What makes great brands great?

Several factors make for a successful brand. One way to build a popular brand is to brighten up people’s routine daily existence. Look at today’s successful brands and you see a great palate of color: Coca-Cola, Disney, McDonalds, Blockbuster Video, Toys R US, the Orange mobile telephone network, Channel 5 in Great Britain, USA Today newspaper, Wired magazine, The Simpsons, AOL and so on. All of these companies employ visually impactful logos full of color, sometimes a lot of different colors combined. Consider the significant extent to which the colorful street advertisements for these sorts of brands brightened up the gray streets of Eastern Europe after communism destroyed itself and was destroyed.

Great brands are cheerful and perk their consumers up. Think about the genius of the upbeat Coca-Cola advertising with its positive and optimistic jingles and slogans: "Life is much more fun when you’re refreshed, and Coke refreshes you best", "Its the smile you can’t hide because it comes from inside, its the way that you feel when you know its for real" and so on.

Of course colorful brands may make you cheerful, but not all will endure over time. A brand comprises two core elements: the product itself and its packaging. For example, Coca-Cola has its brown fizzy liquid as the inner product core and the contour cans and bottles with their dynamic ribbon devices as the outer packaging core.

For a brand to survive over time, it must have a good product. For a brand to thrive over time it must have a good product and good packaging. Without doubt, the combination of the Coca-Cola taste and logo contributes significantly to its success. McDonalds too has a fantastic colorful image, however many people prefer the taste conferred by the contrast of the cold tomato against flame-grilled burger from Burger King.

I certainly get annoyed when I see private label brands from supermarkets imitate their brand name equivalents. You know the sort of thing: look-alike packaging which copies the color, design and shape of brand name products. These own label goods may have the packaging and perhaps even content of a similar quality as the established brands. But derivative imitation is morally repulsive- that these supermarkets deliberately dare to copy other products is a disgrace. Consumers should certainly not purchase these copy cat products.

The company behind the cola brand Pepsi removed red from its core product and concentrated on blue to differentiate themselves from Coca-Cola and the legions of copy cat own brands which following the market leader are decked out in red. Whether the taste component of their brand is lacking or not, at least Pepsi tried to get the packaging to stand out. More generally, there is a move away from using white as the primary color for low calorie non-alcoholic beverages. White is reminiscent of diets and hospitals and is, well, not really colorful enough.

As with brands, and so too with branders, focus attention on building the content itself and the wrapping and you should do well. And be colorful and be cheerful.

Author: Simon Buckingham

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To make a comment to the author, send e-mail to simon@unorgan.com

 

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