GIRVIN’s Strategic and anthropological brand research in global enterprise, personality, and profile testing.
What is the line that moves towards marketing to the psychic space of a person? How do you find the heart of a relationship? Brand to person? Person as brand to community?
During the course of GIRVIN’s strategic design and consulting practice, over the passage of the last five decades, a focus on deepening relationships to community understanding and marketing has been an ongoing experiment. It doesn’t stop. Learnings continuously emerge. From early work in exploring interceptions with single people — to groups: building in-store testing models for Procter & Gamble, to in-home, consumer brand strategy and learning sessions — focused studies and organized group programs, the methods are continuously customized and crafted .
But the idea of getting closer, getting to a space that might seem an even more intimate is an emerging postulate. What method of narrative exploration could added for consideration?
Working with the marketing and testing team of P&G’s haircare group, Girvin created a series of modeling and interception programs for not only analyzing the brands in competitive play, but as well imagery building sessions and brand expression explorations—the personality of the brand being built for—and aligned with—the consumer.
Studying the competition, and framing their archetypes—as persona exemplars—inside their marketing initiatives, we examined matrices of brands to their audiences, and the play between them.
These analyses was built on P&G’s group development programming—now owned by Wella / KKR, working closely with consumers in sorting and building brand framing and personality, literally customized and created on the premise—and the promise—of brand relationships. This was not only with “beauty junkies”, women who preferred to, daily, change-up their look, but as well as stylists and salon owners, given the professional positioning of the product.
This modeling—customer interceptions—and perceptions, was built on our scientific brand work, set as degrees of categorization. In technology branding, we used the same techniques, studying persona and premise, personality and positioning, and what we call brand sphering.
The psychic dimensions of branding isn’t new for you, I’d imagine, nor for us, over the last 30 years of customer relationships and brand-marketing. I first engaged in the notion of interplaying psychological dimensions in brand work in team-based engagements, working the crowd cloudmind, the cumularity of ideas—BrandQuest® and soul summit encounters and explorations.
Studying new ideations and personality, with working sessions and interceptions, in-market interviews with Heublein|Grand Metropolitan Smirnoff [now Diageo—what legacy, moving forward? Back then, it was our learning, team studies, towards retaining legacy, and rolling out a tightened evolution, that was psychically motivated in consumer results. People recalled and admired the distinctive historical and complicated nature of its labeling and identity package.
Listening to consumers, examining the surge in the trend of cocooning—exploring and partnering with Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve, and consulting strategic shifts of population trending—we balanced legacy strategy aligned with measuring brand heritage and consumer resonance. Then, classicism was relevant to customers, as a first-in-class, globally-recognized, premier brand, home-based savored experience. Where things were, use and consumption-patterning, they are remembered.
Smirnoff was created in the latter 1800s—and, post-October Revolution in the early 1900s, was introduced in the US in the 1930s by the Heublein family, and in the late 90s, was evolved, tested and redesigned by GIRVIN’s teams—along with brand leadership by Heublein CMO Martin Pazzani. But that goes on, continues its move to modernism—the consumer relationships continue to shift. We worked earlier.
Archetypal perceptions: a person, a human brand—an approach in working with a single human being is about building a brand strategy that is nearly genetic—finding the heart of the person, brand visioning, understanding the DNA of their propositioning to market. What circle springs round them? What radiant strategy emerges?
Working with Miami entrepreneur Marta Montenegro, athlete, nutritional counselor, training expert and founder of SoBeFit, a magazine she created during that time period with her partner, Enrique Auvert. She was working with us in the building of a brand around her relationship to the magazine, as well as formulating added dimensionality, we explored the essential characteristics of her leadership and the personality sorting and textual profiling to deepen the impressions of Marta’s spirit and foundational characteristics.
The personality lies in the deeper psychic space of the brand founder, inspirations and inventions and leads to an overview of the archetype, which sustains authenticity in the positioning of the brand, and the persona of visioning. Presuming the power of the leadership at the center of the brand, exploring personal links even reaching into psychic space is compelling. And frequently defined as a reality in alignment — what the soul knows, the psyche portends, personality reveals, leadership contains, teams resonate, relationships absorb.
That ranged from explorations that ranged from the psychic, deep personal metaphors and revelations, as well as her own writing and her team stakeholders.
Branding people is a practice that links to the very heart of GIRVIN work. Brands are made by people.
Is it possible that the research might reach to spaces that could be identified as more emotionally motivated in character—the holding point of memory and perception. We’ve been there, walking into brands, their leaders, the sparking point of ignition, initiation and inspiration—that process is exploratory, evolving, newly treading. It keeps evolving, formulating to new presentation of challenges and circumstance.
Understanding the audience is about creating new experimental prototypes for market trending, focus testing—virtual environments, immersions, live-in testing—and most crucially, listening.
This range of study and consideration of the person, in relation to the brand has varying touchpoints to relevance.
• Brands are inherently relationships that are either solely functional—commodity-based (like, for reference, pricing alone)—or emotionally-founded. Intimacy will relate to the emotional link—not the positioning of pricing. Pricing relationships are inherently soluble—they will dissolve, as other pricing breaks the mold of relationship.
• The concept of community in connection to enterprise requires a reach into some level of reactive understanding. What is the way in which a guest, user, consumer, community member psychically connects with a proposition of value? “Wow, this was made for me.”
• What is the method by which these relationships could be expressed? Textual exploration? Imagery? Metaphorical examinations?
More:
In examining the hidden subconscious and mythic dimensionality of experience, the person that could be the heart-full persona of the brand itself, we used that archetypal mapping as a forum in finding — within the leadership committee of the client relationship — the spirit that drives the essential characteristic of the enterprise.
Working for CEO Steve Ritchey and the leadership / creative team at Unionbay—a northwest-founded clothing group, selling nationally and in play for decades. To emotionally connect with its current, newly emerging audience, Unionbay underwent a brand metamorphosis and renewal. The Girvin team led the transformation that far superseded the usual pursuit of merely changing a thematic look and delved deeper by exploring the emotional connection between the brand and its audience.
As myth-finders, the very mystery of Unionbay’s brand psyche was probed. The result: Unionbay gets a new look a new feel a new psyche and a new home. The creation of the new Unionbay website utilized an analysis of Jungian archetypes to show Unionbay’s distinct place among other apparel brands . Girvin incorporated the work of the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung into their BrandQuest® process during strategic sessions that helped Unionbay further its commitment to being a dominant player in the marketplace as a teenage brand. That exploration, the proprietary brandstorming process of kickstarting strategic sessions, and the outcomes of the genetic threading of the BrandCode® in its text and visualizations, to create the new website. These processes involved a Jungian study of all of the basic characters that are essential to the human psyche and linked them to new ways of thinking about the Unionbay brand personality.
The concept of examining the archetype as a modeling for reaching to the psychic place of brand registry is merely one exploration for relationship and context discovery. Another path relates to the pursuit of finding the global persistent persona of international brands.
Would it be possible to engineer a global testing paradigm, and use this approach as a way to understand the conditioning of world [brand] minds?
Working in the Jungian construct of Myers Briggs | Keirsey Bates prototypical personality profiling, we (The Fluke Brand Evolutions Team) explored a global testing of users of Fluke technology.
The idea behind this investigative positioning was to ascertain a sense of alignment in characteristics of users. The profiling is based on Jungian precepts of deeply analyzing the psychic qualities of people that utilized the tools. Certain patterns emerged, for two types of users that represented two paths of technology.
The testing could be summarized in one categorical review, for hand held measurement devices, the testing created a result in the nature of the Artisan.
An exemplar, can-do attitude might be positioned in a quotation like: “Let’s light this candle.” as voiced by Alan Shepard (Crafter Artisan) He expressed this just before his liftoff into space.
The other, to more sophisticated equipment testing tools is the Rational. A focus on resolution of outcomes through knowledge, is exemplified in the positioning of a phrasing like “Error of opinion maybe tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Thomas Jefferson (Architect Rational).
The positioning of these elements, particularly in the framing of the larger audience lead to an entire worldwide visualization effort, working with dozens of countries. Bright colors, bold illustration of action, striking visualizations, powerful simple text and messaging — a “no instruction kit” kind of mentality, get it done kind of approach.
I wonder if we can get this imagery larger?
The other systems of messaging and collateral, for the more scientifically-persuaded personality profiles were cooler palettes, more complex messaging and illustratively detailed renderings of hardware and workers in action—bent to a persuasion of accomplishment in more complex resolution of testing challenges. Psychic branding, might be the positioning, from the analyses—a deeper reach—into the character of brand, the enterprise and the community it serves.
There are other forms of placement, in connecting with consumer relationships as in on-floor, retail and merchandising.
Aside from home meetings, and other connections in nearly domestic or working circumstances. In our explorations of brand experience design, for the branded creation of spa product innovations and new product development, that focus has lent anything from built testing and interception environments:
Or even examining a kind of combined “walk-through” shopping experience, as envisioned in this digital three-dimensional digital environment for exploration and examination of consumer attention—as well as marketing intention—in a computer graphics retail sense of sales place, shown below:
Alternate examinations of deeper space brand allegories and archetypal symbologies—and manifesting them as expressions of place-making—retail merchandising presentations that relate to concepts of, in this instance, adding increased feminization of sales constructs:
The summary might be that there are many levels of testing, brands, stories, propositions, but the premise for GIRVIN’s explorations—the nature of our creative engagements, soul work and enterprise query in BrandQuest® — is about what lies beneath, the deeper metaphors of experience, memory, sensuality and sentient embracement.
We go there.
tsg
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Brands | love | humans
Tim
Co-create. Collaborate. Connect.
GIRVIN | Strategic Brands
Design for Hollywood | GIRVIN Digital
Built Environments by OSEAN
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