(According to my Brand IQ, anyway….)
Test your own brand intelligence by seeing if you recognize the brands behind the famous slogans and taglines below:
1. “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s ________.”
2. “The Ultimate Driving Machine”
3. “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands.”
4. “The breakfast of champions.”
5. “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s __________.”
6. “Share moments. Share life.”
7. “Think outside the bun.”
8. “Nothing runs like a __________”
9. “The quicker picker-upper”
10. “Just do it.”
My genius claim probably doesn’t seem quite as valid anymore. Like me, you probably recognized all of the brand slogans above (answers at the end in case you live under a rock), but just because a tagline lingers in your head like that bad ‘80s rock song you heard on the radio yesterday doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll feel compelled to purchase the particular product. So, what measures an effective branding strategy?
The modern concept of branding evolved when ranch owners would mark cattle in order to better identify their own in a herd. Eventually, consumers began to recognize certain marks and associate those marks with an overall better product. The brand became a promise of the quality the consumer would receive.
Today, the dictionary definition of a brand might be as simple as a company name, a product name, a logo, or a trademark, but I think that an effective brand is one that can actually help us define ourselves. For example, think of Dove’s new “Real Beauty” campaign. The ads focus on promoting real, natural beauty and positive body image by portraying women of all shapes and sizes instead of unrealistically tall and skinny supermodels. A brand should not only be a symbol of quality, but it should also encompass a certain human element to make the consumer feel connected to a concrete set of values that the brand represents.
My point is: in a world where we’re constantly influenced by marketing and branding, it doesn’t matter whether you’re washing with a soap that challenges today’s stereotypical view of beauty, driving a car that screams of your success, or wearing a pair of jeans that boast of your obsession with haute couture (and the amount of money you’re willing to spend to place yourself among the fashion elite), you’ve been undeniably and inescapably branded … just like that herd of cattle.
Answers:
- MasterCard
- BMW
- M&Ms
- Wheaties
- Maybelline
- Kodak
- Taco Bell
- John Deere
- Bounty
- Nike
