Brand, Position and Story - How to Tell the Difference

Brand, branding, mark.

Modern marketing talk, definitions and practice tends to confuse the word brand. In the classic sense, the original meaning, brand is the mark that shows you where something originated. The swoosh on the shoe tells you it's from Nike, the stuckout tongue tells you its from the Rolling Stones, the blue and white circle tells you it's from BMW.

These days, marketers tend to just think of that mark as their logo. It needs to embody the branding but they don't consistently use the language that that is their brand. But by classic definition, that's it just like the brand on a lost steer tells you which ranch it belongs to.

Back to Al Ries, back in the day, he and Jack Trout posited the idea of positioning, which simply has to do with where you are positioned in someone's mind in relation to a competitor.

So Coke and Pepsi are really close in attributes so they occupy a certain segment of our mental map, but 7-Up is the uncola, so it claims a totally unrelated position, thus not really competing with Coke and Pepsi. Healthy granola cereals are still a choice and option for spending your cereal dollars, but Kashi has to concern itself with finding a separate position from Bear Naked rather than worrying about Trix so much.

So now we get to the story. Seth argues that what most marketers typically call their brand these days is actually their story - the narrative about the emotions people feel when using the product.

The story might be that the user feels smarter than the average bear because he knows about the product. It might be that they care more about their children because they bought your safe car. It might be that your product will makes them feel more attractive to the opposite sex.