I realize that I only have a couple choices.
I have my choice of the 24-hour McDonald's and the 24-hour Taco Bell and so if I'm not a McDonald's fan then Taco Bell wins. It wins in the brand preference or the ranking. From there, we move on to a purchase intention. Now we know where we want to go.
Subway, or Burger King, or McDonald's, whichever one it happens to be, and we have this intention. But let's say that while we're driving toward that restaurant, we drive past some other place, maybe it's a barbecue place, and that barbecue place has this great smell to it, and we stop and think, wow, even though my intention was to go one place, My actual purchase may be another place because something else happens between the intention and the purchase. But typically speaking, when I have that intention, more often than not, I should make the purchase with the same brand. At that point, we're really happy.
We're marketers. We've gotten people to come and buy our brand, but we're not completely satisfied because we want repeat purchases. And those repeat purchases are what are going to give us more money because obviously it's that same thing you've heard over the years, and that is that it costs a lot more money to get a new customer than to retain the old customer.
So we want to have people come back and to repeat purchase. It's the concept of, lifetime customer value from there hopefully then we after a period of time of repeat purchases will build something called brand loyalty but the problem with this is that this concept of brand loyalty may not be accurate for example what if I'm going and buying something because it has a low price and then later because they think I'm loyal they raise the price on me and then I go somewhere else instead I was really price loyal rather than brand loyal. Or what if the quality changes of the product? And now people realize that I wasn't really loyal to the brand.
I was loyal to the quality. Maybe it's a location issue. Maybe it's a social issue.
I used to go to a place for to buy chlorine for a pool and I really really enjoyed the people who worked there. It was a family who had the franchise. I went there all the time and then one day I walked in and the family wasn't there anymore and i talked to one employee that was still there and i said what's happened and he said well they sold the franchise and they're gone and he said almost everybody else is gone as well there's only three of us left and i thought wow even though there was another pool place down the the road where i could buy chlorine probably for a lower price all this time i was loyal but i wasn't loyal to the parent brand i was loyal to the people who operated that franchise once they left At that point, there was no loyalty at all.
There was no loyalty to the brand, and now I switch back and forth between the two stores because there is no brand loyalty. So it could be that instead of brand loyalty, people are being price loyal, quality loyal, location loyal, convenience loyal, socially loyal. Perhaps they go to the same place over and over again because their friends go, and then when their friends leave, they don't go to that place anymore. And that company may have thought that they had them, that they were loyal, but they're not. Eventually, there's extreme brand identification.
This is when people get to the point where they feel very much like not just that they care about the brand, but the brand is representative of them. This is like if you think about it, something like Harley Davidson. Now, Harley Davidson, late 70s, early 80s, 1980s, they really weren't doing too well with their production.
And they would sometimes put out motorcycles that didn't have high quality. And that was the time when a lot of the Japanese imports were coming in. But those Harley-Davidson customers would buy a higher-priced, lower-quality motorcycle, then work on it themselves to build it up.
Consider, would you buy a higher-priced product that's lower quality, and then put in the time and effort to make it better just because it was the brand you wanted? They did. And the reason they did was not because they liked the brand so much, as much as that brand was identifying for them.
At that point they were part of something, not just part of the social side of it, but part of if you rode the Harley-Davidson, then that was who you were. It was like the early days of Apple when people would say, oh, I'm a Mac person or I'm a PC person. The idea is having this brand identification.
Finally, we have to think about things like brand sustainability. Can we keep our brand going over time, especially if we're going to end up diluting what the brand means? Can we have the sustainability and keep the brand going? Will we have this brand affinity where people will care about our brand and build affinity groups around that brand? Right now on Facebook, you'll see people that have a certain affinity group with a brand.
The brand doesn't run that group, but the people that care about the brand do. And finally... maybe you really do have this thing at the top that's called brand worship in quotes there. And that's really connected to that extreme brand identification. Are there people who absolutely think the best of that brand no matter what that brand does?
And if you think about things like extreme brand identification, think about tattoos. How many tattoos do we have of people that, or how many people have tattoos of Harley Davidson versus of, let's say, FIU? And I would imagine that there's a lot more.
Now, granted, you could argue. that that particular market is maybe much more prone to get tattoos in another market but still the idea is at some point how extremely connected to that brand will you be and how much will that brand help identify who you are so i want to leave you with a quote about branding brand image exists independently in the mind of each audience member it's the marketer's job to shape that brand image in a manner that builds the desired brand equity.