Brand Associations
What are the first words that come into your head when you think about a brand? It could be a logo, a celebrity, or even a specific colour or smell. Brand association represents the connections between your business and the specific emotions or attributes it evokes for customers. These associations can be either positive or negative, and can be a driving tool towards brand recognition, loyalty and revenue. Brands such as Nike, with their links to athletic performance and Patagonia, with its strong association to environmental activism and sustainability, show how businesses can thrive by building powerful, positive connections.
What is Brand Association?
Brand associations are the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that come to mind when people hear your brand. It’s essentially how your brand is remembered, and can also be tied to images, emotions, experiences or celebrities. These associations can also be either positive or negative and can significantly shape consumer behaviour and brand recognition.
These associations can be developed through consistent interactions over a long period of time through methods such as advertisements, product placement in films or celebrity endorsements. In a perfect world, you’ll want customers to have brand associations that are straightforward, complementary and memorable.
Why is Brand Association Important?
Brand association can be vital to your business because it helps to build stronger relationships with your customers to give you a competitive edge. The following are the key reasons why brand association is important:
Brand Loyalty
Once your customers build positive associations with your brand, this helps to keep them coming back. Brand loyalty is one of the hardest things to develop, and by giving your customers positive connections, you can help to foster a sense of trust and reliability.
Competitive Advantage
Building strong brand associations can help your business stand out from the pack. Having clear associations allows your customers to understand everything that your brand stands for and, importantly, what makes you unique. For instance, your brand may prioritise renewable packaging, with customers making links to ethical values and sustainability that sets you out from the competition.
Increased Revenue
The more positive associations you can build between you and your customers, the more likely someone is to recommend you to a friend or become a repeat customer. All of this can help drive more revenue back to your business.
Types of Brand Association
People can associate your brand with different emotions, words, activities, and many more. The following are some of the common types of brand association:
Celebrity-based – We’ve all seen celebrities marketing products, from luxury brands on billboards, to tv advertisements and social media. Choosing to connect your brand’s identity with a celebrity endorsement can be a great way to build positive associations. Nike’s ongoing collaboration with Michael Jordan and the Air Jordan brand is a great example of how celebrity endorsements can boost your business. By leveraging Jordan’s excellence in basketball and strong cultural influence, Nike significantly increased brand loyalty, helping to give them an edge over direct competitors such as Adidas.
Founder-based – The way customers associate with a particular company may be directly tied to how they feel about their founders. For instance, Tesla founder Elon Musk, Apple’s Steve Jobs or Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Character-based – Often, the face of a company isn’t even a real person. Fictional characters and mascots can personify everything about your brand’s identity through their appearance, unique traits, and personality. For example, Duolingo’s owl character has become iconic for its playful, cheeky reminders, turning a language-learning app into a brand with personality and humour.
Activity-based – Brands can choose to associate themselves directly with a certain event or type of activity. This can be a great strategy because it allows fans to associate their love or passion for these events with your brand, too. Red Bull has been a pioneer in this space, regularly associating their energy drink product with extreme sports.
Value-based – Brands aligning themselves with strong ethical principles may evoke positive associations. Particularly with consumers who prefer a brand that aligns with their values.
Luxury-based: Your brand can also connect itself with associations of exclusivity, wealth and luxury. Specific brands have used these associations to great effect, such as Ralph Lauren or Rolex with their line of premium watches.
Benefit-based – Customers can link how they feel about a brand to what unique benefits you are offering. This can involve highlighting what your product does best, or how a particular service can improve your life.
Brand Association Examples
Often, you may not even realise the things you associate with a brand until you stop to think about it. Many businesses have been smartly developing their brand associations through decades of marketing. Here are some of the quintessential examples:
Milo
Milo has developed a close association with “sport,” “fitness,” and an “active lifestyle.” Achieved through sponsoring athletes, initiating grass-roots sports programs, and featuring sportspeople on their packaging. This is a positive for Milo, with customers choosing their products because of how they associate them with energy and good health.
Walt Disney
The Walt Disney Company has closely associated itself with family-friendly entertainment that focuses on evoking “childhood,” “nostalgia,” and “happiness.” This is not only reflected in their films, which have classically skewed towards fairy-tale stories, but within their theme parks, which focus on rides and experiences that aim to evoke a child-like wonder.
Nike
When someone mentions sports footwear, Nike is bound to spring up fast, which points to how strong their associations are. Developed through decades of marketing, Nike has also built links to “high performance” and “fitness.” Their iconic “just do it” slogan is a direct link to building “motivation” and “pushing the limit.” Furthermore, by focusing their endorsements on ultra-successful athletes such as Serena Williams, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, Nike can further associate themselves with high performance.
Challenges To Building a Positive Brand Association
Not all publicity can be good publicity. Even if your brand is super memorable, it may not necessarily cut through in the right manner. You may find that having a negative brand association can even start to push customers away. Your businesses may be struggling with these challenges to building a positive brand association:
Lack of understanding of your brand voice
If your business isn’t sure what your brand wants to be associated with, then how can your customers? It’s vitally important to understand how you want your brand to be remembered. This can be communicated through your business’s products, visual identity and values.
Lack of communication
You may have the vision but lack the tools to communicate it. Associations can be created in a variety of different avenues. These can include: videos, social media, websites, advertising and email campaigns.
Miscommunication
With so many different avenues to promote your brand, it can be tricky to maintain a consistent message. Particularly if different departments aren’t aligned, this can easily cause miscommunication. Keeping your message simple and straightforward to drive home the associations you’re after.
How to Build Positive Brand Associations
Brand association is something that’s built over time through clear marketing and branding strategies. You want to reach a point where customers have simple, positive, and immediate associations with you and your products. Explore our guide for building positive brand associations:
Establish a clear brand identity
Your brand identity will be the foundation for how to develop positive associations. This should include your brand values, logos, mission statements and overall personality. This should inform all of your choices going forward, and allow your customers to build a clear understanding of what you stand for.
Choose the right partnerships
Forming relationships with the right partners is an important part of building positive associations. It is important to ensure these are brands that align with your values, so as not to muddle your messaging. This can grow your business in an authentic way to new avenues, exposing your brand to a fresh audience.
Create a brand association map
This is a great way to visualise all the associations consumers may have with your brand. The stronger, more frequent associations are placed closer to the centre of your map. This can be carried out by surveying your customers or by brainstorming ideas internally. Allows you to directly see how customers view your brand, and the strengths or weaknesses of your associations. This can also be a great tool for informing how to make decisions going forward.
Ensure consistency
Develop a branding strategy that evokes your business’s identity. Try to keep everything consistent across the board. When your messaging appears more connected, it builds trust within your customers, which makes your associations clearer and more convincing.
Be memorable
Customers have never been more saturated with media content and advertisements. This makes it important to stand out from the crowd. Think about what emotions or positive associations you want your customers to feel and try to pinpoint some creative ways that you can stick in your customers’ minds. For example, Who Gives A Crap has built strong connections through humour and social impact, while focusing on personal experiences can also help you resonate more deeply with your core audience.
Have a plan to combat negative associations
We recommend investing resources into creating a crisis management plan that can deal with customer complaints or any negative media coverage. Parts of this plan could be focused on acting upon any negative customer feedback, increasing community involvement or releasing regular press releases. Great way to put you ahead of any potential bumps in the road to protect your brand’s reputation.
How to Measure Brand Association
Because associations are usually an emotional connection between your brand and customers, they can be difficult to measure. However, there are ways in which you can assess the types of associations that your customers are drawing from your brand. This is a great way to find information on how to make informed decisions in the future.
Social media platforms
Monitor the online conversations that are being conducted over social media. Pay attention to what emotions or associations are being regularly expressed, and identify some of the keywords. It could include physically checking your comments to see when associations are positive or negative, and which types of posts attract the most likes or positive reactions. It can also be done organically with social listening tools, which help to track online conversations by identifying keywords and patterns.
Customer surveys
The most straightforward approach can be just asking your customers directly what comes to mind when they think of your brand. Using surveys and focus groups are a great way to gather firsthand perceptions.
Positive associations are about projecting the best of your brand. The values you choose to represent, the partnerships you build and how you want to be perceived. These associations are earned through an understanding of your brand identity with consistent messaging and smart partnerships. We understand this can be a lengthy process, but once you achieve positive associations, your business can stand out from the crowd with loyal customers. Create your brand association strategy with the expert team at Brandwell are ready to help you through each step of your branding journey.