The label as an ambassador for the brand*

Comment by the Editor-in-Chief | Johannes Frederik Christensen

The Business of Brand Management sheds light on brand management in the context of the present and history. This article is part of a series of republications of selected texts by Olaf Leu and Bodo Rieger from the years 1987 to 2018. What was thought, written and advocated back then is worth re-reading - not out of nostalgia, but because it reflects questions that have not been resolved even today.

The art of making a name for oneself through outstanding achievements was already successfully practiced in ancient Greece: by sculptors, sword and shield smiths, writers, philosophers and politicians. The next country to be mentioned, and this may surprise the people there the most, is Austria, because nowhere else has it been so successful in turning landscape into a brand, agriculture into a brand, gastronomy into a brand, music, and especially three-four time, into a brand, and political sophistication and the charm of hospitality into brands.

"The label as an ambassador for the brand" is an obvious choice. An ambassador has to present and represent and make the best impression for the identity of his nation in order to demonstrate sovereignty. Knowledge of all the possible and impossible rules dictated by the social etiquette of his country and the host country helps him to do this. He is something of a "maitre d'etiquette". Nothing else, albeit less spectacular, but more durable and economically expedient, is the silent work that every label has to do for its brand and its sender as a dedicated carrier of a message and a name. The label also presents and represents an unmistakable, distinguishable service through the way in which it conveys the brand identity and thus manifests the quality claim. The brand, identical in itself, i.e. uniform, and at the same time differentiating itself from its inevitable competitors, has nothing other in mind than the preservation of its identity.

The word "label" comes from the French etiquette, which in turn is derived from the term estiquier, meaning to pin or pin up a sign, i.e. to attach information about an object to it, just as we attach door signs to our house or name tags to our jacket lapels on important occasions. The only difference is that our label has much more behind it than just the simple task of being a sign. To put it in the stiff language of the marketing people, it serves to provide information about a range of services in order to classify it within its product and price category for the identification of the searching consumer, who is faced with the problem of finding his brands from around 30,000 different products in a large consumer market and would therefore wander helplessly around in a jungle without these traffic signs of consumption. These badges therefore help us to present transparency so that the great exchange of money for brand runs so smoothly that the cash registers rejoice and the marketing bosses and shareholders do the same.

The brand label has one thing in common with social labeling: getting to the heart of an idea. Just as the public attaches the label conservative or progressive to a politician, people's creative imagination attaches an image to products in order to make subjective decisions.

And when differentiating between labels, be it wine or cheese brands, every decision is a judgment on the rise or fall of that brand and therefore, in the longer term, on the company behind it. The label is therefore not only the bearer of a service, but also a functionary in the service of the consumer, the greatest and most democratic power there is on this earth.

If we take a closer look at the function of the label, we can define the actual performance in three dimensions:

There is the material dimension of quality, related to the product itself and its characteristics; secondly, there is the spiritual dimension, which conveys the thoughts and feelings associated with the product, such as the idea that one is honored or not with this product and the feeling of having made a good choice in order to present oneself as a connoisseur to one's friends. And finally, the third dimension, which we call an ideal dimension, i.e. that the label conveys the idea of the brand itself and thus its raison d'être, as expressed in its designed brand identity.

These three dimensions correspond to Plato's three-world model, which owes its recent topicality to the revision by the philosopher Popper. As we can see, this is a very useful model for finding our way through the everyday maze of products by categorizing them. With a wine, for example, we not only learn something about its quality level, its sender and its origin, but also get a feeling of youth through the artistic gestures in color and image, so that we ultimately do not drink wine, but inhale the idea of eternal youth and feel accordingly. Or in the case of a cheese, in addition to the definition of its origin, we also get the idea that it is even more original and genuine and heartier and more desirable than all other types of cheese, especially the industrially produced ones, and for this reason alone deserves our sympathy, and that it conveys this so genuinely with appropriate visual means that we are embarrassed to simply throw away the label, which in this case also represents the wrapping paper, a rational and ingenious idea at the same time.

To cite another example from a neighboring country: the chocolate that, apart from being chocolate, and coming from a decent house, and being called MILKA, and representing everything from left to right of chocolate types and kinds, but being the special one due to the simple fact that it is purple, is not the chocolate, but the brand in the form of its brand symbol, the purple cow, which every child knows and now considers to be the only possible color of a normal cow. In other words, the shaping idea that makes the whole thing unique and desirable and thus represents the decisive difference to everything else that is brown and chocolate.

Let's summarize: The label has no raison d'être in itself, but only through the product it serves to identify and profile. All of these labels together make up the topographical diversity of our brand and marketing landscapes, the pleasure meadows of desirability, whose owners endeavor to motivate us to operate brands like pleasure buttons, in that we can't help but keep replacing the old sin with the new one and become repeat offenders, which the experts then call "brand loyalty". That is the point of this business. It is the unique marriage of art and technology, science and commerce. A four-way union that is something like a perpetuum mobile of our economy.

Of course, we must not forget the four elementary basic human needs: 1. the need for safety. The brand, and as its helper the label, guarantee this in itself, because the brand is a promise of quality and therefore provides security. The 2nd basic need for identity corresponds to the primal function of the brand. We have already learned a lot about this. The 3rd basic need lies in communication, in the dialog between me as a consumer and the brand offer as an exchange process partner. And finally the 4th basic need, stimulation, without which absolutely nothing works, not even in consumption. A label - no matter how clever and beautiful and brilliant it may look - if it does not stimulate, i.e. if the spark does not jump across, then everything is in vain.

There are four factors that make a brand and its label successful:

1. it must have substance, i.e. content and concept must be coherent, understandable and comprehensible and promise a particular benefit.

2. it must be acceptable, i.e. the relevant target group of people must feel addressed, understood and motivated so that they trust the brand.

3. the design must bring conciseness, i.e. expressiveness, which makes the label unique among all the others and therefore desirable and attractive.

4. the brand must be present through advertising so that it is present in people's minds.

All four of these factors combined make a brand successful in the market.

The design of brand labels has a special role to play in the market competition. It is a practical and artistic function at the same time; an art that is useful and makes itself useful because it makes a product spiritually alive by corresponding to the nature of the content of a product (material dimension), serving the consumer's own will (spiritual dimension), communicating the brand's own life, the world of ideas (ideal dimension).

These services of the brand label make up the "living form" of a brand product, as already mentioned: the label as an ambassador of the brand.

*The publication rights for this article are owned by Prof. em. Olaf Leu.