Brand Biology (Define your species).

Brand Biology

“Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Marty Neumeier

Brand biology is a metaphorical term that I will be using during this series of articles, to refer to different types of elements, factors, cognitive phenomena, and components, that gives a brand life and help the brand survive in the different environment of the market.

Your brand biology is your customer’s categorization, your brand’s DNA is your audience perception, and your clients market is your future environment.  The target market defines your species and their thoughts shape your organisms.

There is more than one element to the idea of brand biology and customer categorization, in this article I will review two elements, the first is related to customer perception and the second is cognitive behavior.

Customer’s perception is manipulated and persuaded by factors like brand color, name, personal experience and campaigns.

In a paper that was published by California State Polytechnic University, titled the Effect of theForeign Brand on Consumer Perception.  The paper empirically examines the influence of brand names (foreign versus national) on consumer perception.

The results support the hypothesis that the national brand elicits more positive consumer perception than the foreign brands. In this study, consumer perception is operationalized by four constructs: attitude toward the brand, purchase intention, advertisement feeling, and attitude toward the advertisement.

This is important in terms of brand biology; just the awareness of your species as mentioned in this study affects your survival. In future articles we will look at your brand survival tactics, brand environment, brand biotic and abiotic.

The second element that affects the categorization of the brand is cognitive behavior, as humans we tend to create mental short cuts, especially in the age of the digital worlds the choices of any product or service could be overwhelming.

Within social psychology, cognitive miser is an umbrella theory of social cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attribution biases.

 The theory suggests that humans, valuing their mental processing resources, find different ways to save time and effort when negotiating the social world. The term cognitive miser was first introduced by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984.

 We tend to crate mental short cuts to ease the process of digesting, transforming and exploring data of any kind. The brain activity of categorizing data lies at the heart of cognitive economy. We treat things as being of a kind so we don’t waste neural processing cycles in details that are irrelevant to the core o the process itself.

When we go to the beach we don’t remember every grain of sand, when we look at the forest we don’t name every tree that we see.

And there is a very good evolutionary reason or this, it’s to prevent our brains from getting overwhelmed with data, making sure we don’t have too many brain tabs open at the same time or too many labeled products on the same shelf because too many choices are paralyzing in most cases.

The process of categorizing data in three main ways

the first one is the Gross or partial appearance which means if they look the same they are the same.
The second form of categorizing is functionality; appearance in this case is not the major concern if it can be used for writing it belongs to the writing tools section and sometimes we might call it a pen.
 Finally the third way of categorizing is conceptual and a perfect example of that is the tool box “If it fixes things it’s in the box”

In order for your brand biology to be compatible in such a harsh environment, in order or your kind to survive, the brand must master the skills necessary to stand out among your species.

First Study the industry before entering the market, understand the audience reactions to the existing, past and future products and services in your industry.  That will provide some needed input and insight into the customer’s perception.

Second define your species if your brand is serving an appearance, a function or a specific concept. Make sure you highlight those features build your campaigns based on how unique and authentic your brand is.

The elements of brand biology are many. Customer’s perception and audience cognitive behavior are two essential components of determining the DNA of your brand biology.