Introduction
In the middle of an African gully a man is down on his hands and knees. Sweat stings his eyes as he stares at the ground, not quite believing what is in front of him. He gently scrapes at the dirt, shaving away another peel of earth, revealing even more of what he recognizes as a proximal ulna, the forearm bone of a rare hominid. Paleontologist Donald Johanson spent the morning of November 24, 1974, slowly uncovering a 3.5-million-year-old skeleton. That night, Johanson and his team celebrated the discovery in their tents as the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" played in the background. Nobody remembers how, but the nickname Lucy was given to the female hominid. Lucy's discovery was flashed around the world, and her name became a household word. Equally important hominids have been discovered before and since, yet Lucy alone retains a special place in our imaginations, because she sparkles with something that other discoveries have been without. Lucy sparkles with primal code.
Every sensible CEO, entrepreneur, and product manager wants consumers to feel the same enthusiasm for their products and services that they do. People who build cities and create movements and have new ideas want to attract people in order to create followers, supporters, advocates, and financial partners.
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.
Why?
What is the magic glue that sticks together consumers and Google, Mini Cooper, and Oprah and not others? What is it that strikes the emotional chord sustained beyond the pitchman's cry? Is it a better product? A better customer experience? Better distribution? Better pricing? Each year, millions of dollars are spent by marketers trying to touch their target consumer. They buy advertising on the TV programs people love, sponsor events like Nascar, underwrite golf and tennis tournaments and marathons that their consumers enjoy, and produce emotional advertising so that consumers will feel better about their brands. Millions more are spent throwing banner ads onto Web sites that their target market hits. More millions are spent anticipating product and service niches that consumers might flock to. Even after all that, however, the connective tissue that bonds consumers to emotionally powerful brands like Coke, Disney, Apple, Starbucks, and Nike does not form.
In fact, while it's easy to explain why Coke has achieved brand loyalty after over one hundred years of consumer advertising and marketing support, it's almost impossible to reconcile how Starbucks has achieved similar consumer loyalty in the beverage category with virtually no advertising. Why? Traditionalists might point to things like great product, great experience, great locations, and great employee training. Certainly, those are factors in the success of many companies. Yet many products with great product innovation, perfect locations, terrific customer experiences, even breakthrough advertising fail to sustain the visceral traction in the marketplace that other brands achieve.
Seattle's Best Coffee shops, for example, serve terrific coffee, debatably have an experience similar to Starbucks, and have great locations. Their name even seizes the category superlative. However, Seattle's Best Coffee does not seem to have the same attraction for consumers that Starbucks has garnered. Clearly, there is something beyond traditional marketing tools that connects loyal consumers to their most beloved brands. After years of working with brands like Absolut, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, UPS, John Deere, Lego, Disney, Unilever, BellSouth, Sara Lee, IBM, Montblanc, H&R Block, and others, I wanted to find out why. The result of my search led me not to the typical answers already found in marketing and advertising, but to something much deeper.
What is a brand, anyway? Thirty years ago, a "brand" meant more than the superficial hot-iron I.D. on cattle hide; it was a product or service that customers felt something about. Today, aspiring to the higher ladder rung, virtually every product, service, or company calls itself a brand. The new meaning transformation occurred during the great conglomerate building in the 1980s and 1990s, when companies were merging one after the other. They needed new logos, new business cards, new stationery. Branding was demoted from resonance and appeal to a corporate identity project, even though the quest to become desired by the consuming public was more important than ever.
In the beginning the question was, Why do some products mean something to us while other products -- with essentially the same features and benefits -- do not? The result of this quest led to a much larger question of how ideologies -- belief systems -- come to exist. In the end, the search for meaning revealed not only how products and services but also companies, personalities, movements, ideologies, and civic communities unwittingly, instinctively, and through time bring together seven definable assets that construct meaning behind the brand. Perhaps the most surprising discovery of all was that while most companies try to communicate a single brand message to their audiences, there are in fact seven brand messages that must be delivered to create preferential brand appeal.
Not one message, but seven.
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.
Brands are belief systems. (Note: For purposes here, the term "brand" is considered to be any product, service, personality, organization, social cause, political ideology, religion, movement, or other entity searching for popular appeal.) 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.
Believing is belonging. When you are able to create brands that people believe in, you also create groups of people who feel that they belong. This sense of community is at the center of psychologist Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of human needs. Whether you belong to a Masai tribe or you're a New Yorker, whether you're a baseball nut, a computer geek, a shopaholic, a marathon runner, a foodie, tekkie, biker, trekker, or triathelete, it is an essential human truth that we all want to belong to something that is larger than ourselves. That community can surround a product or service, a personality, a social or political cause, or a civic community.
Too often, we thrust products and services onto the shelves and into the streets without imbuing them with any meaning whatsoever. Relevant differentiating benefits, unique selling propositions, and functional attributes alone do not fulfill the needs of people at large, or the needs of long-term enterprise. What we call primal branding is the ability to make people feel better about your brand than another. In today's parity world, who your customer feels better about is called "preference." And it is well understood that preference creates sales. As Hal Riney, the creative guy who created Bartles & Jaymes and Saturn advertising, once remarked, "In a parity world, my best friend wins."
The primal code presents a new possibility, because it allows you the opportunity to create a culture of belief. If you have a brand that people can believe in, you have a brand that people feel they can belong to. If they feel they can belong, then you've discovered how to create the passion for your brand that zealots feel for Nike, Starbucks, and Apple. Treat them well.
In this book, we are going to decode the seven factors that work together to create believers and, ultimately, successful brands. We will give you robust examples of how others have created individual pieces of code. And we will tell the stories of people who unwittingly and over time put the pieces of code together to create success. Finally, we'll ask you what we ask everyone: Do you want to be just another product on the shelf, or do you want to become a meaningful and desired part of the culture? If your answer is the latter, please turn the page.
Copyright © 2006 by Patrick Hanlon
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Excerpted from Primal Brandingby Patrick Hanlon Copyright © 2006 by Patrick Hanlon. Excerpted by permission.
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