WHAT YOUR DOG CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT BRAND MARKETING

If you’ve ever brought a puppy home, you know the routine. Along with all the cute cuddles, oversized ears and paws, comes the night time whining, the chewing of your undergarments, and the inevitable ‘accident’ you step on, barefoot, in the dark.

Everyone from vet to neighbour gives advice about what the dog needs in order to settle down. It needs its place in the pack, the social construct it understands, in order to feel safe and make sense of the new surroundings.

Ok, all logical stuff, but what does this say to the dog about its own identity in this new ‘pack’ of humans? Does the dog think it’s a person, just like the rest of the pack? Or does it think everyone in the family is a slightly weird dog?

An animal psychologist told me once it’s not so binary. The dog doesn’t think it’s a person. That’s why it doesn’t assume it can drive or read the paper or sit at the table for dinner. Nor does it think you are a dog, which is why (in most families at least) it doesn’t sniff your backside.

The dog recognizes you are different but it does apply its own canine context to you and your family. It judges the world in canine terms, and is more relaxed in a pack structure, because that’s the only context it has.

WHY YOU GIVE YOUR CAR A NAME

The fact is we do exactly the same as the dog. We apply human qualities and characteristics to both living things and inanimate objects without ever confusing them as being people. We name our cars, we describe kitchen appliances or computers as ‘liking’ things (‘The dishwasher likes being full,’ my daughter said last week), we dress our pets and even describe plants as possessing emotions or having relationships with us that they clearly do not have. How many dog owners describe themselves as the animal’s parents when (hopefully) there’s no biological connection? 

This framing the world in human terms, is central to our ability to create and function in community environments and to our success as a species.

And so it is exactly what we do to brands: we anthropomorphise . We build brands personalities, and, like the people we know, we expect them to behave in certain ways, observing certain communal rules. When brands communicate, this is where that personality comes out and those rules are tested, so anything done in their name needs careful planning. If the personality is inconsistent, unclear or just absent, it’s harder for consumers to form any meaningful relationship with the brand behind it.

BE APPROPRIATE, CONSISTENT, AND AUTHENTIC

The key for a brand is for its personality to match what we want from the product. KFC does this well, painting the brand as fun, down to earth and everyday; laughing at life’s awkward moments, and saying ‘Bucket’ to the world. It’s what consumers recognise in a fast food product: not aspirational, but real.

 Of course a positive anthropomorphic brand doesn’t mean we have to like the personality it creates. Take BMW, a cold, dry, efficient, darkly serious and utterly reliable brand that is exactly what you want from an executive car. Or Prada: aloof, elusive, inaccessible and dispassionate, all of which appeal to those who want an exclusive luxury product.

CONTROL VS DEMOCRACY

Of course the holy grail in all this is creating a brand the consumer can trust. And here it’s what we mean by trust that’s important. It’s not trust that a brand will be good company at a party necessarily, but trust to act appropriately, consistently and authentically. That in turn needs a level of control over how the brand communicates. It is very hard to do through social platforms, unregulated distribution, and performance advertising.

If consumers want to be communicated to as individuals and to take the wheel in the distribution of messaging, establishing and maintaining trusted, reliable brand identities is a central challenge for marketers. Defining a brand through open public comments or trying to closely edit customer feedback is risky and has destroyed many an image that has taken years to build.

On Feb 27th Mediatel and Ebiquity are hosting the Future of Brands event at Doltone House. It will be a fascinating day and central to it is a session debating brand trust in the age of data privacy breaches, increased expectations of social responsibility and fake news platforms.

Provocatively, the session asks its contributors and attendees "Do you stand for something in the eyes of the consumer?' Like dogs recognising their owners aren't canine but needing the social structure of the pack to feel comfortable, consumers know a brand is an artifice but they relate more closely to those with consistent human characteristics.

In an era where consumers expect the control, reinforcing those characteristics will be critically tough for brand custodians to deliver safely.

The rewards are significant though, Those who get it right using both new and legacy media channels, will end up top dogs, leaders of the pack, and leave their competition howling at the moon.