Branding for Dummies

And you thought it was just a bottle of water... Sun sentinel dives into brandings effects on still water.

Your throat is parched, so you dash into a convenience store for a simple bottle of water. You stare at row after row, bin after bin of refreshing options. For a moment you hesitate. Aquafina or Evian? Dasani or Poland Spring? Splurge on an upscale sip of Vittel or Fiji or go for the cut-rate, store-brand guzzler?

What makes one bottle more special than the other; one taste better?

"Pixie dust," said James Twitchell, who specialized in pop culture as a professor of English at the University of Florida. "That's pixie dust you're tasting."

Twitchell isn't talking about genuine Tinkerbell glitter. It's simply his cynical way of suggesting there is absolutely no difference in the product in the bottles. It is, simply, water.

But there is a powerful factor at work in how we perceive these thirst-slaking options. And that, ladies and gents, is called branding.

It's also one of the strongest, most pervasive forces in our everyday lives. Take a look in your cupboards or fridge; in your living room and medicine cabinet; in your driveway; on the desk at your office: Everything you bought, everything you eat, even the very newspaper in your hands has been touched by branding.

Branding -- how a consumer object has differentiated itself from its identical competitor -- is the reason you might drink Pepsi over Coke, lather up with Dial instead of Ivory, drive a Honda, not a Toyota. The choices you made from myriad options of nearly identical products is the product of successful branding.

"Branding is selling. Successful branding is selling," said Lynn Altman, a partner in Brandmaker Express, a Manhattan branding firm. "You can't have a product without the appeal designed into it. Branding is important because nine times out of 10 the marketplace is so overcrowded by pretty much the same product. You need the brand to pick one product instead of another. There are 700 brands of water. They all couldn't exist if there weren't multiple brands."

Branding is creating an identity, said Cynthia R. Cohen, a leading authority on branding. "Why is branding important? Because it works," said Cohen, founder of Strategic Mindshare, a retail strategy consulting firm. "There are so many choices for things. A brand helps communicate to people what it stands for. You put a brand on it and it tells me something about quality, if it's designed well, if it's hot. That's identity."

A brand is a connection, an instant identifier. The better the connection, the more powerful the brand. Or, as Twitchell would say: The better the story, the better the brand.

In his new book, Branded Nation: Selling Culture in America (due next year from Simon & Schuster) Twitchell, a prolific pop culture chronicler, has reduced the practice of branding to a simple, neat concept: storytelling.

"What branding really is, is a story attached to a product," he said. "When you have a product that's just like another product, there are any number of ways to compete. The stupid way is to lower your price. The smart way is to change the value of the product by telling a story about it."

Take a deep breath and let the professor explain. Branding, he said, is a modern phenomenon that is a direct result of the Industrial Revolution. Soon after technology allowed for mass production, branding had to inevitably enter the picture, he said. "Sooner or later the successful producer is going to start storytelling," Twitchell said. "We love the stories. We're all susceptible to the power of suggestion."

A modern example is bottled water. "We put it into a container. We say it's from a glacier. Or from a really deep well. Or that the French like it," he said. "If we get the story right, we can charge a buck fifty for a substance that is essentially free and comes out of your tap."