When H&M sought to define their brand and experience, they chose not to look for or invent something new and different. Instead, they chose to keep it simple and generic. Their business concept is one many retailers can claim: fashion and quality at the best price.

What makes H&M different is that its stores change constantly. H&M decided to build on the constant new supplies and chose to focus on how it did things, rather than what it did. With an ambition to become the ‘fun’ of fashion, it defined fun by its wide assortment of daily new arrivals, by affordability and unexpected collaborations. These collaborations began with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004. That a fashion retail chain was able to attract famous designers known for their integrity is one of H&M’s greatest surprises. And the collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld highlighted its own concept of constant change: Karl embodied the changing nature of fashion. As he said of himself, ‘I never do or say the same thing twice’.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Thomas Gad, excerpted from his book Customer Experience Branding, with permission from Kogan Page publishing.

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The factory management quickly produced a full page of text in the regional newspaper, GT, where they tried to explain that PVC is not at all dangerous when treated correctly. Unfortunately, they used a lot of words to say very little and, as Greenpeace had hoped, Norsk Hydro’s effort just made things worse. Instead of a well-reasoned and informative explanation, their response looked exactly like typical cold-hearted and cynical industrialists desperately trying to defend themselves.

I was called in as a branding and communications consultant to help the Norsk Hydro management team. The first thing I did was to explain to them how communication works. I felt that this seemingly obvious step was necessary because most of the management team was made up of engineers and business administrators who had never needed to know how to manage perceptions in people’s minds.

In A Brand Crisis Do The Unexpected

I suggested that instead of continuing to do what everyone expected them to do – explain with facts – Norsk Hydro should do the opposite and actually attack Greenpeace using their own methods. Instead of reacting and defending, they could break both their own expected pattern and the pattern of the common view on plastics as something we just use and carelessly throw away: waste without value.

I had two ideas on how they could break this pattern of perception in people’s minds, about plastic in general and PVC in particular. The first idea grew serendipitously from a meeting I’d had a few weeks earlier with a Swedish artist named Carouschka. She had told me that she wanted to create an exhibition about plastics inspired by a huge collection of everyday plastic items that a Stockholm advertising art director has accumulated. Carouschka wanted to add to his collection and create a major plastics display at the most visible cultural venue right in the heart of Stockholm, Kulturhuset. However, financing was an issue.

Therefore, I asked Norsk Hydro if they would consider funding it, pointing out the opportunity of breaking the pattern of what Norsk Hydro, plastic and PVC stood for at that moment in time. They agreed and within a month the exhibition was successfully launched. It gathered a lot of attention from the media and culturally influential people within Sweden and prompted one of the top cultural journalists to write the headline ‘Plastic – the modern gold’ in his review of the exhibition. In one stroke of the media, plastic was transformed into something with cultural and artistic value. And the centerpiece of the exhibition was a plastic bag containing blood, hanging from its hook and ready to deliver a life-saving blood infusion to a model human arm. Despite the toxins emitted when waste PVC is incinerated, its use is invaluable in medicine and it is the only material that can contain blood without risk of contagion.

The second activity I suggested also worked towards the goal of supporting a sense of value instead of waste. This activity was to immediately start a recycling program for plastics in Sweden. Convincing the engineers and economists in the management team to do this was a tough proposition for two reasons. First, the art exhibition was much easier to buy into, because there was already a plan in place that simply needed to be put into action.

A recycling program would need to be built from nothing. The second reason was that the recycling of plastics was technically difficult to manage and was not considered economical. I had to turn to the universal communication model once again to explain that the recycling had nothing to do with making money, nor did it even need to carry its own cost. Instead, it was symbolically essential to help people perceive plastic as something with its own value, as opposed to something worthless that you just throw away when you’re done with it.

The amazing and unexpected result of all this was a kind of truce that developed between Norsk Hydro and Greenpeace. It became the story of how non-profit organizations like Greenpeace, who had initially lobbied for a total European Union ban on PVC, had a serious impact on commercial companies like Norsk Hydro. This impact created a gamechanging effect in the PVC business that began in Sweden and quickly spread around the world. It fundamentally changed the industry’s approach and launched the drive to develop a sustainable business strategy and the development of PVC manufacturing techniques that replaced the toxic and poisonous ingredients with stabilized and non-toxic alternatives.

Break The Pattern, Solve The Brand Crisis

We have very clear, stereotyped expectations about how an industry should act in crises: first with silence, followed by denial, attempts to explanation or threats. Simply breaking that expected pattern creates the possibility for you to find your way out of the crisis with the respect of your opponents and with limited damage. It’s not enough today to turn around and admit a mistake. Now, you have to offer good reasons that explain your past choices and find a way to repair the damage caused by corporate mistakes. Which in turn are usually caused by the wrong corporate culture. As with the Norsk Hydro case, it may even be possible to turn a crisis into an acclaimed success by bringing people together.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Thomas Gad, excerpted from his book Customer Experience Branding, with permission from Kogan Page publishing.

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Another study by the CEO of NeuroBusiness, Srini Pillay M.D., showed that we can, in fact, predict which messages will go viral and which messages won’t. Ideas that spread out have a distinct, recognizable characteristic that lies, surprisingly, in the brain of the sender. Messages that spread trigger two key areas in the sender’s brain. The first of these registers rewards, the value that the sender places on the message. The second area deals with the ability to see things from the message receiver’s point of view.

When we, as brand managers, create our message, it is these two factors that help determine whether the message will go viral or not. The more you value an idea, and the more accurately you can predict how others will perceive the message, the more successful you will be at spreading it.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Thomas Gad, excerpted from his book Customer Experience Branding, with permission from Kogan Page publishing.

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Brands are built on perceptions and experiences, and branding can be defined as managing perceptions and experiences in people’s minds. We are looking at different aspects of brands than we considered before. We like a brand to introduce us to new things. Brands should represent the future (or nostalgia), and make us feel updated and savvy. We want a brand to offer something that we proudly show off to friends; something that will become a new favorite.

The brand should be perceived as a leader of its category. This gives us confidence in the brand, even when this isn’t always true of its products or services. Some brands that are perceived as high innovation are not always first with the technology, but are first with exploiting a new user experience (like Apple and GoPro). It’s even better if we can identify with the brand and feel that the brand is ‘always reading my mind’, or that it’s one step ahead of me or making me, as a customer, feel special and important. It’s not just a different, new experience we’re looking for, it’s also the brand’s personality.

Again, this can be through a sense of nostalgia – when the brand is perceived as classic – or through following a new trend and being an agitator on the boundaries of its category. Customers already have very high expectations that the perceived top brands will be predictable in both their tangible deliveries and their personalities. I usually consider branding to be very similar to friendship, and positive surprises have always been a good way to maintain interest between friends. In fact, the same principle applies within any kind of relationship.

Surprise Leads To Brand Loyalty

This becomes most challenging for strong brands. Since we love to be positively surprised by our favorite brands, the surprise-effect makes us more loyal. And when we are more loyal to brands, our friends and family take notice and are influenced by us. Even when we don’t actually mention the brands in conversations, we are important promoters of the brands just by using them. We sometimes forget that.

When our favorite brands exceed the expectation we have of them, by giving us a surprise, we get more excited and our interest in and loyalty to the brand increases. One of the few things that makes us repeatedly loyal to a brand is experiencing something positively unexpected. And when a brand (and company) fails or vanishes from the market and our minds, it is usually caused by a lack of positive surprises for a long time. Surprises can become almost like a drug for us; the kick of the new and the different that we don’t want to be without. When the time between the kicks of surprise gets longer and longer, we lose interest. This is why brands that fail to deliver those kicks have a very hard time. Especially if the brand had previously given their customers reason to anticipate surprising innovations.

We can look at Google to see this. The Google brand is continuously on the rise, always coming up with new surprises and out-of-the-box ideas like Google Glasses, driverless cars or singularity research and thought leadership with Ray Kurzweil. Even all the start-ups Google picks up create surprise, despite Google’s prominent business strategy and its lead role in developing the digital world, the internet and mobile business. With Android, Uber, Waze, Nest and more, Google is continually surprising. Even the Google logo changes every so often, which a classic transaction brand would never do.

For contrast, we can turn to Apple. In the years following the death of Steve Jobs, the company’s flow of surprises slowed to a stop. The perception of Apple as an innovative company that challenged the status quo and looked at the world in a different way began to fade. The result was that their relationship with their many fans and brand supporters showed signs reminiscent of a fading marriage. This was reversed when Apple introduced several new products and concepts at one very important launch event, almost two years after Steve Jobs’ death.

Apple’s example shows that these failing brands have the ability to recover again, but this kind of long-term disappointment and lack of surprise can lead to the loss of even the most loyal customers of a brand. Not every strong brand that was temporarily perceived as boring returns to the same dynamic strength it had before.

Make Every Surprise Personal

The most important surprises are those that are presented in a personal manner. These are the surprises that we look forward to and anticipate, but are not sure that we’ll get. At the very least, we want our anticipation to be confirmed, which itself creates a sense of surprise.

We like new surprises, ones that make the brand more human and personal, such as the pulsing light when the first generations of Apple’s laptop computers were closed. Steve Jobs wanted it to mimic the beating of a human heart.

It’s of great importance for a relation brand to be perceived as personal. The tone of voice a brand uses today should be surprisingly human. The intuitive and proactive perception of the brand’s nature has to become genuinely human. We’re getting used to this now. The situation has matured and brands that don’t have the right, human tone of voice are perceived, more than ever, as cold-hearted and unfriendly, and it becomes hard to build a relationship with them.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Thomas Gad, excerpted from his book Customer Experience Branding, with permission from Kogan Page publishing.

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A good way to understand what branding does is to consider the opposite: what happens if you do not use branding at all? The amazing thing is that branding takes place anyway. But instead of the brand owner or manager intentionally guiding people, people use their imagination to fill the empty space, this vacuum of information, with their own ideas and fantasies.

This is always the case in situations when there is no available information; the empty space is filled with speculations, and the ideas based on them. People start to speculate, and share their speculations with others. Sometimes, outside commentators try to help by producing statements and comments, still without access to precise facts or real insight into the thinking of the decision makers.

I have never met, or heard of, any brand builders who found the right branding by launching their products with no planned branding effort. I have met their opposites, though, who complain that their brand is not perceived the way it should be, or that their brand is not in the forefront of people’s minds as it is supposed to be.

Managing is a key word in explaining what branding is all about. In most companies, there are many different management processes: human resources management, finance management, production management, procurement management, etc. Since branding is one of the most important processes in creating value, both in terms of equity and of the business’s result (profit), it should definitely be considered an important core management process. Unfortunately, in many companies, it is not.

Sometimes this is the result of a traditional point of view. Branding is considered part of the marketing process, and yes, of course, it is an essential part of marketing. But there is much more to branding than just marketing; it is traditionally the basis of the company culture. Branding is usually where the company’s vision, mission and values are stated. It is, simply, a sub-set Branding of management strategy in any kind of enterprise, not just commercial. Favorite alternative phrases for branding include ‘company DNA’, ‘company soul’ or brand essence.

Example: ‘Pirate Branding’ – How To Manage Perception Of Fear In People’s Minds

The marauding pirates of the Caribbean in the iconic pirate era of the 1650s to the 1720s are a very illustrative and dramatic example of effectively managing perception in people’s minds. It begins with the ‘logo’ of the pirates: the classic flag most commonly attributed to Henry Avery, one of the most infamous pirate captains. The white skull in profile, wearing a kerchief, on a red or black background and with the crossed bones below very clearly depicts the fate of the crews who refused to surrender to the pirates.

An important part of managing the perception of a brand is being clear about what drives the brand owners – the why or the purpose and mission of the brand. A widespread myth states that the pirates were only interested in loot, and not in killing. This is why many ships full of merchandise, including gold and other valuables, surrendered relatively easily, with very little fighting. The sailors forced to fight by their ambitious navy officers knew very well that the pirates were outlaws with very little to lose, and that they were therefore extremely dangerous and brutal fighters. Many crews surrendered to pirates only to be recruited into pirate ranks, which not only kept them alive, but also offered monetary rewards. A pirate received one to two shares of the loot instead of the 19 to 24 shillings a month for a sailor offered by, for instance, the merchant navy.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Thomas Gad, excerpted from his book Customer Experience Branding, with permission from Kogan Page publishing.

The Blake Project Can Help: Define the strategy behind your brand perceptions in The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers