Have you ever been to a launch where a cowboy, magician, painter and clown walk out onto stage in the middle of a presentation? Well, I have. When companies attempt this kind of thing at an event, you know it is either going to be horribly cheesy or very effective. In this case, it was the latter.
The event I’m speaking of is last week’s launch of Added Value’s new brand positioning and mobilisation model, BrandSum. “Traditional brand positioning models take into account things like consumer and category insights to identify potential positioning territories. But they omit two key mobilising elements: a robust characterisation of the personality of the brand and the use of cultural insight to keep that personality fresh and relevant over time. BrandSum is what we use to pull all of this thinking together into one collective approach”, says Paul McGowan, Chief Marketing Office at Added Value, who was one of the main speakers at the launch.
For a more comprehensive look at the launch itself as well as the content presented, please read Leigh Andrew’s article on Totally MAd. What I am going to speak about here is the topic that was brought up by Added Value that intrigued me the most – the topic of ‘character creation’. Now, some of you might be thinking that I am being silly in saying this was ‘intriguing’, because companies have been creating their unique characters for years. Well, that might be true but they have not been doing so in the way that Added Value and new model, BrandSum, requires, which I believe is truly successful.
What the BrandSum entails is looking at a number of psychological archetypes and deciding which ones best describe your brand, in this way narrowing it down to what could be the unique character of your brand. Added Value has also given you a platform whereby you can experiment with this type of character defining on the CharacterLab™ website. McGowan provided an example when describing the process of character creation, using the characters of James Bond and Austin Powers. He said that you could probably use the same adjectives to describe the two, but that didn’t make them the same character. For example, both could be described as ‘suave, charming and a spy’ but they are, in essence, two completely unrelated entities that you would never confuse.
This really hit home for me, because often when trying to come up with marketing collateral, I find myself stuck on the words ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’. After this launch, I thought “there are so many other ways of defining a brand’s character”. I walked out of the launch ready to get started on some branding exercises. Let’s see, COUP’s character is revolutionary, lateral, avant-garde …
For more information on Added Value, visit www.added-value.com.
