Understanding Brands as Values-Based Social Contracts

Brand psychology looks at brands as symbols of meaning.  They are a social contract, promising values and experience.

The brand values and promise are encapsulated in the stories we tell about a product, service or experience. Brands are narrative representations of expectations, beliefs and assumptions that live in the mind of the consumer. A successful brand is one where the brand promise aligns with the consumers’ expectations. In other words, when both sides fulfil the social contract.

 There are several theoretical approaches that I use to better understand how consumers perceive brand meaning and brand promises, such as perceptions of the brand personality and how that fits with the consumer’s identity, needs and goals as well as cognitive processes and biases that inform how the consumer makes meaning, creating mental models about “how things are” and schemas about “what things do or are good for.”

We often assume that the term brand is related to consumer products. However, looking at a brand as a symbol– as a distillation of meaning–is equally applicable to all forms of persuasive communication that focus on an idea or purpose, such as nonprofit organizations, a political candidate’s campaign or a public policy debate.  Using the term brand as a meaning unit or meme helps organizations focus on the psychological and practical values that consumers attribute to the brand.

Analyzing brand meaning and capturing core values in story

Storytelling is a buzzword in marketing these days because stories are clear expressions of a brand’s values.  As we all know, storytelling is not new.  We look at the role of story as fundamental to how people navigate the world, how they make sense of themselves and others.  Storytelling is what we do every time we explain how or why something happened, every time we have a social interaction and every time we plan or project into the future.  Psychology has looked at the role of narrative as a theory of mind and individual development for some time. Narrative psychology’s rich history includes personality theory and motivations as well as ‘rewriting the past’ to support identity and behavior change.

Narrative theory has many overlaps with narrative psychology, but narrative theory comes at narrative from a more structural vantage and understanding how structure has purpose and meaning in narrative.  It addresses things like the ways we think about the boundaries and story elements and the meaning that those create. It looks at the role and impact of genres, characters, the power dynamics of heroes and villains, and the power and sequencing challenges and struggles.  The cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner’s narrative theory and mythologist Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as useful tools to use when building a powerful story.

Matching brand story to universal archetypes and metaphors

Since brands have meanings that existing within the customer’s brains, all communicators face the same challenge: how to tell a brand story in a way that is consistent internally, but is also ‘heard’ as it is intended by the consumer.  This means identifying the core values within the brand message.

Storytellers have many devices to transmit information effectively.  Things like metaphors and similes trigger larger meaning through the audience’s existing knowledge.  This knowledge, however, tends to be culturally embedded and experiential, meaning it varies across audiences.

Archetypes, however, drawing on the work of psychologist Carl Jung, are based on a fundamental model or pattern.  Jung believed, and much research supports, the idea that there are universal models or patterns that we all recognize and that appear within every culture.  Your hero may not be the same as my hero, but we both have an understanding of the hero. For Jung, these were part of a collectively inherited unconscious that is universally present in all individuals.  Because archetypes capture core patterns that evoke emotion, image and cognitive understanding, they are an effective way to approach brand development.  Identifying a core archetype is a valuable exercise to clarify both messaging and action.

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash