Branding | Lawrence van Rijn

Most of us react to it, we sometimes invoke reactions, and at times we set the reaction to what WE think is the cool reaction, there is not one exception, not you, not me and not those around us. So to set that premise we need to look at some ‘definitions’ as they are told to us, but also set markers on what we expect to see, they are not the same.

Branding
““Broadly, a product is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy a want or need, including physical goods, services, experiences, events, persons, places, properties, organisations, information, and ideas” (Kotler & Keller, 2015)”, yet that is not enough, there is also ““A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers” (American Marketing Association)”, this is all the foundation, but consider the following

Emotional marketing tells invokes a feeling that connects audiences with brands with an optional personal/human way. As any media channels, devices, objects and platforms emerge, they ensure that people have plenty of access to brand events. What’s more, there are now a host of ways for companies to convey their identity and vision, making emotional marketing much simpler, yet how does any consumer see that?

That is the stage I found myself in, I was in a store and the staff member was standing next to a tote-bag roughly 60 by 40 stating ‘Victoria Secrets’, now I in my giddy nature asked, What did you buy at Victoria Secrets? The lady got quite upset, there was inference, no innuendo, merely what I stated. Now, I am not holding her reaction against her, some might state that I had no business stating what I stated, and if that is so, why on earth did she have a tote-bag like that? To minimise her profile during headwinds? Branding is more than the definitions, we made it as such. The T-shirt stating Nasa, ‘Just do it’, enjoy Cocaine, the examples are there by the thousands and it has no intention, or attempt in stopping or slowing down.

For me the reaction was a bit strong, but I had never stated anything like that, as such I wondered why people overreact. This was not about emotion, this is about something else and we need to take consideration of the reaction, both the person making it and those hearing it. We seem to fall in the gap of branding and as such the use and abuse of branding is about to turn a corner.

Japanese
As I see it, we are becoming a ;little too Japanese in this. There some girls wear shirts with slogans and they do not know what it means. Now, we might have that with Kanji, Hiragana or Katakana, so it works both ways. But consider, how many women do you know wearing a shirt stating ‘I am a Whore’? It seems that people all over the world have become blind to what they are wearing and then overreact to the reaction, is it about manners (never say anything), yet is that not the opposite of what branding is trying to achieve? Branding is more than noticing, it is about conversing and about the creation of awareness, people talking about the brand creates awareness.

The problem
There is a problem, for any version of a view towards awareness, we see (a+1)(b+1), when there is linearity, we see 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 and so on, yet if any view invokes 10 opinions we get 1, 121, 441 and so on, and that is when the views and opinions are in a set stage, now try (a+1)(b+1)(c+1), a setting for views, opinions and reactions. So 1 view gives us 10 opinions and 20 reactions. Now we get 1, 462, 6237 and that is before we get to social media where the numbers really stack up. At what point will this come to blows, because that will happen, if one persons indication matters, so what happens when a person asks that question who has no idea what Victoria secret is? OK, that is really thin ice, but there is every chance that they haven’t heard of that brand in Loshchinka (Siberia).

No matter how we slice this, the reaction brought me out to consider branding, we take it for granted, but who is aware of what they are branding, or even that they are branding and if branding is a way to invoke a reaction, is there any consideration on the reactions we give, all whilst we are branding?

Just some food for thought

Has it happened to you? You are sitting there, in a chair (or sofa) and you suddenly get hit with realisation, this is what happened to me in the last 4-6 hours. You see, when I created some of my 5G IP, it was not in a stage of need, it was a response to the stage of Neom City, a KSA undertaking that is founded on a new city bathing in new tech and high tech. I foresaw hat consumers needed and off course I looked at. Global stage, a 5G stage where we see 440,000,000 small businesses on a global scale handing over what the buyer needs. I altered part of this to set for a much higher cyber security need (sorry to seem mysterious, but the IP has not been sold yet). This all started before Covid, so even if Covid was never a consideration, my solution would still work and would work with increased positivity. It was however today that I stopped to think about certain repercussions.

Walk the walk
We all talk the talk (anyway most of us do), we even walk the talk, but who walks the walk? Let me explain, when you walk (the actual exercise using legs), you often do it without thinking about it, you go from one place to another, you walk to get the groceries, to get the lunch, to get wherever you need to be. And overall you forget the foundation of matter, where you walk and how you walk, it is an automated process. For me too, but when you stop and think that process through, you might see a few choices that you do not normally think about. That is a process I found myself in with my IP, I found a second treasure chest, one I never bargained for, one I never considered, but it is there and now that I realise what my IP brings, it is a much larger stage.

Awareness
In market research there is something called awareness. For brands awareness is close to everything and they know it, they are always in a place to increase awareness and I have always been aware of that, yet as I do not work for them, I didn’t really care, they have staff for that and that staff has several ways to increase their brand awareness, and they are armed with a compelling list of reasons why they should do so, where they should do that and when they should do that. It is the way the world works. Yet I am now in a field where it is not merely about awareness, I have entered a stage where we see a sort of aggregation of awareness and curiosity. What is when, when is that and optionally why it is. This got me to ‘The curiosity and exploration inventory-II: Development, factor structure, and psychometrics’ (at Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009) 987–998). Here we stake notice of “refine the measurement of trait curiosity with an improved version of the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (CEI; [Kashdan, T. B., Rose, P., & Fincham, F. D. (2004)”. I was somewhat aware even as the paper is 11 years old, but then I remembered something that the paper held “Many new scales have been published, but few have been subjected to close psychometric scrutiny. The present research centred on the development of a brief, reliable, and valid measure of curiosity, improving upon an earlier version of the CEI. The data offers early evidence for the scale’s latent structure and evidence for convergent and discriminant validity”, it is the ‘a brief, reliable, and valid measure of curiosity’ that stuck, you see it is that what kills the cat and I remain (sincerely) a cat person, so I took notice. It dawned on me that my IP cannot distinguish between awareness and curiosity, but are they not scales of grey? They are both fruit, so if someone used my IP to get the data on a new Maserati, the person cannot afford one (neither can I), but is it curiosity or creating awareness on the new model? That is out in the open, so there is a second treasure chest and optionally the chest in that chest containing a diamond in the rough? (sorry Disney), I leave that up to you to consider but the stage is a lot larger, is it not? If the path we walk on gives us pause to consider where we walk, we optionally consider the soul of our shoe and how it can pass that terrain more easily. It might not make sense, but consider if you are in London, the streets will not make you pause, but Hyde Park will and that is where we find ourselves, on the edge of a park, where we see an optional new cluster of consumers, the curious ones and we get a stab at the stage that they occupy.

And those who respond with “curiosity bears a resemblance to several other psychological constructs, all of which are concerned with the way people regulate and direct their attention in the presence of novel or valued environmental stimuli. Although these terms have been used somewhat interchangeably, this unfortunate tendency has obscured the fact that the essential qualities of curiosity con- note a high degree of receptivity and willingness to engage with novel stimuli”, in this day and age ‘novel stimuli’ is the bread and butter of hype creation and that pushes the borders of curiosity, yet they are in the stage of trying to maximise that part (plus 10%), in my case the stage of that is there and now we need to see if the data can give us the curious, the aware and make them the buyers or at least clearly separate the two groups towards the active consumer if you will and that stage is not merely set on a whim, the better the data is, the better the results will be and that I what these brands are also pursuing, I merely noticed that I had more data to offer these brand polyglots and offer a new kind of shovel to parse through the data in that regard.

That is the stage I found myself in, I just found a new chest and I am hoping for the good of it and an optionally small chest holding a diamond, now I merely need to attach it to the IP I already have and I am increasing the application of my IP by a decent amount.

Sometimes life throws you a bone, sometimes a chest, whether it holds renumeration or manure is not yet clear, but I hope for the best.

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