"Brand" is a highly misunderstood term in marketing, rivaled only by pseudoverb "branding." Smart marketers on the whole should avoid these terms, unless like Dan Herman, they are willing to help us understand them better.

Even experienced marketing experts can benefit from Dan’s penetrating analysis of brand-building in his paper at MarketingProfs: Ten Ways to Create Brand Value (registration required).

First, why "gluing" emotional associations onto a product doesn’t work:

Consumers are purposeful when trying to achieve experiential, emotional, psychological, interpersonal and social goals/benefits, just as they are when trying to achieve more tangible goals. Brands with added value are usually means for consumers to achieve such goals. They are instrumental, although this is a psychological or a social instrumentality. A brand without a convincing usage scenario is actually not a brand. It may appear to be a brand. It might have widely recognized name, logo, visual identity and advertising style, but consumers will not desire it because it is useless.

Then he shares ten distinct tactics for adding value to a product or service so that it becomes a brand with emotional pull for the user. I’ve paraphrased these to fit the way I see I can use them, but you’ve got to read it yourself to see how USEFUL Herman’s ideas are. I feel like I just got a new toolbox full of cool tools.

1. Link to a tangible benefit (the original idea behind building brands)

2. Form a mental context

3. Direct an experience

4. Facilitate self-expression

5. Help deliver a message

6. Build cultural authority

7. Help achieve altruistic goals

8. Provide an alter ego

9. Build an emotional gym

10. Facilitate fantasies