Brand Admiration: Building a Business People Love
A review by Bob Woodard, Founding Partner, Deep Relevance Partners
By itself the term “brand admiration” evokes other recent concepts in brand marketing and positioning like brand relationship, brand love, brand relevance, and brand trust, only without the same sense of “connection” between brand and customer[1] that one might expect in marketing these days. However, after reading Brand Admiration by distinguished marketing academics C. Whan Park, Deborah J. MacInnis, and Andreas B. Eisingerich, I am convinced that “admiration” precisely captures the endpoint of a rigorous yet practitioner-friendly model of brand value, one that neatly contextualizes, connects, and brings to life concepts like those above.
The foundation of their model for brand admiration comprises the “Three E’s”: enablement benefits (those related to doing with distinction what people call on brands to do for them), enticement benefits (those related to customers’ sensory and other personal experiences during acquisition, use, or other interactions with the brand), and enrichment benefits (those activating a sense of shared values, self-image, etc.). By respectively attracting the customer’s attention, providing focus, and supplying “energy…to overcome barriers” to purchase and usage, each plays a critical role in driving the customer’s overall understanding and feeling about the brand — and in motivating these customers to take action.
The authors provide copious examples of contemporary brands delivering one or more of the E’s. Examples span the continua of product vs. service, B2C vs. B2B, and profit vs. non-profit. Some are perennial favorites of the brand-management genre, such as Nike, but at least as many are brands not routinely found in the literature, such as Camper shoes and Porsche Consulting.
One of the authors’ most compelling case studies describes Singapore Airlines’ meticulous and inspired management of its brand identity through the Three E’s. Because of their many superlatives and firsts in the airline industry — the top safety record, the newest fleet, the first to fly the Airbus A-380 — Singapore enables its customers to “reduce…anxiety and stress during the flight.” The tasteful aesthetics of their logo and uniforms, the excellence of their food and wine offerings, and the bounty of other in-flight amenities, are powerful enticement benefits of the Singapore Airlines brand. Finally, the airline enriches the lives of fliers, according to the authors, through numerous manifestations of social responsibility and personal cachet.
It’s tempting to see the Three E’s as a kind of laddered hierarchy, with enablement and enticement covering the more functional domain (enticement perhaps a bit higher on the ladder because of its arguably less utilitarian characteristics) and enrichment covering the so-called higher order outcomes. But this would miss a far more substantive insight embedded in the model’s design: each of one the E’s begets a ladder of its own; each is a distinct thread uniquely connecting the brand with the customer’s self.
For example, according to the authors, enabling benefits themselves make customers feel empowered and capable, resulting in brand trust; enticing benefits provide a sense of excitement or warmth, resulting in brand love; enriching benefits drive pride and inspiration, resulting in brand respect. These three “threads” could represent a valuable new paradigm for eliciting as well as analyzing consumers’ deep associations with brands and categories and developing useful, differentiated insights for application in market.
The Brand Admiration model also establishes important, non-ancillary roles for other brand marketing concepts like brand relationship and brand relevance, though in slightly different terms. Brand trust, love, and respect — obvious characteristics of successful, lasting brand relationships — merge multiplicatively, according to the authors, into brand admiration. Admiration itself, then, is operationalized as a combination of top-of-mind recall and “brand-self connection.” To my mind, “brand-self connection” encapsulates the range of meanings that marketers intend when using the term “brand relevance” — the connection of a brand to the broader life of a person, well beyond the product and the category it represents.
Brand trust, love, and respect merge multiplicatively into brand admiration.
The book leverages its powerful Admiration construct across the enterprise and takes on the establishment and growth of admired brands through not only an array of marketing levers like logos, brand names, package design, product and brand extension, and brand architecture but also other functional areas of the company, such as human resources and finance/top management. The chapters on marketing levers are all highly recommended for marketing practitioners.
Brand architecture receives a treatment fully immersed in contemporary issues and examples; the authors’ chapter is the most helpful descriptive and prescriptive content on this topic that I have seen. The same is true for the two chapters on extension. Brand positioning receives a refreshing upgrade from conventional thinking by means of a much more strategically focused process of target selection and a superior formulation of brand benefits courtesy of the Three E’s. The authors’ template for a positioning statement does not include the traditional “frame of reference,” but the “need profiles” included in customer target selection appear to compensate fully for its absence. To inspire brand admiration by employees, the authors provide clear guidance on creating brand missions and supporting stories that motivate employees to embrace them without feeling inauthentic.
The authors’ chapter [on brand architecture] is the most helpful content on this topic that I have seen.
The field of marketing has long tried to establish “brand equity” as a critical, “hard” business performance measure among financial and general managers. To help this cause, Brand Admiration provides a new approach addressing the limitations of previous approaches as well as the “consensus” features of a desirable Brand Equity measure: i.e., objective, grounded, singular, financially based, etc. Their micro-economic argument is rigorous but straightforward and understandable, and the resulting financial measure of brand equity seems eminently sensible. However, the authors’ recommendation that analysts use attitudinal measures like The Three E’s and Brand Admiration as diagnostics for the performance of the financially based Brand-Equity measure seems somewhat impractical. Limited comparability between the financial measure — which is calculated with cumulative, internal accounting data — and attitudinal measures like the Three E’s and Brand Admiration, which are snap-shot measures captured for company and competitive brands alike, are likely to confound an integrative analysis of cause and effect.
If there is a substantive limitation of this impressive volume, it is the absence of research or discussion explicitly connecting the effect of the Brand Admiration model and its components to some form of actual, rather than intended or claimed, consumer behavior. In their chapter on Brand Dashboards, the authors provide a helpful example using Structural Equation Modeling to decompose customers’ loyalty and advocacy “willingness” into key drivers from the Admiration model. But with the escalation of pressure on CMOs[2] and marketers to deliver real, organic growth, more behaviorally-grounded reassurance to practitioners is needed. The good news is that marketers across industries can readily apply this book’s well grounded model to develop alternative marketing programs or concepts, and use live A/B testing or simulation experiments with behavioral science’s latest proxies for real behavior to assess the model’s performance in and relevance to their industry.
In a nutshell, Brand Admiration offers much to be admired in a brand equity text for marketers regardless of industry or organizational level. This volume deserves a place on the practitioner’s desk within easy reach, right next to those of Aaker and Keller.
Bob Woodard is a Founding Partner of Deep Relevance Partners (DRP), a consumer brand strategy firm committed to driving consumer behavior change & real business growth through strategically advantageous, validated brand positioning and behavioral science. Previously, he was VP of Global Consumer and Customer Insights at Campbell Soup and held numerous senior insights posts at Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay.
[1] Since this book addresses both B2C and B2B marketing, we follow the authors’ convention in using the term “customer” to represent both consumer and what we normally understand as the customer.
[2] Jack Neff, CMOs First on Firing Line when Companies Miss Growth Goals, Advertising Age, Nov 1, 2016 (accessed through adage.com)
