It’s hard to regard the success of the Red Bull brand as anything less than astonishing. They took a workers’ energy drink from Thailand and turned it into one of the biggest brands in the world.

Not bad for a product that market research taste testing concluded was amongst the worst it had ever presented to respondents.

Red Bull realised that taste is not the point. Put the right associations around a product and that determines, to a large extent, how we will experience it when we drink it.

We’ve seen studies that show how people’s brains respond differently to the same product at different prices: increase the price and the reward centres of people’s brains will light up more in fMRI scans.

In Consumer.ology I wrote about a study by researchers at Duke University who subliminally exposed people to brand logos. They flashed logos for Apple, IBM, Disney and the E! Channel (a US television channel that focuses on salacious celebrity gossip) more quickly than people could notice consciously whilst they were focused on other tasks.

They discovered that people who had seen the Apple brand performed with greater creativity on a subsequent task than those who’d seen IBM’s logo, and that people who had been exposed to the Disney brand were much more honest in subsequent tests than those that had seen the E! Channel’s logo.

Given that we’re surrounded by brands these influences are a fundamental part of our world. Of course, we get to add our own influence to this influence by choosing what brands we buy or what media we watch: a virtuous or vicious cycle of brand influence!

This week further research on the impact brands have on our behaviour was published, this time looking at drink brands.

People were given a car racing video game to play and, although they didn’t know it, were assigned one of four cars. All performed in exactly the same way in the game, they had the same speed and handling characteristics, but four different brand decorations were used: Red Bull, Guinness, Tropicana and Coca Cola.

People in the Red Bull branded car were found to drive much more aggressively. This meant they either did very well in the racing game, or else pushed too hard and crashed out.

What’s interesting to me is not that this influence exists (it reflects the way our unconscious minds work by association) but that certain brands have managed to position themselves with such powerful consistency that they induce such consistent effects.

How many brand owners could be confident that they had executed their marketing with this level of consistency? The researchers selected brands like Apple, Red Bull, Disney and E! because they recognised, probably intuitively, that they were powerfully and consistently communicated propositions.

In my view brands of all sizes would do well to consider how it is that such businesses achieve this brand clarity. Sometimes organisations ask me to look at a new initiative with consumers and explore whether it fits with their brand: this is a clear sign that they don’t understand the single-minded focus that a brand-owner must have to be successful.

One key aspect of this is approach is working out what exactly your brand should be at the outset and then having the conviction to stick with it. This is easier if you’re clear about which fundamental psychological desires your brand is targeting.

Whether we like it or not, when brand owners get it right, when they communicate a clear proposition, they create imagery that has the power to change how we behave at a level outside of our own conscious awareness. I’ll leave you to consider the morality of this situation.

Sources: Consumer.ology  / Duke University (2008) Logo can make you “think different,” ScienceDaily, March 30.
S. Adam Brasel, James Gips.Red Bull ‘Gives You Wings’ for better or worse: A double-edged impact of brand exposure on consumer performance.Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2010; DOI:10.1016/j.jcps.2010.09.008