Branding Psychology How Brand Provides Intangible Benefits Overshadowing its Tangible Benefits

By Mike Parson

Numerous studies have shown that people buy feelings and experiences, not things. When you see a cute puppy, certain hormones fill your brain, and you become loving and affectionate. You don't care about the exact hormone process in your brain, but the puppy certainly makes you feel good.

There is an intense psychological component to marketing a business or creating a successful brand. In its essence, branding is designing a campaign to induce popularity and loyalty among customers. To do this, one must understand the audience's psychology, giving you the ability to entice consumers who will mentally connect and relate to your brand's identity.

Every individual consumer has an entirely separate and possibly stressful life outside of your market. Busy lives mean that consumers do not have the mental bandwidth to consider every product on the market.

To establish a long-lasting relationship, the brand provides intangible benefits that sometimes overshadow the tangible benefits. It is getting tougher with the explosion of communication technology, where people stay connected to update information. The emergence of branding topics has been witnessed with the blast of branding categories that apply to manufacturing and service industries. The brand is a logo, symbol, name, or design that creates a trademark or signature that distinguishes goods or services. Building a strong provides additional value that looks simple from the customer point of view but a great deal for a firm to survive the stiff competition in the market. The brand is a critical element to superior quality products, especially to the saturated market; hence, a trusted brand must satisfy customer needs and deliver excellent quality on attributes that matter to customers, low cost of quality, and overall cost leadership, and effective positioning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: vincenzo nappi
• Release date: Aug 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201204488

Book preview

The Psychology of Branding

The monetary value of brands is impressive. In a ranking from 2014, the consulting agency Interbrand, for instance, estimated the brand equity of Apple to be more than USD 118 billion. In many cases, the monetary value of a brand even exceeds the monetary value of all other assets of a company. Whilst part of the monetary value of the world’s leading brands can unarguably be attributed to the high quality or innovativeness of their products and services, much of the benefit of brands is based on psychological effects. Take the brand Stradivarius as an example. Stradivari was a traditional Italian crafter who built string instruments with a leading quality more than 200 years ago. The instruments are still played by professionals today and are sold for record prices at auctions, sometimes for more than USD 2 million for a single instrument. The most fascinating fact about this, however, is not that antique instruments receive high bids at auctions or that professionals are willing to pay large amounts of money to play such an exceptional instrument, but that, in blind tests, professionals cannot distinguish the sound of a Stradivarius violin from that of other prominent violins that cost only USD 10,000—a small fraction of the price of a Stradivarius. Hence, an instrument made by Stradivari provides a utility that goes beyond the functional benefit of producing an excellent acoustic experience. Instead, research suggests that the value of the brand Stradivarius depends on a unique bundle of brand associations and benefits that work in concert to create a distinctive brand perception.

Strategic brand management has to take into account at least three different benefits of brands: a functional benefit, a symbolic benefit, and an experiential benefit. A functional benefit is related to solving a current problem or preventing a potential problem. A detergent, for instance, can possess the functional benefit of cleaning clothes. We can define a functional benefit as one that is related to externally generated needs. Functional benefits can regard needs to improve a current status (e.g., dirty clothes need to be washed) or secure a current status. By contrast, a brand with a symbolic benefit is a brand that fulfills internally generated psychological needs for self-enhancement, self-verification, or affiliation with a group. For example, a consumer can use a brand to increase his or her status (self-enhancement), to act in line with his or her values and express these values (self-verification), or to signal that he or she belongs to a specific social group (affiliation). Finally, brands with an experiential benefit can satisfy needs that arise from seeking pleasant sensory experiences, stimulation, or variety. A brand of coffeehouse, for example, could be associated with a relaxing atmosphere and the particular smells and tastes of its coffee and