A guy in the restroom of a dive bar in Manchester, England, checks his hair in a mirror and smiles, the girl he’s been talking to for the past hour is definitely into him. He heads back out to the bar, looks across the room—the girl is gone. “Kebab,” he mutters to himself. It really is the only sensible next step from here.
What does this obviously entirely fictional story have to with how we develop new brand positioning? Much like the witty, charming young man in our story, brands can be poor judges on who they are and how they are perceived by others. Just because a brand book tells you that your brand radiates the personality of an ancient Viking warrior, it doesn’t mean that girls at bars—as our witty, charming friend assumed—or consumers see you that way.
Of course, you can include consumers in any sort of brand development process. But, much like girls in bars, they can often be too polite and lovely to tell you that you have more in common with two-week-old organic lettuce than you do with a Viking warrior—and sometimes they run out on you when your back is turned.
If traditional tools for brand development—archetypes, consumer co-creation—suffer from the girl-at-the-bar problem, what are the alternatives? We need approaches that take the brand into account, but are consumer led, and avoid artificial conversations or even asking direct questions entirely.
These criteria were at the top of my mind when I found Ditto. Ditto is a startup that does facial recognition for brand logos. Ditto’s system scours the web for images and sorts them based on the logos found in the images.
Maybe Ditto’s tool could help with brand positioning as the images are all by consumers and reference a brand, but aren’t for the brand. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe a set of Instagram photos could make a pretty good collection of short stories? There was only one way to find out: run an experiment to see if the images tell us about how consumers view these brands.
I setup a Ditto project comparing two car brands, Volkswagen and Mazda. Over a one-month period, 6900 images (2700 Mazda and 4200 VW) were collected. These images were then categorized depending on where the image was taken, what was happening in the image and what emotion the analysts thought the image conveyed.
After the images were tallied, a few interesting patterns emerged. For example, images that contain a Mazda logo are more likely to be seen in an “outdoorsy” setting with mountains and forests. Images with Volkswagen logos in them tended to include a Volkswagen car, while the Mazda logo was more likely to be seen without a car.
While this initial categorization was a useful way to organize the images, things got more interesting within the categories. For example, I looked at the way “happiness” manifested in images with Mazda or Volkswagen logos. In happy images with a Volkswagen logo, people were interacting with the logo, touching the logo at the Volkswagen factory, holding the steering wheel in a Volkswagen car or, in a few cases, making Volkswagen branded cupcakes.
The Mazda images categorized as happy had a different quality. In these images, the logo wasn’t the center of attention; it was a spectator on the side lines. Many images were of soccer fans before, during and after games, and there were a number of older photos uploaded reminiscing about good times with old Mazdas in the background.
All this is useful information when developing new brand positioning. It tells you how your brand is seen by others and how it differs from other brands without being self-referencing and using leading questions. It, however, isn’t the whole story.
Neither Ditto nor any other technology is going to do the work for you. It’s not going to completely replace brand archetypes, CART models or co-creation, but it can make the work you do better.
And that is key for me. It’s rare to find a technology that’s a silver bullet, that solves all your problems, and it’s probably unfair to evaluate a technology on those terms. It’s better to ask, “Is the way I’m doing things today better than the way I was doing them yesterday?” Take these small wins on the days you can, and go eat kebabs on the days you can’t.