Hello, everyone. How many of you woke up this morning, had your shower, had breakfasts, got dressed, and made your way into work? Most of you, right? As a marketeer, of course, I notice I woke up with the alarm clock in my iPhone, which I cannot live without. I showered with my Eucerin gel because I have sensitive skin. I washed my hair with Kiehl's shampoo because I'm so hooked up in all these non-paraben, non-silicon, non-sulfites stuff. I then have my Burgo de Arias, a Spanish brand of cheese. I clean my teeth with my Oral-B brush. I put on my moisturizer, Kiehl's, again I'm afraid. Made up slightly with Guerlain's Meteorites. Put on my nice Zara summer dress and my gorgeous Tod's and booked a Car2Go to get to work. These are just some of the brands I interacted with in just under one hour and you're probably doing exactly the same thing, you just might not be aware or notice. But I do hope that after today, you start paying attention to this little interactions and you learn a little bit more about why brands are so important in your everyday life. So what is a brand? A brand is the difference between an alarm clock on my iPhone, between a moisturizing cream and my Kiehl's, between a toothbrush and my Oral-B. The word, brand, actually comes from the old Norse word, Brander, which meant to burn in, and refer to the way cattle were marked with an iron, so they could be identified. This was branding which is basically market for identification has led many to associate the brand to a name or logo and more recently to a tag line or a slogan, Just Do It. A good way to understand what a brand is is by ruling out what a brand is not. A brand isn't your name or your logo or your tagline or your slogan. It's not your products or your branches or the advertising or your website. These are tools you can use to strategically shape people's feelings about this brand or organization by a marketing and communications, but your brand is so much more than that. Branding and brand come before marketing and communication efforts. They are bigger than both or either of them and are continuously shaped by being out there. So ultimately, brands are built by what companies decide they are, but they are also built by the messages that are spread about them by the companies they belong to and the consumers they interact with every day. Jeff Bezos from Amazon says that your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room. There are certain truth to this. No matter how hard we tried to build brands and we will be learning a lot about these in the next sessions, brands behave a little bit as people. There is a very rational side to them, but they are also incredibly emotional and the way they relate to people is purely emotional and intangible. Some people go as far as stating that a brand refers to all these collection of gut feelings that you have about an organization. The gut reaction when you think about a product or company and its services. Look at the brands on this screen. What is your gut reaction? Because when I hear Harley-Davidson, I immediately think of a free rider, a rocker at heart who loves heavy metal and belongs to the community of like-minded individuals, and when I hear Ryanair, I instantly think about plastic and uncomfortable experiences and the ultimate sense of just not worth it. This collection of associations works as mental shorthand. We create brands to summarize our attitudes about basically everything; people, places, things, and this summary contains what we expect each brand is capable of delivering. How we relate to brands is a lot about how we relate to people, so when we meet someone for the first time we start forming impressions about them. We make a little mental notes about how they look and the things that they say and they do, and as time goes by, we make adjustments. We amplify some attributes, we add others, and we delete some, and it works exactly the same way with brands. Every thing you say and you do as a brand, as a marketeer, will influence how people think about you. Every interaction is an opportunity to build your brand. Positive interactions build your brand and we will see this later on in this specialization and negative interactions have a strong impact as well; sometimes so strong that you never quite recover. For brands, like people, every interaction is an opportunity to refine a reputation. From an ad to an app, which is why it's so essential to be consistent, and as with people, first impressions count, but it is also important how we manage that impression, time after time after time. This repetition helps to create a picture in people's minds about what to expect. Remember in one day, people encounter 5,000 branded messages. We like it when brands keep their promises and when brands deliver what consumers expect from them. So, it is key that we treat brands as a promise, as a pledge, as a commitment for what it stands for, its single driving focus. It is the impression we leave with consumers time after time after time. The secret for a brand is to stand for something, for one thing, and to be focused enough to stick to that one thing, and brand stand out when they're consistent, when they make promises they can keep, and they deliver on that promise every time a consumer encounters the brand. But it is also important to understand that brand exists in a crowded space. They need to stand for something, but also be different enough from others to be remembered. A relationship with a brand is a bit like an emotional bank account. Positive experiences with the brand are like adding a little bit of money to the account and a bad experience is like taking money from the account. It takes your time to fatten it up again. With brands, actions speak louder than words, and your brand will be built by what you do more than by what you say. So to recap, what is a brand? Well, it is created for people, for consumers, and their experience with the brand is fundamental for long-term growth and sustainability. It represents a relationship and each relationship will be personal, so any branding is by definition, subjective, and it starts with an agreement what we will call a brand promise, but that promise needs to be nurtured carefully.
