Primal Branding: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company and Your Future

by Patrick Hanlon

Overview

In one of the most original books of its kind ever written, Patrick Hanlon explains how the most powerful brands create a community of believers around the brand, revealing the seven components that will help every company and marketer capture the public imagination -- and seize a bigger slice of the pie.

What is the magic glue that adheres consumers to Google, Mini Cooper, and Oprah, but not to others? Why do many brands with great product innovation, perfect locations, terrific customer experiences, even breakthrough advertising fail to get the same visceral traction in the marketplace that brands like Apple, Starbucks, or Nike have? After years of working with famous brands like Absolut, Ford Motor Company, LEGO, Disney, Montblanc, Sara Lee, and others, Patrick Hanlon, senior advertising executive and founder of Thinktopia, decided to find the answers. His search revealed seven definable assets that together construct the belief system that lies behind every successful brand, whether it's a product, service, city, personality, social cause, or movement.

In Primal branding, Hanlon explores those seven components, known as the primal code, and shows how to use and combine them to create a community of believers in which the consumer develops a powerful emotional attachment to the brand. These techniques work for everyone involved in creating and selling an image -- from marketing managers to social advocates to business leaders seeking to increase customer preference for new or existing products. Primal branding presents a world of new possibility for everyone trying to spark public appeal -- and the opportunity to move from being just another product on the shelf to becoming a desired and necessary part of the culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743288828
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/13/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	957,278
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

As a senior executive at the world's most creative advertising agencies, including TBWA, Ogilvy, Hal Riney & Partners, and Lowe & Partners in New York City, Patrick Hanlon has worked on such famous brands as Absolut, UPS, John Deere, H&R Block, LEGO, General Motors, BellSouth, Pepsi International, Sears, and IBM. In August 2003, he founded Thinktopia and began sharing his proprietary new primal branding construct with marketers from Target, Starbucks, American Express, and elsewhere. It was immediately hailed as "a provocative new look at classic branding." Others simply cheer that primal branding is "not the same old branding B.S." After a decade of working on Madison Avenue, the author is now headquartered in Minneapolis, where he serves Fortune 500 clients across the country.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

In the middle of an African gully a man is down on his hands and knees. Sweat stings his eyes as he stares at the ground, not quite believing what is in front of him. He gently scrapes at the dirt, shaving away another peel of earth, revealing even more of what he recognizes as a proximal ulna, the forearm bone of a rare hominid. Paleontologist Donald Johanson spent the morning of November 24, 1974, slowly uncovering a 3.5-million-year-old skeleton. That night, Johanson and his team celebrated the discovery in their tents as the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" played in the background. Nobody remembers how, but the nickname Lucy was given to the female hominid. Lucy's discovery was flashed around the world, and her name became a household word. Equally important hominids have been discovered before and since, yet Lucy alone retains a special place in our imaginations, because she sparkles with something that other discoveries have been without. Lucy sparkles with primal code.

Every sensible CEO, entrepreneur, and product manager wants consumers to feel the same enthusiasm for their products and services that they do. People who build cities and create movements and have new ideas want to attract people in order to create followers, supporters, advocates, and financial partners.

People point to favored brands like Coke, Google, and IBM as examples of the way to do things, and they are right. But the path to mimicry seems a dead end. Within successful enterprises, whether they are products, personalities, a political or social cause, or a civic community lurks an intangible. In fact, consumers of those products become more than just customers. They feel an almost religious zeal that consumers of brands like Lestoil, Goodrich tires, and MCI never feel.

Why?

What is the magic glue that sticks together consumers and Google, Mini Cooper, and Oprah and not others? What is it that strikes the emotional chord sustained beyond the pitchman's cry? Is it a better product? A better customer experience? Better distribution? Better pricing? Each year, millions of dollars are spent by marketers trying to touch their target consumer. They buy advertising on the TV programs people love, sponsor events like Nascar, underwrite golf and tennis tournaments and marathons that their consumers enjoy, and produce emotional advertising so that consumers will feel better about their brands. Millions more are spent throwing banner ads onto Web sites that their target market hits. More millions are spent anticipating product and service niches that consumers might flock to. Even after all that, however, the connective tissue that bonds consumers to emotionally powerful brands like Coke, Disney, Apple, Starbucks, and Nike does not form.

In fact, while it's easy to explain why Coke has achieved brand loyalty after over one hundred years of consumer advertising and marketing support, it's almost impossible to reconcile how Starbucks has achieved similar consumer loyalty in the beverage category with virtually no advertising. Why? Traditionalists might point to things like great product, great experience, great locations, and great employee training. Certainly, those are factors in the success of many companies. Yet many products with great product innovation, perfect locations, terrific customer experiences, even breakthrough advertising fail to sustain the visceral traction in the marketplace that other brands achieve.

Seattle's Best Coffee shops, for example, serve terrific coffee, debatably have an experience similar to Starbucks, and have great locations. Their name even seizes the category superlative. However, Seattle's Best Coffee does not seem to have the same attraction for consumers that Starbucks has garnered. Clearly, there is something beyond traditional marketing tools that connects loyal consumers to their most beloved brands. After years of working with brands like Absolut, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, UPS, John Deere, Lego, Disney, Unilever, BellSouth, Sara Lee, IBM, Montblanc, H&R Block, and others, I wanted to find out why. The result of my search led me not to the typical answers already found in marketing and advertising, but to something much deeper.

What is a brand, anyway? Thirty years ago, a "brand" meant more than the superficial hot-iron I.D. on cattle hide; it was a product or service that customers felt something about. Today, aspiring to the higher ladder rung, virtually every product, service, or company calls itself a brand. The new meaning transformation occurred during the great conglomerate building in the 1980s and 1990s, when companies were merging one after the other. They needed new logos, new business cards, new stationery. Branding was demoted from resonance and appeal to a corporate identity project, even though the quest to become desired by the consuming public was more important than ever.

In the beginning the question was, Why do some products mean something to us while other products -- with essentially the same features and benefits -- do not? The result of this quest led to a much larger question of how ideologies -- belief systems -- come to exist. In the end, the search for meaning revealed not only how products and services but also companies, personalities, movements, ideologies, and civic communities unwittingly, instinctively, and through time bring together seven definable assets that construct meaning behind the brand. Perhaps the most surprising discovery of all was that while most companies try to communicate a single brand message to their audiences, there are in fact seven brand messages that must be delivered to create preferential brand appeal.

Not one message, but seven.

Primal branding is about delivering the primal code. It is a construct of seven assets that help manage the intangibles of your brand. Those seven assets are: "the creation story"; "the creed"; "the icons"; "the rituals"; "the pagans"; "the sacred words"; and "the leader." Together, these pieces of primal code construct a belief system.

Brands are belief systems. (Note: For purposes here, the term "brand" is considered to be any product, service, personality, organization, social cause, political ideology, religion, movement, or other entity searching for popular appeal.) Once you look at a brand as a belief system, it automatically gains all the advantages that enterprise strives for: trust, vibrancy, relevance, a sense of values, community, leadership, vision, empathy, commitment, and more. With the seven pieces of primal code in place you have created a belief system and products and services that people can believe in.

Believing is belonging. When you are able to create brands that people believe in, you also create groups of people who feel that they belong. This sense of community is at the center of psychologist Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of human needs. Whether you belong to a Masai tribe or you're a New Yorker, whether you're a baseball nut, a computer geek, a shopaholic, a marathon runner, a foodie, tekkie, biker, trekker, or triathelete, it is an essential human truth that we all want to belong to something that is larger than ourselves. That community can surround a product or service, a personality, a social or political cause, or a civic community.

Too often, we thrust products and services onto the shelves and into the streets without imbuing them with any meaning whatsoever. Relevant differentiating benefits, unique selling propositions, and functional attributes alone do not fulfill the needs of people at large, or the needs of long-term enterprise. What we call primal branding is the ability to make people feel better about your brand than another. In today's parity world, who your customer feels better about is called "preference." And it is well understood that preference creates sales. As Hal Riney, the creative guy who created Bartles & Jaymes and Saturn advertising, once remarked, "In a parity world, my best friend wins."

The primal code presents a new possibility, because it allows you the opportunity to create a culture of belief. If you have a brand that people can believe in, you have a brand that people feel they can belong to. If they feel they can belong, then you've discovered how to create the passion for your brand that zealots feel for Nike, Starbucks, and Apple. Treat them well.

In this book, we are going to decode the seven factors that work together to create believers and, ultimately, successful brands. We will give you robust examples of how others have created individual pieces of code. And we will tell the stories of people who unwittingly and over time put the pieces of code together to create success. Finally, we'll ask you what we ask everyone: Do you want to be just another product on the shelf, or do you want to become a meaningful and desired part of the culture? If your answer is the latter, please turn the page.

Copyright © 2006 by Patrick Hanlon

Table of Contents

Contents

PrePrimal

Part One: Going Primal

Introduction

1. The Primal Code

The Creation Story

The Creed

The Icons

The Rituals

The Pagans, or Nonbelievers

The Sacred Words

The Leader

2. Primal Belonging

Part Two: Primal Perfect

3. The Primal Product or Service

4. The Primal Destination

5. The Primal Personality

Part Three: The Final Step

6. Primal Reengineering

7. The Bones

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

..."it's exactly what many companies should be doing, but are not."

Editorial Reviews

Create Zealots for Your Brand and Company
Why do people love Oprah so much? Why do they swear by their Starbucks coffee? There are thousands of brands we could name if we tried, but there are only a few for which we develop deep emotional attachments that go beyond loyalty. In Primal Branding, advertising guru Patrick Hanlon reveals the secrets of branding while describing the elements that create communities of believers around certain brands. The seven components he describes form the links between the public's imagination and their favorite brands. Understanding them is vital for marketers and company leaders who want to attract customers to their new and old offerings.

Hanlon describes branding in terms of delivering primal code. He writes that there are seven brand messages that have to be delivered to create preferential brand appeal.

Hanlon explains that together, these pieces of primal code create a belief system. This means brands can bring their companies the vital advantages of trust, vibrancy, empathy, commitment, leadership, values, community, vision and relevancy. He writes that by putting the “seven pieces of primal code” together, companies can create “a belief system and products and services that people can believe in.”

Seven Pieces of Code
The following seven assets help to manage the intangibles of a brand:

1. The Creation Story. Hanlon writes, “Where you come from is as important for people to know as what you believe and what your advantages are.” Every belief system comes with a story. When Sherwood Schwartz was asked why his shows Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch began with a theme song that outlined the story's premise, he said, “Because the confused do not laugh.” Hanlon points out that the confused do not buy, either.
2. The Creed. Defining, understanding and communicating your mission to employees and customers is critical to your brand's success. Coke lets everyone know “It's the real thing.” Nike says, “Just do it.” Campbell's makes it clear that “Soup is good food.” Hanlon explains that the creed is what you want people to believe.
3. The Icons. Brand identity and brand values resonate from icons and their instant concentrations of meaning. Many icons are simply the company logo: Nike's swoosh, Target's red bull's eye, Starbucks' mermaid, etc. People in the public eye can also become icons for their brand, such as Virgin's Richard Branson or Microsoft's Bill Gates. When developing a visual icon, companies should find those that attract attention and radiate the values of authority, leadership and confidence.
4. The Rituals. Hanlon writes, “Rituals are the repeated interaction that people have with your enterprise,” and they can be imbued with either positive or negative meaning. Companies must consider how they can make these touch points with their brands and ideology more pleasant, engaging, enhanced, simplified, less frustrating and more fun. For example, Aveda builds instant connection with its customers with scalp massages, which relax them and help them to communicate with their stylist.
5. The Pagans. For every believer, there is a nonbeliever. These pagans allow believers to define themselves through contrast. By defining the pagans, you define who you are by demonstrating the antithesis of your position. That's why 7Up declared itself the “uncola” and Taco Bell wants us to “think outside the bun.” Understanding the pagans helps you open up opportunities to manifest your potential for what you can become.
6. The Sacred Words. You must know a group's sacred words to belong within that group. These sacred words set people apart from others and bind them together as members of a group. This specific language helps them work together effectively. Words like “iced grande skinny decaf latte” help us define and distinguish ourselves.
7. The Leader. Hanlon writes, “All successful belief systems have a person who is the catalyst, the risk taker, the visionary, the iconoclast ...”

By defining these seven elements and showing how they can be used to make brands more valuable and powerful, Hanlon helps companies make their brands a necessary and desired part of the culture.

Why We Like This Book
Primal Branding offers a fresh outlook on branding that resonates with insightful observations and timely lessons. With many examples from the past and present, Hanlon shows companies how to get brands into the minds of their customers. Experiences and advice from other experts help Hanlon guide companies to their next great brands. Copyright © 2006 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

..."it's exactly what many companies should be doing, but are not."

From the Publisher