The Stress of Branding

NextStage is closing up a four year study of how people get branded and the results are numerous. Why a four year study? Because there was a lot to learn and honestly, I doubt if four years was enough. I have to chuckle when somebody publishes a "three month study" of anything having to do with humans. Three months, barring catastrophic social events, is a snapshot into group psyches. Four years and one begins to see patterns that are seasonal, migrational, technology inspired, things like that.

Anyway, what one thing can decrease branding effectiveness -- getting your message as deep into consumer consciousness and memory as it can go -- by as much as 70%?

When Not to Brand

Let's say you have regular visitors to your site, your Facebook Fan page, your whatever. Let's say you create some new task that is obvious to you, your designers, your programmers, your team as a whole, and ask visitors to complete this new task.

The only problem is it's not intuitively obvious to your regular visitors because they've had months if not years to become familiar and comfortable with the old way of doing things. New visitors have no problem, regular visitors are going nuts.

Their old and trusted friend, your brand, is changing. Any change in something trusted forces our psyches to question ourselves nonconsciously; if what I trust is changing, am I changing to?

So whatever you do, do not -- Repeat! Do Not! -- attempt to brand them. The reasoning goes like this:

What was once simple is now difficult.
Regular visitors become confused because of the difficulty, a difficulty stemming from (for example) a redesigned site, a new login procedure, a popup request that was never there before, ...
This confusion translates into stress and creates dysfunction between cognition and memory.
Brand messages get lost in the confusion because the brain wants to restore order, not internalize some brand message.

Want a recent example of this? Think "The Gap".

Branding Made Simple

Now how about a way to increase positive branding by as much as 70%?

A bit more costly and amazingly effective, if a brand's call center contacts users/clients/consumers when there's absolutely no problem simply to touch base, to ask if people are satisfied, to conduct an impromptu poll to get an opinion, etc., that company/product/brand will get a 70% higher rating than their competition in brand awareness and recognition.

Ah, but it gets better. People contacted share their positive experience freely, gladly and often with others (interestingly, this included people walking down aisles in stores and striking up conversations with others they didn't know. Fascinating, that).

Summary

So, change something on the user interface without giving the user the ability to change the interface back? Good job, you'll lose 70% of your branding authority. Users/visitors may stay and they won't be happy. Worse, they may look for an exit or take one when it becomes available.

Want to get brand advocates and influencers for short dollars? Have your support and call centers periodically contact your user/client/consumer community just to say hello. Your market power will climb as much as 70%.