Brand is Important, But What’s on the Inside Matters Most

How important is brand name recognition? It’s extremely important to establish a link, a connection through whatever process, through social media, through marketing, through in store presence, but in the long term I think it’s more important what’s on the inside than what’s on the outside of a product.

That automotive industry is a good example.  It’s more important the electronics, the tools, the resources, the connectivity that are going to be in automobiles than the external packaging of the automobile that shows to the world outside.

Internet pioneers or the hooked-up generation, today’s college students, are much more interested in what is inside.  They’re much more interested in what is inside the human being.  Because they’ve grown up on the internet a person’s color, a person’s gender, a person’s beliefs, religious beliefs for example, are far less important than their beliefs as human beings, their attitudes toward human equality, their attitudes towards diversity, their attitudes toward giving back to the world, to their schools, to each other.  So the branding, the external packaging is far less important to them than what is inside, whether that’s another human being or a package of cereal and what the brand is and what the brand name is what the legacy of that product may be versus its health qualities.  Its ingredients become more important or an automobile where the internal electronics and safety of a car is more important than what is showing to the outer world.

So it’s really a great question when you think about what are the implications to a brand and the whole tradition of brand marketing and the importance of using advertising and media to build brand.  I believe that it’s going to be much more important to communicate the qualities of a brand than trying to build the emotional connection to a brand. 

In their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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