Mapping brand values (and deliverables)
The Inglehart Values Map may give you some ideas if you’re ever involved in mapping brand values, and/or your brand deliverables, to different cultures, populations or markets.
I might use a different contextual scheme, based on new brand models and where brands intend to lead customers, but this map could serve as a conceptual starting point.
The Inglehart Axes
The axes used for this particular map are:
Horizontal: Survival Values — Self-Expression Values
Vertical: Traditional Values — Secular-Rational Values
For brand builders, the form of brand mapping employed would be strongly influenced by one’s brand agenda.
Sweden is the one
Given the ubiquitous quadrant bias in business diagrams, it appears that Sweden is the epitome of self-expression and secular-rational values. Perhaps, but a devout Lutheran farmer scratching out a living in a remote province may be as tradition-bound and survival-oriented as his suffering counterparts in the desolate African sub-Sahara.
However, if I were Absolut I’d say, “Yep. Looks about right.”
February 19th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Dear Brian,
From 2003 onward we are working on a new way to understand branding and actually, we are succesfully using as a base the Inglehart’s framework…
Instead that the paper is in Spanish (and it’s from 10.2003), perhaps you’ll find it interesting… http://www.allegro234.net/es/pdf/B_Identidad_100103.pdf
Cheers,
Cris
February 20th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Cris,
Thanks. That’s an interesting and well-structured paper (I read and speak Spanish). Inglehart’s framework points in the same direction that I’m headed, which is that brands, instead of being simply stylized sales stimulants, can become proactive components of deeper and richer cultures. As I see it, the customers that a brand creates can actually do more for the brand than the company itself. Customers have their own identities invested in the brand, and can push and pull it in new (more vital) directions, well ahead of what a company could figure out.
Where you have your “nirvana” block (cuadro 25} is where I would put my “high performance customer.”
One of my pet theories is that European brands have an inherent (albeit often unrealized) advantage over US brands because they have access to deeper and richer cultures that can grow and energize the brand. Too many US brands rely on a “marketing culture” that is very thin, and easily exhausted.
Brian
February 21st, 2008 at 10:44 am
Hi Brian!
Thanks for your comments. I’ll keep you posted on what we are doing… As a matter of fact, we are beginning a research which would be based on this issues!
Regarding “cuadro 25″, that was developed by Shailendra Kumar (UK) for brand valuation purposes.
Probably, you’re right when you say that European brands have an inherent advantage over US brands. What we have seen is:
- Company value agendas are comming from their history and translated into a “call to action idea” summarized in their brand experiences
- Postmodernism is understood a little bit different here… “If modernism does not generate any benefit, so we go back to our grandmother’s traditions”… So, postmodernism, in certain way, is understood as a blend between modernism and traditions that remain useful for us
Thanks again & we keep in touch!
Cheers,
Cris