What are ‘they’ saying about your brand?

“A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”
—The Brand Gap, by Marty Neumeier

I recently read The Brand Gap, along with Neumeier’s follow up, ZAG, and I particularly like this quote because it forces communications practitioners to put themselves in the shoes of their target audience. What’s being said about a brand, and why?

Knowing the answers to those questions are especially crucial in today’s social media environment, where bad news can travel the globe in seconds. But good news can have the opposite effect – it can build a following for a brand that Neumeier refers to in ZAG as a Unique Buying Tribe (or UBT).

Customers, he says, would rather buy than be sold. And when they buy, they do so in a tribal fashion. (Want proof? Consider the legions who couldn’t wait for Apple’s iPad and iPhone 4 to launch this year.) Within a UBT, he says, “news spreads quickly, which gives brands extra traction.” Social media has only exacerbated this situation.

So what does this mean for brand management? In The Brand Gap, Neumeier says that a brand is a person’s “gut feeling” about a company and the products or services it sells; managing the brand, then, is “management of differences, not as they exist on data sheets, but as they exist in the minds of people.”

When those differences get verbalized – or posted on Twitter or Facebook – that’s what can make or break a brand. Managing that gut feeling, Neumeier says, requires both strategy and creativity working in concert with each other. But when they don’t, when there is a separation between the logic of strategy and the magic of creativity, there’s a gap … the brand gap.

In addition to recommending his books, I’d also urge following Neumeier on Twitter, @MARTYneumeier. He’s a prolific Tweeter, providing similar content.