Our brains come with built-in biases and heuristics—rules of thumb that have proven useful from an evolutionary standpoint, but can sometimes play tricks on us in the modern age. Branding puts many of these psychological phenomena to use. Below, I’ve briefly described five psychological phenomena at work in branding—the halo effect, mere exposure effect, bandwagon […]
psychology
Introducing the Brand Personality Cards
Click here to buy a deck of all 36 Brand Personality Cards A few months back, I posted a little Instagram carousel about the brand personality cards I created for a client in Singapore. I’ve finally gotten around to recreating them, and you can now buy a deck or download a free, printable version of […]
Some thoughts about brand personality
Soft. Hard. Spiky. These three words, spoken by a consultant I hired while leading brand strategy for FutureBrand in Southeast Asia, were some of the first I’d heard used to describe a theory of how to “correctly” select brand personality traits. The idea, as I understand it, is that brands should have (at least) three […]
Definition of brand archetype (What is a brand archetype?)
A brand archetype is a universally recognizable, innately understood character type or role that a brand can embody.
Brand loyalty and the psychology of love
As branding professionals, we want more than our customers’ money—we want their loyalty. We want them to fall in love with our brand. Ideally, we’ll create such a strong relationship with customers that they’ll stick with us—with our brand, I mean—in good times and in bad, in sickness and in…you know the drill. What’s […]
So, you want to do branding?
I am sometimes asked by college students who aspire to a career in branding, what books they should read. Here is my recommended syllabus.