How does a brand become magnetic? Richard talks to Nir Wegzryn, founder and CEO of Brand Opus, about the elements that go into brands that are attractive to customers. Nir talks about brand attributions and associations - the one or two words that describe the brand, as well as the visuals that create the association. Implicit testing can help reveal the strengths and weaknesses of those attributions and associations, as well as provide a method to iterate their design to make a more magnetic brand!
Brandon Wehn (00:07):
Welcome to the show. This is Brandon Wehn and you're listening to the Understanding Consumer Neuroscience Podcast, brought to you by the folks at CloudArmy. In this episode, Richard talks to Nir Wegryzn, CEO and founder of Brand Opus, about brand magnetism and how implicit testing can strengthen the brand attributions and associations to make a brand more effective.
Richard Campbell (00:36):
Hi, this is Richard Campbell. Thanks for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience. Today, my guest is Nir Wegryzn, who is the founding partner and CEO of Brand Opus. So welcome to the show.
Nir Wegryzn (00:46):
Hello. Nice to have me.
Richard Campbell (00:49):
Great to have you here. And I find this idea of brand magnetism fascinating. How do you define that concept of being magnetic?
Nir Wegryzn (01:07):
A magnetic brand will be a brand that attracts onto itself its consumers, its inherent system of identity and values that have the ability to automatically and intuitively drag consumers towards it.
Richard Campbell (01:26):
Right.
Nir Wegryzn (01:27):
Hence, a magnetic brand is a lot more effective brand, is a brand that all the marketing is easier to work for it, everything works together and build together. So a magnetic brand is just like a magnet. It's a simple metaphor. It attracts to itself.
Richard Campbell (01:40):
Yeah. It pulls everything in towards it because it's so attractive. So what makes that brand attractive?
Nir Wegryzn (01:48):
To make a brand attractive, at the most simplistic level, it needs to have a coherent brand identity system. So it needs to have a meaning, a narrative on one hand, and it needs to have a visual structure on the other hand that work together. So it needs to have a narrative, meaning, story on one side, visual structure on the other side. Altogether, a brand identity system that is therefore able to attract people and connect all the touch points together.
Richard Campbell (02:13):
All right. So I mean, we can think of iconic brands like Coca-Cola and the others that have that colorway and a shape, like the pinched waist bottle is incredibly iconic.
Nir Wegryzn (02:25):
Yep. So we found that all the strong brands economically as well as culturally tend to have a very clear idea about who they are. Like one word is normally, maybe two sometimes. And then they will have one, two, or three, preferably three very strong visual assets. Like you've just said, Coca-Cola has got a cultural bottle, it's got a very clear logo type and it's got a very clear color and altogether extremely powerful presence.
Richard Campbell (02:57):
So multiple visual images, but one or two words?
Nir Wegryzn (03:01):
Yeah. That's fascinating. People have been busy for I think the last five, six, seven years in trying to define complex purposes for themselves and try to give themselves some kind of a mission of the corporation.
Richard Campbell (03:17):
I've read my share of mission statements, but I don't know that you put that in your marketing.
Nir Wegryzn (03:23):
Well, that's the problem that it confuses the marketing people. They're all of a sudden torn with multiple essences and purposes and missions and confuse the corporate with the brand as well, where the brand itself just needs to have a clear role in people's lives. I need to understand what do I use this brand for? Do I drink Coca-Cola for refreshment or do I drink it to help me save the world?
Richard Campbell (03:51):
Yeah. Settle the stomach. Something like that. But I appreciate the idea that mission statements are really for the employee. The attention span of the average consumer, not only are they not going to read it, they're certainly not going to spend the time to understand it. It's not that important to them.
Nir Wegryzn (04:05):
Well, there was a theory about six, seven years ago that consumers do show an interest in the corporate side of the business and they will not buy a brand who they don't share the value system with. I don't think that theory survived the reality of the situation. I think when you buy things in the supermarket, when you buy things in a bar or when you make choices on a digital scale, your decision-making process is very far from rational. It's intuitive.
Richard Campbell (04:35):
And we are talking about neuroscience here. We know how much of these decisions are automatic and implicit and then rationalized later.
Nir Wegryzn (04:43):
Yeah, post-rationalized. We make decisions and later on we should post-rationalize them, I think is the words of Daniel Kahneman. Yeah.
Richard Campbell (04:51):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Nir Wegryzn (04:54):
The [inaudible 00:04:54] not what we think it is.
Richard Campbell (04:55):
But it speaks to, you have to touch that subconscious mind, that implicit moment to be magnetic. You're magnetic at a subconscious level, which is nuts.
Nir Wegryzn (05:08):
Yeah. But that's the inevitable way of understanding how things function in the world, if you follow any of the cognitive neuroscience, because it's the way the brain processes.
Richard Campbell (05:19):
Yeah. And it has always been true.
Nir Wegryzn (05:22):
Always.
Richard Campbell (05:22):
Just I suspect more so now because attention is now so valuable and scarce.
Nir Wegryzn (05:27):
It highlights the importance of really understanding what's going on out there where people make decisions because they don't, they fall into an intuitive call. I think Carl Gustav Jung said that a hundred years ago. He said, you don't make decisions from your thinking.
Richard Campbell (05:44):
No.
Nir Wegryzn (05:45):
It's just impossible.
Richard Campbell (05:47):
It's not the way things work.
Nir Wegryzn (05:48):
You just can't do it. You've got the evaluative systems, you've got intuitive systems, and they make the decision for you. And I think that's why system one and system two is so important to understand.
Richard Campbell (06:00):
Sure.
Nir Wegryzn (06:01):
Actually both are really important. We heard about this again about 15 years ago, and then everything is about system one, quick, everybody makes quick decisions, but that's not what it says. It says that you've got very deep function, subconscious function where everything that you do is shaped by it and you need to understand the way in which you affect it or work with it. And long-term success relies on brands having the ability to relate to the subconscious of decisions.
Richard Campbell (06:35):
Yeah. That makes perfect sense to me. And I'm really enjoying this whole, the visual part versus the word. Because the word's about what the brand's about, and the visual piece is how we get to that word, that is the association piece that elicits that quick response. So how do you set a word for a brand? That seems profoundly challenging.
Nir Wegryzn (06:57):
It's that's what we do for a living kind of thing. So what you need to do is you need to understand the different type of motivations that people have in a particular category. So let's say if we talk about beers in Canada for example, or beers in any country. It's incredible that by the time you dive into it, there are going to be five, six, seven different motivations. There's not going to be a thousand motivations to drink a beer. Basically, I drink a beer for refreshment, or I drink a beer because I'm chatting to a friend or I'm buying a beer because I'm in a party or I'm buying a beer because I'm in a big sport event and I want to feel that I'm part of what's going on. I'll find another two if I try really hard, they will be part of that system. It's a party, it's a social occasion. It's high energy, social occasion, it's low energy social occasion by myself. That's it.
(07:50):
So a brand needs to understand, A, where all the competitors are, and they need to understand what you already are part of. And if you go back to the Canadian market, you'd see that something like Budweiser will be owning a space of social sporting events spaces. Whereas a brand like Coors Light, I know they're both American outside of the border area, and it'll be a lot more about refreshment and fun. And then when we try to find a space for Molson, you're through the testing, but through thinking you can see that the brand is a lot more to do with me and you going to have a drink in the pub, me and you are going to go outside to the barbecue and get some neighbors around and we're going to have a good afternoon. And that's where the brand belongs and that's what it owns.
Richard Campbell (08:36):
The social aspect versus the sporting aspect.
Nir Wegryzn (08:39):
Yeah. The small, the low level social aspect that you and I are having a drink together or me and my neighbors or there's a barbecue.
Richard Campbell (08:48):
Right. The backyard barbecue.
Nir Wegryzn (08:50):
Yeah. Backyard. That's the word. I knew there was a Canadian word for that.
Richard Campbell (08:54):
Oh wait, because you're in the UK, so it would be a garden for you.
Nir Wegryzn (08:57):
Garden party. Yeah. But I knew it wasn't it. I knew it was the garden party.
Richard Campbell (09:01):
Yes.
Nir Wegryzn (09:03):
So then you develop the brand. You look at the visual assets and you go, okay, if that's the territory I'm going to own, and this territory that I need to build on, then I need the advertising to reflect it. And I need the visual side. So you can see that over time we switched the Molson from owning a maple leaf, which is a generic symbol of Canada, which even [inaudible 00:09:23] is used.
Richard Campbell (09:23):
Made a whole flag around it.
Nir Wegryzn (09:25):
To a ownable asset that we actually found in the archives, this hexagon that was used. And Hexagon being a connecting brand is a perfect metaphor for connecting people. So we brought it up and then we enlarged it and then we brought Molson's signature to life because this is a person every Canadian know existed and was a fundamental cornerstone of Canadian ideas, ideas, values, and structures. So we brought his signature up, we created the hexagon, we developing hexagons. And as soon as the metaphor reflects the idea, the thing becomes so powerful. That's where the subconscious work with the marketeers as opposed to against it. So the brand is growing, it's doing well. And of course what the magnetism test allows us to do is to check those aspects to see how it works, to see whether it's improving.
Richard Campbell (10:17):
So you did some testing with this hexagon? How do you land on that?
Nir Wegryzn (10:22):
Oh, how do you land on it is a different thing. And then you go, oh, [inaudible 00:10:36]
Richard Campbell (10:35):
We call it brainstorming, right? And I appreciate you you founded it in the archive and the fact that hexagons, eons of bees can't be wrong. It's an important shape.
Nir Wegryzn (10:48):
Yeah. It's a natural connecting shape.
Richard Campbell (10:51):
Yeah.
Nir Wegryzn (10:52):
I don't know if Mr. Molson, all those 150 years ago when he put the original hexagon thought about it in that way or what his [inaudible 00:10:59]. But it doesn't matter.
Richard Campbell (10:59):
It doesn't matter.
Nir Wegryzn (11:01):
It is what it is.
Richard Campbell (11:01):
Yeah.
Nir Wegryzn (11:01):
It's a shape. And that shape will have a metaphoric value and then will be recognized in our brains as such. We can't do anything about it. It's just the way the brains work.
Richard Campbell (11:09):
So you find it.
Nir Wegryzn (11:10):
So we find it.
Richard Campbell (11:10):
Then you test it and it tests well.
Nir Wegryzn (11:12):
Yeah. So we created with CloudArmy a system which is both implicit in its nature. We don't ask rational questions.
Richard Campbell (11:20):
Right.
Nir Wegryzn (11:21):
And it's cognitive neuroscience developed. So it's all about timing and a way of working out those aspects of the brands and understanding whether those elements together separately add to and create this magnetic value that we are looking for. And it's very clear from the test that the idea of connecting people for Molson is very powerful. It's very clear that the metaphor works really well and then it's recognized, it's attributed to Molson, it's not mis-attributed, even though it's quite new.
Richard Campbell (11:58):
We believe as marketers, it's just going to take time for people to learn our brand. And you've got pretty good evidence here that that's not the case. That when it's the right word and the right visuals, it happens immediately.
Nir Wegryzn (12:09):
It just works. Yeah. Because we're not talking to the rational part of the brain. We're not trying to convince people that we arrive. We're not trying to explain things. We're not trying to make people understand anything. We're putting together structures that the brain recognize and words that belong to the category rather than try to fight in the category. So it works intuitively. It should either work or doesn't.
Richard Campbell (12:31):
But you found intuition in a hundred plus year old brand that wasn't there before and pulled it in and immediately the testing showed the difference and apparently now the market's showing the difference as well.
Nir Wegryzn (12:42):
Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think we discovered that in lots of brands that if you get the structure of the brand correctly. So we can talk about a brand called McCain, which I'm sure you are aware of.
Richard Campbell (12:56):
Frozen foods?
Nir Wegryzn (12:57):
Frozen foods. Yeah. It's Canadian, it's owned by a Canadian family and it's a global brand. It exists everywhere around the world. And we created a new symbol for McCain. We replaced the black box with a sunshine, and everybody thought it was complete madness. And when you showed it to consumer the first time around, people would go to a shelf that we put it on pretending it was always there, and they'll pick it up and they'll swear by their children that they bought that pack yesterday.
Richard Campbell (13:27):
Right.
Nir Wegryzn (13:28):
It's immediate. It's no-
Richard Campbell (13:31):
So it's so well-matched with their thinking, they didn't even think it had changed.
Nir Wegryzn (13:35):
Yes. It fitted their idea of what the brand is for them.
Richard Campbell (13:41):
Interesting.
Nir Wegryzn (13:42):
And the fact that the visual changed, they didn't even see it. They just immediately accepted. And obviously it functions a lot better when the visual agrees with the idea.
Richard Campbell (13:54):
You didn't just make that packaging and then put it on the shelf and hope for the best. You had done implicit testing around the whole thing and knew.
Nir Wegryzn (14:00):
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I think that was tested more than any other brand was ever tested around the world, I think. We actually ran a very, very strict implicit test on it ran by some Harvard professor to make sure that the neuroscience of it works, rather than just asking people what they think.
Richard Campbell (14:17):
Right. And still, you're dealing with these two pieces. You're dealing with, do you associate this with the brand and what do you attribute the brand to? So the visual versus the word.
Nir Wegryzn (14:26):
Yeah. And that's what makes the brand works. Whether there's a simple narrative that relates to why I buy this now or why I feed it to my children. And it's visualized in a pluralistic way, if you like, through metaphors that illustrates that narrative. And that's where the brand is powerful.
Richard Campbell (14:51):
Yeah. I'm thinking like, so the black background star is the new one. The old one was like a bird or something.
Nir Wegryzn (14:59):
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Richard Campbell (15:00):
Oh, the black is the old one. The sunrise is the new one.
Nir Wegryzn (15:05):
The sunrise. Now you're talking. Now you're talking. And the sunrise has got a family of birds flying through it.
Richard Campbell (15:12):
Cutting through it.
Nir Wegryzn (15:12):
So it's a happy family.
Richard Campbell (15:14):
Right. And it's family food, right? It's frozen french fries and the like.
Nir Wegryzn (15:19):
Putting families together.
Richard Campbell (15:21):
Yeah.
Nir Wegryzn (15:21):
Yeah. [inaudible 00:15:23].
Richard Campbell (15:23):
And yeah, I could see why people would not even realize that it changed. Just that it's better. That's the product.
Nir Wegryzn (15:30):
It fits your idea of why this is big.
Richard Campbell (15:33):
It's fantastic. Yeah. It's very interesting. So was there many iterations on that final design? Do you test a bunch of different things?
Nir Wegryzn (15:41):
Right. So for example, that one we had, I think, three... So the other tests that we'll do would be semiotic tests. So you put a bird on the pack, it immediately got semiotic power. It becomes a signifier and you have to code it. So you decode the bird that flies across the sunshine. Every country around the world will have a different interpretation of exactly what birds mean.
Richard Campbell (16:08):
Sure.
Nir Wegryzn (16:10):
And of course if the bird, for example, has got its head pointing too low, it becomes an aggressive hunting bird.
Richard Campbell (16:18):
Right. It's a raptor.
Nir Wegryzn (16:20):
Yeah. If the wings are too long, it becomes angelic. No, no. This is hedonism. We can't have angelic. So in fact that, you reiterate and reiterate and reiterate.
Richard Campbell (16:34):
Yeah, no kidding. What's the right bird?
Nir Wegryzn (16:37):
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, the right bird. And then you have to get the relationship between the birds to work correctly. Is it a family flying together or is it like random people going different places? And then you have to worry about the world that it's in, that you have to worry about... On the other hand, you have to worry about when you do such radical changes, you have to make sure the memory structure is not broken. So you have to understand what people see when they buy it before and make sure that that doesn't break when they move on. So it takes a lot of expertise, a lot of knowledge, and a lot of putting the right tests together. You don't ask people whether they like it or not.
Richard Campbell (17:12):
No. They'll just make happy noises. That's not going to help you.
Nir Wegryzn (17:15):
Oh lord, it doesn't matter. You need to see that the implicit responses are the correct responses, that the intuitiveness is not broken and you need to, not to research it, but to test it.
Richard Campbell (17:26):
Yeah. Because I mean the colorways were essentially the same. The old one was black background with yellow perimeter and that yellow star-like thing, the font is almost identical. They're both cursive. Although I think you moved the C down. Just these are subtle changes.
Nir Wegryzn (17:43):
Yes. Yeah. And nobody will ever see any of this.
Richard Campbell (17:46):
No.
Nir Wegryzn (17:47):
But you're right, the colors clicked, but it's the same colors.
Richard Campbell (17:48):
Yeah.
Nir Wegryzn (17:49):
And also, if you look carefully, you see that the bird is exactly where the star was. Usually nothing happens. You don't even know that it happened. I can tell you that around the world-
Richard Campbell (18:00):
Yeah. You're plugging into all the same mechanisms in the brain. Right? And even the shape of the bird as similar to the star, the set of lines. It's very clever, Nir. But again, I don't think you arrived at that all at once. It's like this was the one that worked the best. And in some ways you're able to rationalize it worked the best because it's the most like the old one as well.
Nir Wegryzn (18:21):
There were different variations on the theme. And it doesn't happen by itself. And you have to separate ideas from execution. It takes time to arrive at an idea. Then once the idea begins to work, then you got to really sharpen the pad and really execute it with precision and knowledge, because it's not an amateur game. You don't just feel like something and do it.
Richard Campbell (18:42):
No. And the danger here is what I just did, which was to pull up in Google images the McCain logo and see the old one and the refined new one side by side and you go, well obviously this is better. Where not seeing the work that's done in between.
Nir Wegryzn (18:58):
Yeah. Yeah. But consumers never see them. Yeah. Consumers never see them together. It's not a thing.
Richard Campbell (19:02):
No. It doesn't matter. And it certainly doesn't show how much effort went into all of that and that series of tests to get there. But that combination is really powerful to be able to plug into the old and still bring in the new and lend strength back to the brand.
Nir Wegryzn (19:18):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (19:19):
Are the approaches different when the brand is new, when you're really launching something from scratch?
Nir Wegryzn (19:24):
The same.
Richard Campbell (19:25):
Yeah?
Nir Wegryzn (19:26):
Same. You still have to have a clear idea about what you're here for and then you have to invent a new metaphor.
Richard Campbell (19:37):
Right. Find a new word.
Nir Wegryzn (19:38):
You have to invent [inaudible 00:19:40]. So that's a different exercise in the sense that it's very iterative. You have to think of quite a lot of options and then you have to marry them and then you have to test them. And it's a different process. But yeah. But you have to adapt again with a story and a visual that works together to give me this.
Richard Campbell (19:57):
Can you end up with only one? Do you have a visual that people can relate to but don't necessarily have an association with a word?
Nir Wegryzn (20:04):
You can, but that makes it weaker.
Richard Campbell (20:05):
Right. I mean, I know you need both. I'm just wondering if you get to a place where you have to fix one or the other.
Nir Wegryzn (20:12):
Yeah. Yeah. It happens. It happens. Yeah, for sure. That's normally what happens is that either the visual is not strong enough or the narrative is doing something slightly different or it keeps changing because you'll have another advertising campaign every two years and advertising will come up with a new propositions, which are perhaps relevant at the moment, but they're not anchored in the identity system of your brand. And eventually if you change too many campaigns and campaigns tend to be also a lot to do with the trend of the moment, whereas the brand identity system can't, it needs to be outside of that.
Richard Campbell (20:51):
It needs to be more stable than that.
Nir Wegryzn (20:52):
Yeah. It needs to be something that stays coherently to be... Otherwise, you don't become a thing with identity. You become something that flows through the wind.
Richard Campbell (21:01):
Right.
Nir Wegryzn (21:02):
And many brands are obviously guilty of that.
Richard Campbell (21:04):
Well, pop culture is powerful. Right? And you think you could ride the wave of today, but there'll be a new wave tomorrow. And then where are you?
Nir Wegryzn (21:11):
Oh, and examples galore.
Richard Campbell (21:13):
Yeah. That's an easy one.
Nir Wegryzn (21:15):
They come and go. Yeah.
Richard Campbell (21:16):
How does scale play into this? Do you have to be a certain size or what does it even mean in terms of magnetism?
Nir Wegryzn (21:23):
Now that's a good question. And scale obviously helps.
Richard Campbell (21:25):
I mean, Coca-Cola has an advantage of being a worldwide brand and so forth, but I know some great nichey brands too. It doesn't have to be massive.
Nir Wegryzn (21:33):
No, it doesn't have to be massive. And the niche brand launches, and if it's structured well, it will have an impact immediately. Coca-Cola gets eroded by the day by so many... Well, look at Prime, which is a badly structured brand, which will disappear, but I think it was almost the biggest in the world at some point.
Richard Campbell (21:52):
Yeah. Incredibly massive. But once upon a time it was about free shipping. Now what's it about?
Nir Wegryzn (21:55):
Because it anchored itself in a person. It's in a current moment and a current story and the stories move on, and the brand, for it to become a proper long-term competitor, it needs to have a deeper anchor and it needs to be metaphored in some visual, none of which happened on that bottle. So it can't stay forever.
Richard Campbell (22:24):
Yeah. It's a fascinating problem. So it feels to me like you work really closely with CloudArmy to evaluate all this so that you're coming up with the ideas and finding these things and then leaning to CloudArmy to do the testing.
Nir Wegryzn (22:37):
They have to do the testing. Yeah. We're not a research agency there. We identify the category. Either a client wants to run a test or we... And we will structure it so that they can... They run a test, we don't run a test. They do all that process, and the-
Richard Campbell (22:57):
And then take the feedback. And from that you go back to brainstorming on how do we get better results than this?
Nir Wegryzn (23:02):
Yeah. And we will see it and analyze what we got, analyze the category function, analyze the way the different brands own things, and which elements are onable, not onable, mis-attribution, not mis-attribution. So you identify elements which are mis-attributed to other brands and you start a program of getting rid of them and you recognize weaker elements, so you have to strengthen them. And it's a fascinating process.
Richard Campbell (23:29):
Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, an iterative process. I love the idea that you get a set of measurements around association of a brand and then you work to change them or to better define them and then measure again and see that you've succeeded.
Nir Wegryzn (23:43):
Yeah. And it turns the brand from a guessing game and relying on viewpoints of some consumers to a program of quite clear progress into a very much more coherent space where you have a visual structure, you have a narrative structure, and it's developing to become a stronger and stronger magnetic brand.
Richard Campbell (24:07):
Stronger over time. Not just that campaign work, this campaign didn't, but that there's a gradual iteration towards a very strong brand.
Nir Wegryzn (24:15):
And we will have a viewpoint, even though the campaigns, we'll say, "Guys, you can't have campaigns outside of that entity structure. I can't have structured the brand around connection, and you're doing campaigns about, I don't know, wild parties. It doesn't work."
Richard Campbell (24:27):
Right. But in some ways it gives us a box to work in that's easier to live with. Now you know roughly where you're going to go for each of those campaigns.
Nir Wegryzn (24:47):
Yeah. And in this day and age where marketing dollars are difficult to come by, budgets are shrinking, I think, the idea that there's a way of getting more effect out of the marketing dollar spent is very attractive.
Richard Campbell (25:02):
Yeah. Do some good measuring first before you go do the big spend on the marketing campaign so that you can have some ascertained results.
Nir Wegryzn (25:09):
Yeah. Make sure it all works in the same direction, I think, is what we'll say.
Richard Campbell (25:13):
I think that's a great place to leave this. In the end, it's about using the science of this to make sure you're going to get results when the campaign flies.
Nir Wegryzn (25:19):
Yeah. It's an interesting way of combining science and creativity, actually. It's fascinating. Because on one hand you've got this very strict science of, I mean the strict science in the sense of real science, it's cognitive neuroscience, it's implicit, it's not asking random questions. And on the other hand, you've got this creativity that comes from lower about, here's a visual that doesn't metaphor. So this idea of visuals, metaphors, creating a language that works, but strictly testing it.
Richard Campbell (25:47):
Yeah. And then strictly testing it to say that it does resonate with all of the elements that matter and we're stronger for this.
Nir Wegryzn (25:53):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (25:54):
Nir, this is really a fun conversation. I am thinking differently about how I would approach a brand now. I appreciate that.
Nir Wegryzn (26:00):
Very good.
Richard Campbell (26:01):
Yes. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Nir Wegryzn (26:03):
It's a pleasure.
Richard Campbell (26:03):
And we'll talk to you next time on Understanding Consumer Neuroscience.