Level 5 Blog

LEVEL5 was mentioned recently in a story about a company’s foundation-shaking decision to change its name. To read it is to learn not just about the intricate and insanely complicated nature of such a dilemma, but to understand a little more about LEVEL5’s life work.

G.A.P Adventures is a 21-year-old highly successful global organization out of Toronto, that arranges global adventure travel expeditions for its clients. It ran into trouble this fall when U.S. apparel powerhouse Gap Inc. launched a trademark infringement lawsuit with the claim that the smaller firm was intentionally confusing consumers in a bid to boost sales. Ultimately, the spat resulted in a legal ruling that gave the tour operator three months to reinvent itself in the American market. They approached LEVEL5 for help.

With our brand as a business system philosophy we knew that a simple name change without a fact-based strategy to guide it would be destined for failure, a forecast with which G.A.P CEO Bruce Poon Tip agreed.  After conducting market research through our proprietary BrandMap™ tool, we were able to identify the rational and emotional attributes behind the brand, and found that there was tremendous attachment to the GAP brand name – some of the strongest we’ve ever seen.

The key insight from this exercise? That a tweaking of the name— not a wholesale change—was the best way to preserve the company’s strong brand equity.  With that knowledge, a major name change was avoided, as was the potential backlash from the market, and G.A.P’s brand equity was protected.

We then worked with G.A.P to clarify their brand strategy.  That process revealed another key insight: that G.A.P’s culture was the engine behind its brand. As long as the culture remained strong (already a prominent focus for the company), and the new moniker didn’t stray too far from the original, damage from this enforced change would be limited.

The confidence resulting from this second insight allowed LEVEL5 and Poon Tip to land on “G Adventures” – a new name was born. G Adventures launched in market in early October 2011, and the reception to the new name from employees, travellers and tour operators has been exceptional so far.

When your brand is your business system™, you can’t separate one part of the organization (the name) from the rest (the market and strategy). Try it, and what starts out as a simple name change can result in a complicated mistake.

Longstanding stereotypes notwithstanding, cold, hard business and warm, fuzzy emotion are not the strange bedfellows you might have thought. In fact, as we point out in our new discussion paper, “The Emotional Science Behind Effective Branding,” they’re kind of a chummy pairing.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Long considered the dominion of the rational mind alone, consumer-purchasing decisions actually owe much to the intangibles. Emotions, says the paper, are “the glue of memory,” and the enduring connection they engender with brands is tied up not so much with how they make us think as how they make us feel.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           And that feeling can be measured by BrandMap™, the mathematically sprung brainchild of Hotspex and LEVEL5 that plots all 96 of the recognized human emotions onto a concentrically ringed map, categorized into eight primary “emotion zones.” The map’s value is in providing a concrete assessment of how the market (or employees or partners) feels about a brand. Considering that at least 50% of the purchase decision is emotional, that insight is critical and a source of competitive advantage.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Such level of detailed attention to the robust, and increasingly necessary, subject of emotional science is important as the world’s products continue to be commoditized, brands become more service based and the economy overall shifts into a highly service-oriented posture.  When everything’s the same, how do you stand out? Understanding the emotions behind your brand provides the insight necessary to differentiate your organization and drive profitability.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             The more complex the playing field becomes, the more difficult it is to distinguish precisely what prompts a purchase move upon it—and the more vital it is to understand how your market feels about your brand.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Strange bedfellows no longer, emotion and business are best snuggled under the covers together.

In our recently released discussion paper resulting from our last Leaders Forum, we encourage those responsible for their organization’s brand (which includes the CEO, don’t forget) to consider the emotional side of the branding conversation in contemplating their brand’s appeal.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            The Emotional Science Behind Effective Branding: A Better Way to Grow Your Branded Business discusses the idea that the rational mind has some pretty influential company when it comes to identifying those decision drivers that motivate purchase. The emotional mind—surprise, surprise—brings heavy weight to bear on the business of brand selection. Given that at least 50% of the purchase decision is emotional, ignore it at your peril.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Instead, organizations should tap into this innovative research liberally in their efforts to create sustainable competitive advantage. Traditional focus groups tend to be the research of choice, but this paper reveals the critical distinction between what consumers think is governing their buying decisions, and what actually is. In fact, human beings not only struggle to articulate the reasons behind a purchase, they’re generally not even conscious of them (that’s your clue that traditional focus groups aren’t getting all the goods).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Take tires, for one, and consumers’ expressed conviction that they’re buying the things according to bona-fide considerations of such rational and reasonable factors as safety and durability. Probe a bit deeper, though, and discover that we tire kickers are driven more by the emotionally grounded trigger of how the tires’ grooves look than by their safety or durability. Not so rational after all.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             It’s not deceptive, this. The human mind seems wired to reflexively point to cognitive explanations for decisions rather than those that are tangled up in the fuzzy business of emotion. People, as we say in the paper, “are either unwilling or unable to articulate their feelings and perceptions of the underlying reasons why they do things.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           And so, armed with this insight, ours is no longer to wonder why—now we know. Ours is but, with apologies to the original for brand managers’ benefit, to do or die.