REDEFINING BRAND ESSENCE
CHRIS BARNHAM
CHRIS BARNHAM RESEARCH AND STRATEGY
London: UK
Abstract
The idea of ‘brand essence’ is relatively well established in the marketing
community. It has come to the fore in the last twenty years or so for a number of
reasons - as a way for marketers to better understand their brands, as a
mechanism to provide some synergy in the diverse activities of marketing and
also as a benchmark against which those activities can be evaluated. In other
quarters it has, however, encountered much more resistance. It is seen by many
in the creative community as a concept which leads to oversimplification in the
marketing process and, ultimately, as a limitation on the scope and power of the
brand.
It is argued in this paper that the idea of brand essence has been fundamentally
misunderstood. This has, indeed, resulted in a series of negative consequences
for the branding process. However, it will also be argued that the concept of
brand essence still has much to offer marketing professionals. A new, and more
relevant, interpretation of brand essence is put forward in this paper which
recognises its dynamic and relational aspects. As such, it creates a new platform
upon which we can build the management, and analysis, of brands.
Introduction
Mention of the words ‘brand essence’ creates a number of reactions from
practitioners within the marketing community. On the client side, marketers tend
to imbue the concept with considerable significance – it often plays a key role in
their brand models and their development of strategy. Market researchers,
particularly qualitative ones, find the concept a useful way to evaluate specific
marketing activities. On the creative side of the marketing world, however, the
reaction to the concept is often quite different. Here, it is argued, brand essence
has been used for too long, and too often, as a way of pulling back the creative
process. All marketers, however, have shared the same dispiriting experience of
sitting in airless rooms endeavouring to nail down the essence of a particular
brand in a few words which are heavy with meaning.
In this paper I will argue that all of these ways of thinking about brand essence
are fundamentally misguided – both perspectives on brand essence are wrong.
We have all, unwittingly, brought our modern intellectual baggage to bear on our
interpretation of the term and the effect has been nothing less than disastrous.
We need to reconsider exactly how the marketing profession has misconstrued
this particular concept, identify the damage that this has done to marketing
theory and find an alternative way in which we can think about this potentially key
aspect of marketing discourse.
Brand Essence – The Conventional View
We are all familiar with brand essences. Usually, we find them sitting on the
apexes of brand pyramids or in the centre of concentric circles in brand structure
diagrams (for example, see Chart 1). In such contexts they are positioned as the
‘core element’ of a brand, the part of the brand that is its ‘very soul’ and the fount
from which all the other brand values emanate. Crucially, for the purposes of this
paper, this construction already assumes that a brand essence is part of a brand,
albeit the most important one.
Chart 1: The Natural Habitat of Brand Essence
Brand
Essence
Brand
Proposition
Brand Positioning
Brand Values
A number of other key assumptions are also built into this way of thinking.
Inherent within this view is the fact that brand essence is interpreted as the part
of the brand which is unchanging. It is construed as something that is (or at least
should be) a constant in the midst of ever-shifting brand communication
strategies. As Mark Earls puts it:
“Our brand language and brand thinking presents the brand as an eternal,
unchanging thing. We talk of brand essences (unchanging), brand values
(abiding), brand architecture (surely built to last)”
(M. Earls: 2002: p134)
This quality of being ‘fixed’ then leads us to the view that a brand essence must
remain the same in whatever context we find it. Entailed in this notion is the
concomitant quality of being ‘non relational’ – in other words it is not influenced
by contextual considerations. The essence of a brand, it is argued, should be the
same in whatever contexts (such as different markets) it is found. Otherwise, the
argument goes, it would not be the same brand….
There are, however, other aspects of our received view of brand essence that we
should take note of. We find it always positioned in our minds as a distillation of
the values of the brand – a summation of what the brand stands for– usually
summed up in a few words or a short sentence. For example, J. Chandler and
M. Owen describe brand essence in the following way:
“Brand essence: a brief statement of the most important aspects of the brand as
a whole; reducing what the brand is all about to its bare essentials – a single
word, phrase or sentence that captures the most important aspects of a brand as
a whole”
(J. Chandler and M. Owen: 2002: p56)
The purpose of this mindset is to encourage a single minded and focussed
approach in brand communication – brand essence is used as a way of keeping
the activities of a brand on the ‘straight and narrow’. For this reason brand
essence has been seized upon by brand owners as a management tool which
has practical value – it is something that can be employed to keep a brand’s
activity heading in (roughly) the same direction.
This, in turn, has resulted in yet a further use of the idea of brand essence. It has
become increasingly employed as a benchmark against which to judge marketing
activity. It is something that is invoked by brand owners to assess whether
proposed marketing activity is consonant with the core values of the brand.
They, therefore, use the concept of ‘brand essence’ as a means of quality
controlling the marketing process.
In this context, market researchers, particularly qualitative ones, have also found
much that is positive in the concept of brand essence and it has been held up by
many practitioners as a potential tool in the process of analysis. As a
‘benchmark’, qualitative researchers use it to evaluate advertising or design
work. We ask ourselves: do these activities or ways forward fit the underlying
brand essence? Wendy Gordon thus talks of brand essence in the following
terms:
“Brand essence: The core values that define a brand. These remain constant
over time even though the executional characteristics of packaging, advertising
(and other marketing expressions) may change. By defining the brand essence
with clarity, a brand owner creates a template against which all marketing and
NPD activity can be developed and integrated”
(W. Gordon: 1999: p325)
This conventional view - that a brand essence is fixed, unchanging and a
benchmark - is exactly what goes against the grain in many creative agencies.
This has engendered a different response to the concept - one which has formed
a source of resistance to it in recent years.
Leading the attack on the notion of brand essence are a number of advertising
professionals who see it as a significant hindrance in brand development and,
specifically, brand creativity. They view the concept as inherently conservative as something that has the effect of always pulling a brand back to the current
status quo. The language of brand essence is felt to ossify the brand. They also
reject it because of the way the concept is then subsequently used by their
clients. They are very much on the receiving end when brand management
teams use brand essence as a way of judging creative work. In particular, they
argue that it dramatically over simplifies brands - ignoring their inherent
complexity. John Grant talks of “boring, bland essences” (J Grant: 1999) and A.
Stagliano and D. O’Malley argue that any attempt to reduce a brand down to a
simplistic set of words will undermine the very nature of what a brand is:
“In the real world, brands act as a complex and steady-state stream of verbs, not
the simplified nouns and adjectives espoused in brand essence exercises. In
other words, a brand is as a brand does, and what it does is an experience of
irreducible complexity – multidimensional, multilayered and often polysensual”
(A. Stagliano and D. O’Malley: 2002: p34)
Stagliano and O’Malley insist, and quite rightly, that brands are, by their very
nature, the very antithesis of what can emerge from the ‘reductionist’ approach to
brand essence. Brands are living, organic and relational entities that cannot be
tied down to the sterility of conventional brand models; to try to make them do so
denies (paradoxically….) the very essence of what brands are about.
What is Wrong with the Conventional Model?
The interpretation of essence that has been outlined above has, built into it, the
underlying belief that brands are ‘things’ and that, as ‘things’, brands ‘have’
essences. We are used, in our modern world, to thinking about reality as
comprised of various objects and we talk about these objects as ‘having’
essences. Indeed, we often extend this way of thinking to people, or works of
art; they, too, can be construed as ‘having’ essences.
It is quite natural, therefore, when we think about brands that we adopt the same
approach. We assume that brands must ‘have’ an essence which defines them.
It is upon this platform that the received interpretation of brand essence, outlined
above, is established.
This, however, is where we make a critical mistake; for we should not be thinking
about brands as ‘having’ essences at all. Instead, we ought to be construing
brands as ‘being’ essences.
Brands, in our modern world, have an undoubted sense of ‘realness’ about them
and it is this which has encouraged us to think in terms of ‘brand essence’ in the
first place. In the past twenty years there has been a great shift in marketing.
Brands started out as the ‘senders of messages’ and they have been
transformed into things which seem to have a life and ‘being’ of their own. Once
upon a time a brand was just the name on the packaging of a product or the
name at the end of an advert. Now a brand has an equity, a personality, an
attitude and a vision of what it is about. It seems to possess an existence that is
quite independent from the products with which it is associated.
All of these changes have led the marketing world to adopt the view, correct in
my opinion, that brands are ‘real’ in some sense. But what we have done is to
assume (quite naturally) that brands have the same kind of ‘realness’ as objects
do. It is this which leads us to the view that brands must ‘have’ essences. What
we need to recognise, however, is that brands have a very specific sense of
‘realness’ of their own. They are ‘real’ because essences can be forms of being.
This is why we need to think of brands as ‘being’ essences rather than ‘having’
them.
Not recognising this mistake has been the fundamental reason behind our
collective insistence on a vision of brand essence that is fixed, non relational and
reductionist. We need to move away from this interpretation and consider other
ways in which we can understand the concept of brand essence itself. So where
can we turn?
In the history of Western Civilisation there is, it turns out, a wealth of knowledge
about the nature of essences, how they are constructed and how they work. We
can find this knowledge in the pre-modern and Renaissance periods where
essences were interpreted as the key determinants of the characteristics, and the
very fabric of reality itself. In the modern world we believe that reality is made up
of objects in three dimensional space. The pre-modern and Renaissance world
believed, in contrast, that what determined the nature of reality were essences
and their various combinations. This meant that they interpreted essences as
constituents of reality and, therefore, ‘forms of being’. It is this way of thinking
about essence which we can usefully explore in a marketing context - it offers a
way out of the trap into which we have fallen.
The rest of this paper is devoted to outlining the key features of this pre-modern
and Renaissance view of essence. As we shall see, it is one that addresses the
criticisms of the creative community, by recognising the relational and dynamic
qualities of the brand, whilst retaining a firm adherence to the view that the brand
has a structure and a sense of realness about it. The two views are not mutually
exclusive.
Essence: The Relational Brand
Already, by putting forward the view that brands ‘are’ essences rather than the
view that they ‘have’ essences, we have overturned one of the key tenets of the
conventional interpretation. For if brands are essences and ‘forms of being’, then
it follows that the whole of the brand, not just part of it, is the brand essence. We
thus embark on an analysis of how brands are constructed at a holistic level –
and one which is far from being ‘reductionist’. But, as a result of this, it is clear
that we need to understand, within this view, how brand essences deliver the
various different brand meanings that the consumer experiences.
In illustrating the view of essence that is being put forward it is useful to consider
some specific examples of the pre-modern view. Two quotations are cited
below; both are from the German philosopher G.W. Leibniz at the turn of the
eighteenth century. I have chosen these examples simply because they are
more accessible to the modern reader. The first explains what sort of things
essences are (Leibniz, unhelpfully, uses his own term for an individual essence:
‘monad’). The second describes the nature of one particular type of essence – a
human soul:
“The world is a plenum, everything is connected and each body acts upon every
other body, more or less, according to the distance, and by reaction is itself
affected thereby, it follows that each monad (essence) is a living mirror, or
endowed with an internal activity, representative according to its point of view of
the universe, and as regulated as the universe itself”
(G.W. Leibniz: 1714: p523)
“When we well consider the connection of things, it can be said that there are at
all times in the soul of Alexander traces of all that has happened to him and
marks of all that will happen to him – and even traces of all that happens in the
universe, though it belongs to God to know them all”
(GW Leibniz: 1686: p308)
What we have here is an interpretation of essence that is almost the complete
antithesis of our conventional view. In a world that is composed of individual
essences we have a vision of reality that is intensely relational. Individual
essences become the sum of their relationships with the world – every essence
is ‘a living mirror’, defined by how it relates to every other essence that exists in
the universe. And this relational aspect of essence works across different time
frames as well. The essence of Alexander contains traces of ‘all that has
happened to him’ and ‘all that will happen to him’. The conceptual space that
Alexander the Great occupies, therefore, existed even before he is born; it is
framed by the relationships which were already in place. His birth was simply an
actualisation of a pre-existing potential.
Astonishingly, when we apply this way of thinking to brands, marketers find
themselves in a familiar framework. A number of convergences exist. Firstly,
brands are relational and are defined by their contexts. We know this and have
invented a word for it; we call it ‘positioning’. We also know that, for brands,
‘everything is connected’. If a new brand enters a market then it will, necessarily,
change the positioning of other brands already present within it. And taking
Leibniz’s view about the soul of Alexander, and applying it in a marketing context,
we know that the conceptual ‘space’ for the Renault Scenic existed long before it
was launched. It simply took a number of contextual and circumstantial factors to
come together to make its existence possible – to transform it from being
something ‘in potentia’ (to use the pre-modern phrase) to being actualised in the
world.
What is striking to the modern marketer, however, that this familiar way of
thinking about brands can be juxtaposed with the language of essence. In the
conventional view these relational properties of brands are seen (as discussed
above) as being in total contradiction to the values of brand essence.
Essence: The Structured Brand
Leibniz’s reference to how essences relate to each other is important. He argues
that everything is connected, but that some elements in the relational make up of
an essence are more relevant than others. This introduces the idea of a
hierarchical structure into the idea of brand essence because some elements
have more influence in determining the nature of an essence than others.
By a delightful irony, we find that this recourse to hierarchy means that the premodern view of essence envisages the structure of essence in a familiar form –
the shape of a pyramid. But this is as far as the similarity goes; the pyramid that
the pre-modern world espouses is fluid, relational and it takes account of context.
This is in contrast to the conventional brand pyramid which is, if anything, a
rampant celebration of ‘fixedness’. Brand owners use the conventional brand
pyramid to nail down their brands and categorise their elements into neat boxes
– brand essence, brand proposition, brand positioning and brand attributes. The
pyramidical structure of the pre-modern vision is, by contrast, organic and
relational - as we shall see in the next section.
The pre-modern structure of essence is outlined below (Chart 2). The structure of
an essence consists of series of binary oppositions in which different values,
working at different levels, are contained within each other.
Chart 2: The Structure of Brand Essence
Essence
Values contained within it
Looking at this structure, we need, first of all, to consider a number of points
before we move on to its relational characteristics.
The first of these represents a radical departure. Every essence contains within
it values which are also essences themselves. This is because every essence is
defined by its relationship with other essences. For example, ‘Coca Cola ness’
contains ‘Americanness’ and it also contains ‘youthfulness’. This is actually a
very familiar way of talking about brands and something marketers do all of the
time. For some odd reason, however, this is entirely forgotten when they come
to thinking about the specific concept of ‘brand essence’ in our conventional
model of a brand. At this point we collectively shift into a different mindset that
seeks to exclude other values. We try to reduce a brand essence to something
that can be summed up in one short sentence. In contrast, a brand essence, in
this new interpretation, is constructed from large numbers of other essences.
And which essences are involved in this construction is determined by the
brand’s relationships with the world.
The second point about the binary structure relates to the way in which the
pyramid of oppositions extends downwards. The structure should not to be seen
as limited in its extent; it should be viewed, rather, as potentially extending to
infinity. The number of ‘nesses’ that a brand contains is ultimately determined by
all of its relationships with the world. This means that Coca Cola has, in the
lower reaches of its pyramid, essences determined by its relationships with its
drinkers in Outer Mongolia. These values will probably have a very small part to
play in the overall structure of Coca Cola’s brand values, but they are there
(deeply buried) all the same.
In practical terms, of course, marketers only need to focus, for most of the time,
on the main essences within a brand. But they should be aware that there may
be values deeply embedded in their brand which can come to prominence at any
time. They are present in the pyramidical structure, but it takes a change of
circumstance or context to make their presence apparent. Susan Greenfield
illustrates how this can happen. Talking about the concept of a ‘book’
(‘bookness’ in our terms) she shows, quoting Neil Gershenfeld, that books
contain many values that have only emerged since the advent of computers:
“Books boot instantly, and have a high-contrast/high resolution display; they are
viewable from any angle, in bright or dim light; they offer fast random access to
any page, with instant visual and tactile feedback; they are easily annotated with
no need for batteries or maintenance; finally, they are robustly packaged. By
contrast the laptop meets none of these specifications”
(S. Greenfield: 2004: p15)
All of these properties have been present in the essence of books since the days
of papyrus. It is the changing context of reading that has brought these
characteristics of books to our notice. Context, therefore, changes what we
experience within the hierarchy of any particular essence.
So brands are comprised of many other essences. This brings us to third point
of divergence from the conventional model. If it is the case that the make up of a
brand essence is determined by the relationships which it has with the rest of the
world, then it follows that these will include both the positive elements and
negative aspects of the brand. All brands have negative associations, but,
curiously, when we survey the conventional brand pyramid, we seldom, if ever,
find a single negative value in the brand structure. These pyramids are designed
by brand owners with one eye closed to reality and they represent an idealised
version – a wish list – of the things the brand owner wants the consumer to
understand about the brand. The brand pyramid, when thought of in
conventional terms, turns out to be no more than a resource or an ‘armoury’ for
the ‘messaging’ model. And the fixed nature of the conventional concept of
brand essence is given prime position in this armoury (at the tip of the warhead).
The conventional notion of brand essence starts to appear in its true colours – as
the outdated concept of the ‘USP’ - smuggled into modern marketing in borrowed
(and simply more conceptual) trappings.
The pre-modern model of essence allows the marketer no such comfort in their
vision of their brand. It insists that both negative and positive aspects should be
given their rightful role in how the essence is constructed. After all, this is how
brands are in reality - many brands have negative associations and their
problems are frequently driven by the fact that their essences contain negative
aspects. Acceptance of this truth is much more likely to lead to effective brand
management. We need to acknowledge the negative aspects in a brand and
understand their position in the hierarchy. Then we can move forward by
addressing them properly.
The Dynamic Brand: The Role of ‘Propositional Hierarchy’
The fourth, and possibly most important, aspect of the model that we need to
consider, however, is the way in which it is dynamic. Here we need to introduce
the concept of ‘propositional hierarchy’. This is not a concept that will be found in
overt terms in pre-modern philosophy, but traces of it can be seen in the way in
which pre-modern thinkers discussed alchemy (a case of ‘adding value’ if there
ever was one!).
Propositional hierarchy is simply a way of understanding how essences have
fluidity within a given brand structure. And because this fluidity is what gives a
brand specific meaning it can be thought of in ‘propositional’ terms.
So what is propositional hierarchy? If the reader closes their eyes and thinks, for
a moment, of a ‘yellow car’ an image will come into their mind. If they close their
eyes a second time and think of a ‘car’ a different image will probably come into
their mind. Now, if we take this second image and, in imaginary terms, paint it
yellow, the resulting image will be of a yellow car (like the first one), but it is likely
that it will be a different image from the first. This is the effect of propositional
hierarchy. The order in which you conceive of things determines how things are
in the mind – it determines how they are thought about.
If we apply this concept to the pyramidical structure that we have been
considering, it follows that two key factors will determine the nature of a brand.
These are:
1. The values (essences) it contains
2. The hierarchy of these values
The second point here is crucial. It not only matters which values are present in
the brand. It also matters where they sit in the propositional hierarchy. Those
values near the top of the pyramid are more salient in propositional terms and
those which are near the bottom have relatively little input into brand perceptions.
We saw this with the example of the yellow car. By imagining a ‘yellow car’
(which leads with ‘yellowness’) we create a different image to the one that leads
with simply with ‘car’ (maybe the ‘yellow car’ image was more playful?). And so it
follows that the same value in a brand will have very different meanings
depending on where it is placed in its propositional hierarchy.
Let us take a real example – an archetypal brand like Coca Cola. It self-evidently
contains the value of ‘Americanness’. Where this value sits in the brand
hierarchy will be critical in terms of the meaning and imagery of the brand. The
brand owner can decide to reduce the saliency of this value, if this is a problem in
certain markets, or it can decide to increase it, if this is appropriate. In our terms,
Coca Cola can move ‘Americanness’ up or down the propositional hierarchy and,
in so doing, give the brand a different meaning to consumers in different markets.
Likewise, the same brand contains, somewhere in its propositional hierarchy, the
negative value of ‘might rot your teeth ness’. Coca Cola seeks to keep this value
near the bottom of its propositional hierarchy – a task that it achieves fairly
successfully.
Very importantly, as we have seen with the concept of the ‘book’, the exact
hierarchy within the essence is not fixed and can change very significantly if a
context changes. Salmonella was always a small part of ‘egg ness’, but in the
UK in the 1980’s a government minister (Edwina Currie) managed, through a
series of media comments, to made this element more salient. ‘Salmonella’
moved up the propositional hierarchy of ‘egg ness’. It had always been present
in the hierarchy of ‘egg ness’; it was the context created by Currie that changed
the hierarchy with disastrous results - albeit on a temporary basis.
Advertising and, indeed, all forms of communication, are important ways of
changing the propositional hierarchy of a brand. Going back to our Coca Cola
example, a poster that shows young people drinking it (in a scene with lots of
splashing water) will inevitably emphasise, and bring to the surface, the values of
youthfulness, fun and refreshment that are contained within the brand. The
advert changes the propositional hierarchy. Conventionally, of course, we
interpret such marketing activity as brand communication. We construe it as the
brand ‘sending a message’ which creates particular associations in the consumer
mind. We are now in a position to entirely reframe this activity. The real process
that is taking place is nothing to do with ‘messaging’; it is rather that the brand is
acting in such a way as to change (or maybe reinforce) a particular propositional
hierarchy. It does this by using the poster image to manifest the essence of the
Coca Cola brand in a particular propositional order.
As marketers know, it is always easier to reinforce a value that is latently present
in a propositional hierarchy than it is to graft a completely new value on to a
brand. A brand which has, for example, positive childhood associations for us is
able to build upon these and reinforce an emotional bond within us. The brand
effectively takes values that are deeply embedded in its hierarchy and brings
them to the surface. It raises them up the propositional hierarchy. In contrast, it
is very much harder to graft contradictory values on to a brand. It is more difficult
to make consumers believe a brand is modern or stylish when they already see it
as something that contains the essences of ‘not modern’ and ‘not stylish’. The
marketer at this point is trying to introduce new (and antithetical) values into the
propositional hierarchy rather than change the propositional hierarchy of what is
already present in the brand. And, as any marketer will confirm, it is much easier
to do the latter than the former. Many, many, brands have ignored this insight.
They have believed that marketing is just a matter of getting the right ‘message’
across. Marketing history is littered with such unsuccessful forays. As qualitative
researchers we know the issue is one of credibility and this is precisely where the
notion of propositional hierarchy works its magic.
It is worth highlighting, at this point, that the concept of propositional hierarchy is
not the same as ‘laddering’. We are not discussing how consumers rank values
or which are seen by them as being the most important about a brand. Rather,
we are identifying how the consumer thinks about it. This is a subtle, but critical,
distinction – laddering attempts to identify and measure the relative features or
qualities of a brand. Propositional hierarchy, in contrast, seeks to acknowledge
the disposition of the consumer – how they construe a brand. This might (or
might not) be in terms of what is more important; it might be driven by other more
personal factors. This can be seen if we take the example of ‘London’. I will
readily assent to the view that it is the capital of the UK or that it is a major
financial centre. How I think about it, however, is as a noisy, and rather dirty,
place where I cannot park my car. That is how I think about it….
So, in summary, we have, in this re-interpretation of essence, a vision which is
quite unlike the static and simplistic model that we encountered earlier. Essence
has become reframed as something relational and organic. In particular, we
have seen that a new context for a brand changes the values which the
consumer experiences – pushing some values up the propositional hierarchy and
moving others downwards. This is, as we know, is the abiding experience of
international research. When a brand is placed in the context of a new market
the propositional hierarchy of the brand will spontaneously change. Values
which were inherent in the brand suddenly become more dominant and others,
which were important, will disappear from view.
This is not a new insight in itself. What is new, however, is to place this analysis
of brand dynamics specifically within an analysis of brand essence. Stagliano
and O’Malley are right; brands are ‘multidimensional, multidimensional and often
polysensual’. This is, however, not a reason to reject the idea of brand essence.
These properties exist in brands simply because they are essences. Far from
being the very antithesis of how brands are, a proper understanding of the
concept of essence enables us to see that, in fact, it positively embraces these
characteristics. Our fundamental mistake has been to apply the wrong
interpretation of essence – a modern rather than pre-modern analysis - to our
understanding of brands.
Modern Parallels?
Much of this analysis also complements the work of modern authors – some of
which the reader may have recognised already. At the more academic level
there are strong parallels in this analysis with theories of structuralism and,
therefore, semiotics. The idea that reality is constructed in binary oppositions
and in a hierarchical manner is at the very heart of structuralism (F. de Saussure:
1916/1959). This is not surprising. The pre-modern world construed reality itself
as an Act of Creation - a text (written by God) and so the notion that reality (if it is
thought to be built from essences) works like a text should be seen as a natural
point of convergence.
Equally, there are also parallels with other areas of modern thought. As our faith
in an ‘objective’ and neatly ordered world breaks down we find modern scientists
espousing new ways of thinking about reality. The relational view of reality that
the essence model embraces has parallels with ‘Chaos Theory’ (J. Gleick: 1998).
If an essence is defined by the sum of its relationships with the world then we are
thinking about reality in a manner that is not far removed from that which
suggests that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world will create a
tornado in another. To do so is to think about reality in relational terms rather
than ones which are ‘objective’.
And the writings of Malcolm Gladwell (M. Gladwell: 2000) highlight another
modern convergence with the arguments of this paper. The concept of
propositional hierarchy is one that emphasises the fluidity and relational nature of
reality. In our modern way of thinking, in contrast, we tend to see events as
things that occur objectively in a linear and proportional fashion. Gladwell’s
concept of the ‘Tipping Point’ prompts us to think otherwise. Big changes can
come about as the result of very small ones – ‘tipping points’ exist in reality:
“The principle that little changes can somehow have big effects is also a fairly
radical notion. We are, as humans heavily socialized to make a rough
approximation between cause and effect…..To appreciate the power of
epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need
to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from
small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly”
(M. Gladwell: 2000: p10-11)
Maybe these events are just another way of thinking about the effects of
propositional hierarchy? Are Gladwell’s ‘epidemics’ no more than occasions
when the values which are already extant in a reality simply change their
relationships with each other and precipitate much larger events? And is the
rapidity with which this can happen caused by the fact that actually very little
needs to take place? All that has to occur is a change in the relative position of
the values within a propositional hierarchy.
Conclusion
The marketing profession is currently labouring under a crippling
misapprehension. The concept of brand essence has emerged in recent
decades alongside a number of other concepts such as brand equity, brand
concept and brand personality. These terms have recognised that brands have a
form of reality of their own. Unlike these other notions, however, the idea of
brand essence has been thoroughly misunderstood and its potential utility to the
marketing profession much diminished. Indeed, much worse than this, the
interpretation we have universally adopted has had the unintended effect of
denying how brands really are. It has operated, for all intents and purposes, as a
modern and conceptual reincarnation of the old fashioned USP.
In this paper I have sought to show that we have made the critical mistake of
confusing the notion of a brand ‘having an essence’ with its ‘being an essence’.
If we understand this distinction, and see essences as forms of being, then we
are able to release the brand from the straightjacket that the conventional
interpretation of essence has created for it. Much more than this, if we embrace
the alternative model of essence that has been outlined in this paper, we find that
we have a fully fledged vision of how the brand is structured. This model
positively celebrates the relational and dynamic nature of the brand and can help
us understand how the brand works.
The critics of brand essence in the creative community were right to reject the
conventional view – it has had a destructive effect on the business of brand
management. But it turns out that even these loudest critics were applying an
entirely wrong interpretation of the concept to the marketing process. This paper
has sought to put forward an alternative model that even they would accept –
and precisely because it mirrors the very vision of the brand that they espouse.
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