The word "brand" gets thrown around a lot these days. (I know I use it all the time.) But what is a brand?A brand in a marketing sense is essentially everything that has to do with a company or product. It's not only the visual logo and identity as the term is often used, but it's also how people feel about a product, and all of their experiences with that product, both positive and negative. Companies try to influence brand perception with advertising and marketing...I should know, it's my job...but a brand isn't something physical you can hold in your hand. It's an intangible, ephemeral concept that can determine the success or failure of a company. To put it simply, it's quite a powerful little word influenced by more factors than you can count on your fingers and toes.
I read today in the Brand New blog that the Department of Psychology at Harvard University is currently running a "mind study" that examines how people perceive the 'mental' capacities of corporations. Here's how Harvard explains it:
Every day we buy products from a variety of corporations. Each of them employs marketers to see into your mind - the mind of their consumer. Here is your opportunity to turn the tables and evaluate their minds. Of course, corporations do not have minds in the normal sense, but they do possess certain abilities. We are interested in how people perceive the mental capacities of corporations.
It's essentially an exercise to see how you perceive the brands of the 13 companies they're testing. First you meet the companies, ranging from companies most people like (Google, Whole Foods) to companies most people are ambivalent about (Playtex, TWA) to companies most people despise (Phillip Morris, Enron). Next you're given a series of tests to take — the first one I took was "Harm" and others include Worth, Punishment, Morality, Guilt and Desire — that take between 5 and 10 minutes to complete. You're given a series of match-ups of two of the companies on the list...so in my first quiz, I was asked, "If you were forced to harm one of these corporations, which one would it be more painful for you to harm?" Based on my results, here is how I ranked the 13 companies they were testing.
- =Disney
- =Apple
- Toys 'R' Us
- =Ben and Jerry's
- Starbucks
- Whole Foods Market
- Playtex
- Walmart
- Trans World Airlines
- Enron
- Exxon
- Phillip Morris
My results didn't surprise me much...given the list of companies, I probably would have ranked them similarly, with just a few changes in the middle perhaps. But it's interesting to see how emotions can be tied to our feelings about a company's brand, especially in the circumstances Harvard is asking us to put them in.
How do you rank the companies? Take the quiz and find out if your perceptions are in line with your actions. And see why even though a company might spend billions on marketing, or "branding" themselves, there are so many other factors that influence consumers' perception.
