As I shared earlier, a brand image is a condensation of all experiences a person has ever had in conjunction with the brand. The goal in assessing brand equity is to pull out as many of these as possible, then see how they make up a unified whole.
One type of experience is the experience of the tangible product. In thinking of your brand image, ask yourself what single component of the product is most responsible for the total brand image? For Mercedes Benz, it is probably the elegant little three-pointed star hood ornament. In research done a few years back on some mainline US brands, these were some of the main contributors to these brands’ images:
Brand Main Image Source Lies in:
NyQuil Little plastic cup
Levis Gray, faded look when old
McDonalds Fries and mushy texture of Big Mac
VW Rabbit Body shape, little wheels and tires
The research here is simple: Just deconstruct the product into its components, and ask a sample of consumers which component “most communicates the feeling of (brand name)-ness”, as in “Levi-ness”, or “NyQuil-ness.”
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Jeffrey F. Durgee, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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