What Is Branding? The Psychology Behind Strong Brands
Most answers point to a logo. Researchers point to memory: what a name calls up, how easily it comes, and the trust attached to it.
Answer to the question
What is branding?
What is branding? Branding is the work of building a brand's place in buyers' memory. In the model Kevin Lane Keller set out in 1993, that place is an associative network of awareness and associations, and a later paper added salience: how readily the brand comes to mind when a purchase is in view.
Key takeaways
- Kevin Lane Keller (1993) modelled brand knowledge as an associative network memory made of brand awareness and brand image, a set of associations.
- Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp (2004) proposed brand salience as a brand's propensity to be noticed or to come to mind in buying situations, tied to the memory structures buyers hold.
- Three experiments in the Journal of Marketing Research (2004) found that brands which came to mind more readily drew more favourable attitudes.
- A study of 107 brands found that trust and affect combined to determine purchase loyalty and attitudinal loyalty, which in turn were linked to market share and relative price.
- A business controls the cues it uses and how often buyers meet them, and it does not control what buyers store.
Across a data set of 107 brands, purchase loyalty led to greater market share and attitudinal loyalty led to a higher relative price. What is branding, on evidence like that? Researchers who study buyers place the answer in memory: a brand is a body of knowledge stored there, and branding is the work of building it and keeping it easy to reach.
What is branding? What a buyer stores becomes the brand
The frame that most later work builds on came from a paper in the Journal of Marketing. Kevin Lane Keller proposed a model of brand value seen from the individual consumer, in which the value of a brand lies in the effect of brand knowledge on how that consumer responds to the brand's marketing. He modelled brand knowledge as an associative network memory with two parts, brand awareness and brand image. The paper also covers how to build, measure and manage that value. Most later answers to what is branding begin from that model.
The textbook Consumer Behaviour makes the same point in everyday terms. It treats a brand's image as the web of associations a person holds, meaning what they think and feel on hearing the name, and it describes brands competing to be among the options that come to mind for a need. A buyer standing in front of a shelf is working with that web, not with the company's strategy document.
Awareness records that the name is known, and image is the set of associations attached to it. For the moment of purchase itself, a third idea matters to any account of what is branding. Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp argued in Marketing Theory that treating a brand as top of mind, the first one named when a category is the cue, was too narrow. They proposed brand salience instead, a brand's propensity to be noticed or to come to mind in buying situations, reflecting the quantity and quality of the network memory structures buyers hold about it. The paper presents salience as a step on the way from awareness to evaluation.
| Part of the store | What it covers | Source of the idea |
|---|---|---|
| Brand awareness | Whether the name is known to the buyer | Keller, 1993 |
| Brand image | The set of associations attached to the name | Keller, 1993 |
| Brand salience | How readily the brand is noticed or comes to mind when a purchase is in view | Romaniuk and Sharp, 2004 |
A familiar name comes to mind with less effort
Storage is not the whole answer to what is branding in practice, because retrieval also has a feel and the feel carries into liking. Under the processing fluency model, exposure to advertising makes a brand easier to recognise and process, and that ease leads to more favourable attitudes. A series of three experiments in the Journal of Marketing Research, published in 2004, extended the model from perceptual ease to conceptual fluency, which is how readily a thing comes to mind.
The experiments found that targets which came to mind more readily drew more favourable attitudes. The effect appeared when a brand sat in a predictive context, such as a beer shown with a man walking into a bar, and when a related idea had primed it, such as a ketchup following an advertisement for mayonnaise. The authors suggest that a positive feeling underlies these effects. Conceptual fluency concerns how readily an idea comes to mind, so it is the retrieval side of the memory account, and the brand nearer to the cue is the one that gains.
This links the memory account to everyday preference. A brand that is reached easily starts with a small advantage before any argument has been made for it, whether the buyer meets the brand on a shelf or on a screen. Earlier pieces on this site follow the perceptual side of the effect in a name that is easy to say and in the repeat buying that a large, familiar brand collects. The results are attitude measures, not sales forecasts.
Trust is stored beside the associations and shows in price
[Trust](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/branding-ai-trust-matters-more) has been tested at the level of whole brands. A study in the Journal of Marketing pooled three surveys of consumers and brand managers into a data set of 107 brands. With category factors (hedonic and utilitarian value) and brand factors (brand differentiation and share of voice) held constant, brand trust and brand affect combined to determine two kinds of loyalty, purchase loyalty and attitudinal loyalty. Purchase loyalty in turn led to greater market share, and attitudinal loyalty led to a higher relative price.
Seen through trust, the answer to what is branding includes an expectation: the memory frame says the name retrieves a picture of what buying the brand will be like. That expectation sits alongside the associations, and the study links trust, through loyalty, to both share and price. The data are survey measures across brands, so they describe an association within a chain of effects.
A business cannot control what buyers store, only the cues they meet. It chooses which cues to use, how consistently, and how often buyers meet them. Whether a purpose belongs among the associations is a separate question, taken up in a piece on whether brand purpose moves buyers. For a business asking what is branding in practical terms, the work is choosing which few associations a name should call up, using the same cues each time, and meeting buyers with them at the points where a purchase is being considered, so that the knowledge stays stored and easy to reach.
Common questions
What is branding?
Branding is the work of building and maintaining a brand's place in buyers' memory. What is branding in research terms? It is the management of awareness, the associations attached to the name and the ease with which the brand comes to mind when a purchase is in view.
Is a logo the same as a brand?
No. On the question of what is branding, the memory model treats a logo as a cue that retrieves the brand, and the brand is the knowledge a buyer holds: awareness of the name and its set of associations. It works as a cue only when buyers have learned to link it to the name.
What is brand salience?
Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp define brand salience as a brand's propensity to be noticed or to come to mind in buying situations. They tie it to the quantity and quality of the memory structures buyers hold about the brand, and they distinguish it from awareness and attitude.
Does brand trust show up in results?
A study of 107 brands found that trust and affect combined to determine purchase loyalty and attitudinal loyalty. Purchase loyalty led to greater market share and attitudinal loyalty to a higher relative price. The measures came from surveys, so the study shows an association across brands.
Sources
Neal, C. M., Quester, P. G., & Hawkins, D. I. (2002). Consumer Behaviour.
Keller, K. L. (1993). 'Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity.' Journal of Marketing, 57(1). doi:10.2307/1252054. Read at the level of the abstract.
Romaniuk, J., & Sharp, B. (2004). 'Conceptualizing and measuring brand salience.' Marketing Theory, 4(4). doi:10.1177/1470593104047643. Read at the level of the abstract.
Lee, A. Y., & Labroo, A. A. (2004). 'The effect of conceptual and perceptual fluency on brand evaluation.' Journal of Marketing Research, 41(2). doi:10.1509/jmkr.41.2.151.28665. Read at the level of the abstract.
Chaudhuri, A., & Holbrook, M. B. (2001). 'The chain of effects from brand trust and brand affect to brand performance: The role of brand loyalty.' Journal of Marketing, 65(2). doi:10.1509/jmkg.65.2.81.18255. Read at the level of the abstract.