Primalbranding

People point to favored brands like Coke, Google, and IBM as examples of the way to do things, and they are right. But the path to mimicry seems a dead end. Within successful enterprises, whether they are products, personalities, a political or social cause, or a civic community lurks an intangible. In fact, consumers of those products become more than just customers. They feel an almost religious zeal that consumers of brands like Lestoil, Goodrich tires, and MCI never feel. (Location 87)

Primal branding is about delivering the primal code. It is a construct of seven assets that help manage the intangibles of your brand. Those seven assets are: “the creation story”; “the creed”; “the icons”; “the rituals”; “the pagans”; “the sacred words”; and “the leader.” Together, these pieces of primal code construct a belief system. (Location 120)

Once you look at a brand as a belief system, it automatically gains all the advantages that enterprise strives for: trust, vibrancy, relevance, a sense of values, community, leadership, vision, empathy, commitment, and more. With the seven pieces of primal code in place you have created a belief system and products and services that people can believe in. (Location 125)

All belief systems come with a story attached. In fact, a brand is often compared to a narrative. How we originated is the foundation of myth; it fulfills an innate human desire to understand how we came to be. (Location 166)

Creation stories usually embody the who and the why. Who the founder of any nation or organization was and why they started is important for people to know. (Location 204)

Icons are quick concentrations of meaning that cause your brand identity and brand values to spontaneously resonate. (Location 357)

The Nike swoosh. The Apple start-up “bong.” The sound of the Pentium gliss. The smell of Cinnabons, the American flag, the Coke bottle, the Absolut bottle, the Beatles’s mop hair, the rock group Kiss’s make-up, the Budweiser Clyesdales, the Tide package, the national anthem. (Location 358)

Other personalities also have icons to distinguish them, like Stevie Wonder’s sunglasses, Elvis’s stage outfits, Frida Kahlo’s unibrow. These icons inhabit valuable mental real estate that is immediately and indelibly attached to that ideology. (Location 371)

Teaching theory shows that information that has a melody to it attaches itself to memory more readily than spoken information. (Remember singing your ABCs? And be aware that the Burger King’s “have it your way” jingle hasn’t been on-air for twenty years.) Thad Spencer, CEO of Asche and Spencer (Location 532)

are all familiar with major life rituals like weddings, funerals, Fourth of July parades, graduation ceremonies, and religious rites. But our daily lives are filled with other key ritualistic behaviors. The way we drive to work in the morning, whether we brew our coffee or stop at Starbucks, how we shop for groceries, whether or not we vote and how we vote, whether we watch Letterman or Leno are all minirituals that make up the human drama of our day on the planet. Rituals are the repeated interactions that people have with your enterprise. Doing (Location 697)

Ritual replaces chaos with order. Rituals are active engagements that can be imbued with either positive or negative meaning. In fact, the vitality of your brand comes with the number of positive interactions you have with your consumer. (Location 710)

Defining the rituals involved with your product, service, personality, or function is an important step in adding meaning and relevance to your brand. (Location 824)

Rituals are the meaningful repeated points of contact between you and your guest, customer, client, or target market. (Location 890)

Defining your pagans is important in defining who you are. This can be difficult when marketers do not want to exclude potential customers and mass markets. (Location 924)

“The thing about language,” says Abley, “is that there’s always going to be a need for groups to identify themselves and set themselves apart somehow. We live in a society which is incredibly complex and the only way to deal with that is to feel a part of a subgroup or to make ourselves an extended family generally, and so one of the really good ways to do that is to baffle outsiders.” (Location 968)

Yet, it should be noted that the leader’s quest in the primal narrative frequently becomes mythic simply because that is the most powerful form of storytelling. No one is interested in battles against ordinary odds. (Location 1020)

Vibrant brands are alive and juicy with primal code; they make your nerve endings tingle. Brands devoid of code are stale, irrelevant, and flaccid. Primal branding is an organizing principle that helps manage the intangibles of your organization. It defines a world that naturally organizes itself. Why do we try to organize the world? “So that we can navigate it,” replies Richard Saul Wurman. For two years or more, I have been sharing the primal construct with company presidents, CEOs, and senior managers around the country. Many have asked thoughtful, provocative questions that have caused me to think deeply about primal branding and its effects. (Location 2868)