By Leo Valiquette

What is a brand? As the speakers at OCRI’s Zone5ive event emphasized this week (and anyone in the marketing or public relations space should have learnt long before they ever picked up their first pay cheque in the business) it’s much more than a logo.

Brand is the perception of your products or services in the minds of consumers, customers and clients, a perception that is created, moulded and reinforced at every point of contact with the audience you are trying to reach. These points of contact encompass everything from the treatment a disgruntled customer receives when they call a service agent, the reliability and functionality of your product and the tone of your advertisements on radio and television, to your image as an upstanding corporate citizen who is socially and environmentally responsible.

According to presenters Mike McGuire, managing partner at Wingspan Design, and Dennis Van Staalduinen, founder of Brandvelope Consulting, we tend to buy on emotion, regardless of how we may attempt to rationalize the utter logic and objectivity of our purchasing decisions. How we perceive a brand, rather than how we judge the features and benefits of a particular product, often decides our willingness to put cash on the counter.

However, part of how we perceive or favour a brand will be based on how accurately that brand reflects what we consider important, in terms of features and benefits.

For marketers, the challenge is understanding the consumer’s perspective and conveying that to the engineers and developers, while the engineers … well, the engineers need to listen to the customer-facing folks who are anything but engineers. Somewhere in the middle are the industrial designers, who must look backward from the customer’s perspective and focus on the functionality and aesthetics of a product, rather than whether it meets a certain technical specification. Apple is the perfect example of a company that has taken this to heart with a distinct brand that drools cool and exploits our propensity for emotional buying.

For a company looking to put a product on the market, the first question to answer is “What are people willing to pay for?” What they need, even what can make their lives better, doesn’t mean a bloody thing if it isn’t a product or service they are willing to buy.

The classic example that Van Staalduinen cited is the Segway, that two-wheeled gyro-balanced thingamajig from celebrity inventor Dean Kamen. For months it was hyped under the code names “IT” and “Ginger,” touted by the likes of Apple’s Steve Jobs as a revolutionary invention that would change the world and remake the urban landscape for the benefit of flowers, trees, people and puppies every where. And yet, the public at large had little idea what it actually was.

When it was unveiled, we got a high-tech scooter that did nothing that the humble bicycle hadn’t already done for us for decades, only stripped away the health benefits of physical exertion.

Nine years later, the Segway has sold about 30,000 units, whereas the investors had expected to sell 50,000 in the first month. A failure born of too much hype that failed to ask the critical question, “Will people actually pay for this?”

How about it? As you take stock of your business and attempt to chart a strategy to weather the downturn and emerge stronger on the other side, have you sought out the input of your customers and potential customers? Have you taken to heart what’s important to them, regardless of what’s important to you and your design team? Are you sure what you are planning to put out on the market is something people will pay for?

Think carefully, there’s little room for error or opportunity to beg more money from your investors and go back to the drawing board.

Technorati Tags: marketing, product development, market research, industrial design, Apple, Zone5ive

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