What do your fans talk about?
Essentially, your brand concept is your “aboutness”: it’s what they talk about.
Before working on luxury brands, I used to design campaigns for films. And it's only when I stopped doing it that I realised how effective films were at teaching me the basic tenet of marketing: the emotion is the product. A campaign's success depended entirely on finding an emotional hook, and that emotional hook was contained within the product i.e. the film itself.
Every now and then, a film would pop up where we'd do a focus group and find out you can break all the rules and still do something very successful.
Pulp Fiction was a classic example of this: nobody in the focus groups talked about the story. In fact… they didn't even remember the story!
Instead, they talked about:
- the "royale with cheese" scene;
- the "I love you, honey bunny" scene;
- the "bring out the gimp" scene;
- the "cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast" scene;
- ...
We had people in the focus groups who'd quote lines from the film at each other. One girl asked "Who's Zed?"; the guy sitting next to her answered "Zed's dead, baby"; and everyone in the room laughed and felt like they were part of a new in-crowd.
So, when the time came to promote Pulp Fiction's DVD release, instead of pushing trailers, we just pushed these standalone dialogue scenes, on the basis that one of the great things about DVDs was that people could watch the movie over and over until they knew those dialogues by heart i.e. the true mark of a hardcore fan.
Which brings me to the question of your brand concept, a subject we often discuss in these short essays.
There's a good case to be made that your brand concept is simply the thing your superfans remember when they talk about your brand to their friends. No more, no less. Essentially, your brand concept is your “aboutness”: it’s what they talk about.
So, it's worth considering that, if the thing you want the brand to be about isn't the thing your fanbase wants to talk about, you might just be overcomplicating things. Just like with Pulp Fiction, they're talking about this one emotionally resonant thing they have found in you. What are you talking about?