Searching for association: why reinvention isn’t just about product

Have you ever played that game where one player says a word and the other player says another word that they associate with that word and the game repeats? For example if I say the word “summer”; you might say the words “braai” or “swim”.

This is the same game and space in our brains that marketers want their brands to play within. What associations does your target market make when thinking about your brand, and how is this battle in the minds of your consumers’ minds being changed?

While summer is a very big season for all marketers – from retailers and marketers of some of the most expensive consumer purchases from toys (both kids and adult varieties), property, automobiles, holidays and financial products – it will be interesting to see which brand wins in the mind of consumer for the association with ‘summer’?

Traditionally, in South Africa it has been a battle between the major telecommunication players like Vodacom and MTN. It is encouraging to see that Cell C has fired the first shot with its recently launched summer production featuring Cell C Sharks CEO John Smit complete with computer generated super yacht.

Its eagerness can be compared to some retailers that have already put up their Christmas decorations and are searching for their ‘Best of Bonny M’ Christmas songs playlist. We will have to see if its budget can sustain the momentum into December.

For me, one of the most regular but incorrect association I encounter is when the brand ‘Yahoo’ is associated with ‘search’. This is a legacy association from when there was a large public ‘search’ battle, that saw Google emerge as the category winner.

However, Yahoo now is more strongly associated with terms such as Mail, Finance, Weather, and News, and number one globally in these categories which were some of the most popular daily habits of users when the Internet started in the late 1990s and still are some of the most popular and important online daily habits today.

Furthermore, Yahoo is still ranked within the top three online and mobile destinations across all 51 countries of Africa and with over 3-million actual users across PC, Mobile & Tablet in South Africa is ranked within the top five.

In the future, I see the battle of associating between the technology players for the title of ‘brand story-teller’. The key in this battle is making sure that the consumers’ behavioral ‘context’ on the media is matched to the brand’s ‘Context’ at the time of consumption.

Just look at the interesting story of how the popular American toy brand ‘Play-Doh’ reinvented and changed the association their company had, from an industrial product to a consumer product. The lesson is that changing consumers’ brand association takes time, something that is often forgotten in our now fast-paced world of marketing.

Prior to the ‘Play-Doh’ product being a popular toy with the brand being the generic for the product category, its initial purpose was to clean coal residue from wallpaper. It was a white putty substance. But when cleaner fuel sources like gas and electricity rendered coal obsolete, this in turn risked the future of this manufacturer’s high volume putty product.

It is the clever observations of potential alternative uses of the product, with costumers adding their own food colorant and giving it to their children to play with, that saved a company and prompted it to re-launch with a completely new Industry and product.

So often a lot of attention is given to the modern industry ‘disruptor’ such as Tesla in the auto industry, SpaceX in the space industry, Apple in the phone and music industries. However, examples of historic ‘disruptors’ like Play-Doh and Yahoo exist; they just need to be re-discovered.

Who would these days have associated ‘Play-Doh’ with ‘coal’ instead of ‘toy’?

What do you want to associate your brand with, and who already can claim to owning that space? How are you going to creatively, strategically and cost effectively associate your brand with it?

I look forward to playing this ‘Game’ of brand association with you in the comments below. Join me online and let’s continue the conversation.

Image: Yahoo via Flickr.