A Day at Works

For nearly 3 whole days, I’ve focus on brand awareness and association project to refine the last 2004/5 findings. As this is a “nothing new project”, rather than make it mechanical, I start make it retrospection. Moreover this day polemics of AA Gym’s polygamy erupted in mass media.

I still remember the definition of brand, it is everything that can refer to the producer and differentiate to competitors (firm perspective) or refer to certain group of customer (customer perspective). So when customer already knows the producer and able to differentiate the product and experience to competitors, the brand already finishes its goal. In this condition making a re-branding initiative is risk-less. This what happened to one of mosquito repellant product in Indonesia, or a case of “warung sate” which is known for its location only without appropriate publication of the owner and the brand but evidently call for more and more customers.
So the condition which differentiate a brand to a mere name, at least is association it have. In this case, brand awareness will fail to fulfill the definition of a brand… thus the test of association is the test of linkage. How good of the linkage is measured from the next level of brand measures, the old school Aaker call it perceived quality and loyalty.
In this light I see the Harley Davidson brand more depend on the customer perspective of branding than solely on firm perspective. The brand is not communicate how good the product or producer, but what characteristics of the customer community, the one that is respect for freedom and patriotic – of course at least saying that the producer also have these values. The case of AA Gym is bombastic since the branding tends to focus on the quality of AA Gym, and how he is different to others. He is the role model. As consequences, once the position communicated is no more relevant the delivery – problem occurs. Honestly branding on customer perspective is quite difficult in his position….