Figure 3 Brand DNA model
Brand DNA
Brand purpose
The reason why a brand exists, an expression of its ultimate motivation.
Brand positioning
How the brand wishes to be perceived in its market relative to the competition.
Brand proposition
What the brand promises in order to create value, the single most important thing that can be said about the brand, product or service to the customer.
Brand promises and hallmarks
The explicit commitments, actions or behaviours that are given to customers in order to reflect the brand’s intent.
Brand values
The brand’s fundamental principles that shape its culture.
To add a little more explanation, the purpose is best thought of as the north star, an immutable guiding principle that, once articulated, should rarely change. As we mention in an earlier chapter, a purpose will most often be found by looking at what genuinely matters most to both customers and employees. A positioning will most likely evolve over time in response to the competitive context and should be something that can be inferred as opposed to being explicitly stated. A proposition, by contrast, may be regularly updated to reflect changing customer preferences or a different market dynamic. The promises are best thought of as distinctive product and service hallmarks. Brand values, once defined, should by their definition rarely change at all. Get these elements right and you will be a significant way towards building a compelling and motivating brand.
But a model (however good) is just a model. How do you ensure that you are populating the model with the right content and building something that when taken as a whole will be both compelling and distinctive for the customer? Aside from hard work, we believe that any process must start with a full understanding of the brand’s situation. The practitioner must have a thorough appreciation of the overall context in order to understand how to develop the brand. We believe it is helpful to structure this initial groundwork and have developed a model to assist in the process – we call it the 4Cs analysis. Using this tool, the practitioner is required to look specifically at: the Customer, the Competition, the Company and the Context. Let’s briefly explore each of these dimensions.