Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

How "cool" is your brand? Marketers may soon get the answers...

A Breakthrough In Measuring Cool Business leaders can now determine whether their brands are perceived as cool and how much emotional heat they have as a measure of future business success. Results from a recent study in the beer and spirits categories are described below to illustrate the new insights available from measuring cool.

Today there is too much noise, too much clutter and too many choices for customers to navigate in virtually every category. When a brand evokes the characteristics of cool, it stands out and drives consumption. For brand owners and innovators it has been increasingly difficult to differentiate on functional features and benefits to get ahead of competitive brands and private label.

The accumulated research on quantifying cool by Buyology has demonstrated:

- Cool is a key driver of brand favorability across a wide spectrum of product and service categories

- Cool is relevant and important to all age groups, although what is considered to be cool may vary by age.

- Cool brands have different characteristic patterns

- Cool is more reliably measured through non-conscious methods, where perception and intuition operate in our thinking...

...The report says people are getting some optimism back, although their buying habits -- particularly those of 20- to 30-year-olds -- are going to be radically different. The report lists 13 "microtrends." First on the list is trust, or "trust is the new black." Gerzema said there has been a 50% decline in trust since 2001, but a 35% rise in trust as a driver of brand equity. That suggests there's an opportunity for brands that open their arms wide and say, "Here I am with all my blemishes."

"Customers want a reason to believe and brands who give them that will be better off," said Connelly. Gerin said MasterCard is doing just fine in that category -- as she said the brand is 87% more trusted than any other brand of any kind.

McCracken said trust matters in a "black swan" world full of disruptive competitors. "The last 20 years have been a chronicle of brands behaving badly," he said. "The name of the game is absolute transparency." The good news for established brands is that assuming they have not been behaving badly, they have equity, while new competitors have nothing but VC money. To achieve trust equity functionally, the "front" of a company -- its brand, communications, what it claims to be -- must match the back, the invisible side, where it does what it actually does....

[Very interesting trend report for marketing and PR ~ Jeff]