Measure brand as reach, influence and direction

1. What branding is, stated so you can act on it

You have to know what a brand is if you want to build one. People who say they understand branding often do not, and the few who do understand it teach it badly. Look at what many popular marketers say a brand is and you get a list of descriptions: a gut feeling about a product or company; something defined by individuals, not by companies; what customers say it is rather than what you say; a set of expectations, memories and stories that explains why someone picks one product over another; emotional shorthand for what people know or assume. Many of those definitions describe a brand. None of them tells you what to do to build one.

The definition below is one owner's, and is thought to be pieced together from reading them. It was enough, at least, for one brand to grow, and grow fast, once its owner started using it.

The test is behavior. Learning means the same situation now meets a new behavior. Picture a front-desk hire who barely looks up when visitors walk in. You show her what you want: stand, smile, welcome the visitor and ask how she can help. Walk through the door yourself and have her practice it. If the next stranger who walks in gets the new greeting, she learned. If they get the old stare, she did not. A brand is judged the same way: by whether it changes what people do.

The working definition. Branding means pairing two or more things together. It happens all the time, whether you plan it or not: customers pair you with what you say, what you do, what you appear next to and what you look like. The definition alone does not tell you how to do it well, so it comes in grades:

• Good branding pairs your business with something a majority of your ideal audience likes.
• Bad branding pairs your business with something a majority of your audience dislikes.
• No branding leaves people behaving exactly as they would have anyway. You are close to invisible.

Where the word comes from. The first people to make money from branding were cattle owners, who burned a mark into the side of each animal. The mark changed what people did.

• No mark. You find a cow with nothing on it. It is just a cow. You might leave it alone, and that might be the end of it.
• A mark you recognize, say your neighbor's. If you like the neighbor, you might lead the cow home and probably hand it back. That is good branding. If you cannot stand the neighbor, the cow may stay lost for good and end up feeding your family for the next month or two. That is bad branding. Either way the mark changed your behavior.
• A mark you do not recognize. You might wonder whose cow it is: there is a logo, but you know nothing about it. You would treat it the way you treat marked animals in general: it belongs to somebody. So an unrecognized mark is not the same as no mark.

2. Advertising and branding are different jobs

Advertising lets people know about your stuff. Branding is what you let them know inside the advertisement. On the ranch, advertising tells people the cow belongs to someone; branding tells them it belongs to you. You do not want people buying products like yours; you want them buying yours. Branding tells them to buy from you, and what you are worth next to the others.

Because they are separate, you can have great advertising with poor branding, great branding with poor advertising, or any mix of the two.

3. Reach, influence and direction

Good and bad are vague, so put objective measures on both jobs: one for advertising, two for branding.

Reach measures advertising. Reach is how many people know about your stuff, the output of advertising. Good advertising means everyone knows; bad advertising means no one does. The measure is sometimes simply called reach. A brand cannot exist without it, which makes reach the primary element of any brand.

Influence and direction measure branding.

• Influence is the chance that seeing the brand changes someone's behavior.
• Direction is which way the behavior moves: toward the brand or away from it.

Direction depends on the audience you are looking at, because what pulls one audience toward you pushes another away. Politicians are the plainest case. For some people, a politician from one party produces toward behavior: they love that person. For another group the same politician produces away behavior: they hate that person. Does the politician have a good brand? It depends on who you ask. What everyone can agree on is that the brand is strong, because its influence is high: it is very likely to move people one way or the other. Some people see the face and want to throw food at the screen; others send money. High influence both times; the direction differs.

4. The eight positions

Reach can be high or low, influence high or low, and direction toward or away, which gives eight positions. One brand can sit in any of them depending on who you ask. The positions below are one owner's reactions, in the order given; the people are described, not named.

Reach	Influence	Direction	The example, as one person sees it
High	Low	Toward	A pop star he thinks well of in general, though he probably will not buy much of her stuff
High	High	Toward	A tech founder whose products he owns and uses, and whom he in general supports as good for the world
High	High	Away	Terrorists, whom he strongly opposes
High	Low	Away	Film actors, whom he in general finds whiny and entitled, so he is less likely to support them
Low	High	Toward	Close friends: little reach, stronger influence over him
Low	Low	Away	A stranger in the street: little reach, little influence, and in general he avoids them
Low	High	Away	Copycats and scammers: most people have never heard of them, and his pull away from them is strong
Low	Low	Toward	Acquaintances: not many people know them, but in general he is inclined to support them

Money is the scoreboard for a business. Everyone in that table has a brand, and each measures its success a different way. The measure that holds for business owners is money, which makes it simple to tell whether the branding is working. Good branding means your audience likes you and buys. Bad branding means the people in your ideal audience hate it and do not buy.

5. A worked case: wide reach, a bad pairing

A soft-drink company ran an advertisement that put a famous model and a can of its drink in the middle of a protest. The backlash was immediate, and the company pulled the advertisement within six days.

Score it on reach, influence and direction. Many customers hated the pairing. Lots of people found out, which is good advertising; a lot of them hated what they saw, which is bad branding. Fewer people bought, and the business took a loss. People get upset about all kinds of things; what mattered to the company was that sales suffered.

The reading offered, as one owner's opinion: with an audience of everyone, the company paired its drink with something most people do not find refreshing or joyful, a protest. The trouble had little to do with the model and everything to do with the protest. More people saw the advertisement because she was in it, so she could likely have made a different advertisement for the same company and had it succeed.

Every pairing pulls both ways. To some viewers the protest pairing was good; to everyone else it was bad. All pairings have positive and negative results, because people want different things. For a business the question is simpler: did the pairing make more money or not? This one drove away enough people to lower sales. That is not opinion; the company made less money, which is bad business.

The question to ask next is whether some other product exists where the same celebrity-and-protest pairing could have made money. The owner thinks the answer is yes; it just was not a soft drink.

6. Two beliefs about publicity, answered

"There is no such thing as bad publicity." Good publicity beats bad; bad beats none; plenty of good beats everything. Bad publicity exists; it is only that any publicity beats none, and good publicity beats bad. The saying blurs the two measures: the publicity part is advertising, and the good-or-bad part is branding.

If the whole world learns something bad about you, you are still likely to sell more than someone nobody has heard of, because almost nothing looks bad to 100 percent of people. A jailed celebrity who somehow got out and released a product would still outsell an unknown. And if the whole world learns something good about you, you are certainly more likely to make money than in the reverse case. The corrected saying: any publicity beats no publicity, but good beats bad.

"You have to be polarizing." Many people believe a strong brand needs lots of lovers and lots of haters. That is not always true. If everyone knows you, some will hate you; there are always a few. A polar brand does exist: a politician whom people recognize at once (reach) and react to strongly (influence), for or against (direction). But a brand can be strong without being polar. A pop star who moves most people in a positive direction, a celebrated charity worker and a large consumer-electronics company are all widely known and widely liked. You do not need controversy: make promises that serve a large audience, and keep them.

Selling a product polarizes people whether you want it to or not. Setting out to polarize on purpose gets in the way of doing business. Concentrate on getting people to buy your stuff, and you will probably sell more of it.

7. What this page does not decide for you

• Which audience to score against. Direction only means something against a named audience. The ideal customer is chosen on SOP 94 — Pair the brand with what the ideal customer likes, section 5.
• How to put a number on influence or direction. This page gives no figure for influence or direction; the scale offered is high or low, toward or away, and then money.
• What else a business could have paired the protest with. The owner thinks such a product exists and names none. Not established on this page.

8. The checklist

Question	The answer
What branding is	Pairing your business with other things; it happens whether you plan it or not
Good, bad and no branding	Paired with what a majority of your ideal audience likes; with what a majority of your audience dislikes; people behave as they would anyway
What measures advertising	Reach: how many people know about your stuff
What measures branding	Influence (the chance it changes behavior) and direction (toward or away)
Whose direction counts	It depends on the audience; one brand can sit in any of the eight positions
The business scoreboard	Money: good branding means your audience likes and buys
Bad publicity	Beats none; good beats bad
Polarization	Not required; selling polarizes on its own

9. What this page does not cover

Logos, colors and visual design are not covered on this page. Choosing the ideal customer, listing what they like and turning a pairing into a premium price are SOP 94 — Pair the brand with what the ideal customer likes. Moving the market a brand serves, pivoting and recovering from a bad pairing are SOP 93 — Choose a market direction. Making the associations through content, and the three levels of authority that make them stick, are SOP 95 — Climb the three levels of authority.