Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

UNDERSTANDING BRAND RELEVANCE 55
Customers are far from rational. Even if they had the motivation
and the time, which they usually don ’ t, they often lack
credible information, memory capacity, computational ability,
and even suffi cient knowledge about a product area to obtain
relevant information and use it to optimize decision making.
There is little doubt that even the executives at Singapore
Airlines charged with buying planes, supplied with piles of proposal
details on options, will in the end be infl uenced by their
gut feel. Customers, instead of optimizing a purchase decision,
rely on surrogates of perfect information and cues that signal
outcomes. That is why framing is so important. A frame, by
infl uencing the dialogue surrounding a product or service, can
affect the whole decision process and user experience. It can
trump logic, even for those who are informed.
George Lakoff, the Berkeley linguist, talks about framing
in the political sphere and how infl uential it is in terms of
managing the discussion. 6 Consider the difference in perspectives
on taxation stimulated by a phrase that frames the debate.
“ Tax relief ” engenders the metaphor of a hero who is relieving
people of a burden and suggests that anyone who would
obstruct that noble quest is at best naive. “ Tax as investment
in the future ” produces the image of roads built, children educated,
and a defense force enhanced. “ Tax as dues like you pay
at a club ” is a metaphor associated with paying your fair share
for services benefi ting you and others close to you. Each frame
infl uences the discourse very differently by implicitly altering
the objectives.
It matters whether you are buying an energy bar for athletes,
an energy bar for offi ce workers, an energy bar for women, a
nutrition bar, a breakfast bar, a protein bar, or a diet bar. It really
matters. It affects the information you process, your evaluation
of a brand, your purchase decision, and your user experience. If
you are going to buy an energy bar for women, a product that
has a man ’ s look and feel may not be appropriate, even if it has
the right ingredients. It just never has a chance, even though