[Podcast] Brand Associations & Why Most Brands Are Forgotten with Ulli Appelbaum

Brand builders spend a lot of time thinking about logos, messaging, campaigns and creativity, but ultimately, brands live in the mind.

The real question is not just what your brand says.

It is what people remember, what they associate with you, and how those mental links influence choice when it matters.

In this episode of JUST Branding, we’re joined by Ulli Appelbaum, globally respected brand strategist, founder of First The Trousers, and author of The Science of Brand Associations.

Ulli has spent years helping organisations understand how brands grow by shaping the associations people hold in memory. In this conversation, we unpack one of the most important and often misunderstood areas of branding: how associations are formed, strengthened, measured, and used to drive real business growth.

We explore why some brands own clear memory structures while others remain vague, how emotion and storytelling help build associations, and what marketers often get wrong about consistency, distinctiveness, and meaning.

If you want to build a brand that is easier to notice, easier to remember, and easier to choose, this episode will give you a practical look at the science behind brand growth.

In this episode, we discuss:

What brand associations are and why they matter
How associations form in people’s minds
Why memory is central to brand growth
The link between distinctiveness, meaning, and choice
How emotion and storytelling shape brand memory
Why consistency is often misunderstood
What smaller brands can do to build stronger associations
What marketers should measure beyond awareness
The habits that separate strong brand builders from weak ones

A sharp, practical conversation on what really makes brands stick.

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Transcript

Hi folks, and welcome to this exciting episode of the JUST Branding Podcast. Today, we have Ulli Appelbaum with us. Brand builders spend a lot of their time thinking about logos, we think about messaging, we think about campaigns, we think a lot about creativity and design and copywriting and that good stuff. But ultimately, as all listeners to this show will know, brands are not just about those things, brands ultimately live in the mind of the beholder. So, the real question sitting behind all of the activities that we might go about in terms of brand building is this, what associations, what ideas, what concepts do our audiences attach to us, associate with us and the brands that we’re building, which ultimately, hopefully, if we do our job right, drive choice. So, that’s what today’s conversation is going to be all about because we have, as I say, we’ve got Ulli with us, once again, if you recognize Ulli, he was with us a few years ago now, Jacob, right? In season 3, episode 18, he is a globally respected brand strategist, founder of First The Trousers and author of the new book, which we’re going to be tucking into in a minute, The Science of Brand Associations. If you don’t follow Ulli, definitely get on LinkedIn, get on the channels and do that and we’ll give you some of those details in a moment. He spent years helping organizations understand how brands grow by shaping the associations people hold in memory and how those mental links influence behavior in the real world. We’re going to be getting into brand associations, but before we do that, welcome once again, Ulli, to the show.

Thanks so much for having me guys. Pleasure to be on your show again. Really appreciate that.

Amazing. We’ve got your beautiful book here, The Science of Brand Associations. It’s a super easy but very practical guide to leverage the idea of brand associations as a tool with a lot of evidence-backed thinking behind it. But before we get into that, what drew you to write a book on it? What drew you to that area of brand building particularly?

Well, the great question because at the core, it’s really everyone speaks about brand association. When I mean everyone, I mean academics, marketing thought leaders, research or global research organizations. But when I dove deeper into it, I realized that no one had ever written a book about brand associations. So first I thought, well, it’s really not worth wasting my time on it because no one wasted their time on it. But then I dove a bit deeper and started to realize that it’s really at the core of what brands are. Now, brand association is simply a term for brand memories. The reason is simply if you build a brand, all you really got to try to do is for people to notice you and remember you. And not only remember you, but remember you with the right type of meaning. So I want to buy a barbecue grill. What brands come to mind? Oh, Weber. What comes to mind is like high quality, long lasting, all the things I’m interested in. The Weber comes to mind automatically. These are the brand associations. Now you may have another, let’s say, you know, call another brand of barbecue grill. Let’s call it Ossie Delight. I don’t know. Have you ever heard about a brand called Ossie Delight? I haven’t. Jacob, have you? You haven’t either, right? So we don’t know the brand, no awareness and no meaning or no association. So why would I buy, you know, Ossie Delight as a barbecue? There is absolutely no reason. So this is what brand associations are. It’s really what you connect the memories you have about a specific offering. Obviously, at the job as a marketer is to create positive memories and more memories that influence a behavior. And that’s really what the brand associations are. It’s really the building and the management of consumer memories about specific offering and the meaning associated to that. So that’s really what brand associations are.

So, if I was to ask a basic question just to help people get their heads around this, why would brand associations be fundamental for a brand builder to understand the science behind which is what your book is around?

So, when I dove into the subject, I was surprised on one hand how much science there is about memory forming and formation, and I’ve been researching that for the last 50 years, but also a lot of how much data there is from marketing science, from large organization like Ipsos or Kantar or the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and all these big organizations, on the value and benefit of brand associations. Now, the data is really mindful. There’s a whole chapter dedicated in my book on that, but the immediate one is what the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls mental availability. If I’m in a moment of choice, the first brand that comes to mind is the brand that I’m going to choose most likely. Well, the first brand that comes to minds is the brand with the strongest and most leading brand associations. That’s really what it is. Coming back to my Australian delight, there is no association. If you were thinking about a barbecue, you’re never going to think about that brand and you’re never going to even look up that brand. And then when you look at, Kantar has done a lot of research on the power of strong brand associations and its sources as well. And what this show is, the stronger the network, there’s a clear correlation between the strength of an association network and the size of a brand in a market. The bigger the brand, the stronger the association network. So there’s not necessarily a causation, but there is a link between the two. What you also see is that brands with strong association networks tend to command higher price premiums. You justify higher price premiums for brands that have these strong networks of associations and so on and so on and so on. I mean, when you go through the list of factual benefits of strong brand associations, you’re like, OK, why haven’t I thought about it before? And one thing I need to highlight, Matt, is really the book is really a curation of best in science and best in marketing science on memory formation and brand association. So it’s not so much my interpretation or Ulli’s view on branding worldwide. It’s really, what do we know? What is the data telling us? What is the science telling us about brand association and brand association formation?

Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. Well, one of the things that struck me was this chapter that you had on, well, section in your introduction, you talked about that this was a proven secret hiding in plain sight. So that’d be quite interesting to just sort of discuss a little bit because, as you say, there’s a lot of evidence-backed thinking behind these things. We’ve had Mark Ritson on the show and I think Jacob, you’ve done his mini MBA, I have as well, and you reference it in the book that he leverages this. Ehrenberg Bass, you know, Byron Sharp, even going right back to, I think you mentioned, there’s a classic book by Kevin Lane Keller, isn’t there? In Strategic Brand Management, sort of 35, 36 years ago, this was referenced. So it’s there. Why do you think that the brand builders, I guess, haven’t started to leverage that until perhaps quite, and even if we’d say until recent times, we’re not really leveraging it, let’s be honest, fully now. We’ve sort of got it in those academic circles. But why is it that we struggle to get some of these ideas that are proven out into the open and into the discipline, do you think?

That is a great question to which I wish I had an answer. But it’s simple, right? Because I didn’t need to explain to you, you’ve heard the term brand association, right? I didn’t need to explain it to you. It’s something that is familiar. Every marketeer has heard about it. And the data and the science has always been there. But I don’t know if it’s the industry need to focus on shortcuts. It’s like I’m not interested on how things work. I want to know how I can deliver a result faster, easier, with less effort. It’s like when you think about the Herrenberg-Bass Institute and how brand grows, the book has been in the market for over 10 years now. Why is it owned? I’m not agreeing with all of them, but I’m agreeing with 80% of them that are data-driven, science-driven and proven principles on what makes brand grow successfully. Why is it only now becoming successful? I wish I knew. I think there are a lot of storytellers, great storytellers in the world of marketing. So a couple of months ago, I did this exercise. I asked the most big AI platforms. I gave them a list of 20 popular books, marketing books, and asked them to organize them based on are they data-driven and science-driven and are they applicable to the marketing world? And what’s interesting is I wanted to see how much is BS and how much is actually fact-driven. And what’s interesting is literally 90% of the books fall in the category of, I don’t want to say, if I’d be mean, I’d say made up shit. If I’m more pragmatic, it’s great storytelling, because those are philosophies that are being shared, that sounds very convincing, that use case studies to retrofit the principles, but that effectively have no evidence in market reality or business reality. The biggest example I can think of, it’s one of my favorite book to hate, is Why by Simon Sinek. There is no evidence behind it. There is literally no evidence behind it, and scientific evidence behind the book. Yet, it was one of the most successful books of the last 10 years. Fantastic storytelling skills, which I don’t have, so I have to rely on the facts. People’s desire to look for shortcuts. I’m not sure, to be honest. If one of your listeners has a better explanation, by all means, share it with me, because I’m trying to find the secret of what’s behind that.

I guess it’s also quite hard, isn’t it? You might even understand the principle, but it’s actually quite hard to do. So let’s talk a little bit about that. So we’ve talked about what brand associations are, the ideas that people attach to a brand. That’s my sort of very novice-like summary of it, but that’s what it is simply.

No, that’s what it is.

But let’s talk about how those ideas are framed in people’s minds, right? Because ultimately, we’re trying to influence that as brand-builders in a positive way, like you said before. So how do we form an association as a consumer about a brand?

Well, actually, when you think about it, it’s actually very simple. That’s the part that scared me. It’s like once you think about it in those terms or in those memories, it becomes very easy to see what contributes to a strong memory or not, right? So first of all, it needs to be something that is important to you. It sounds dumb, right? But if you get, I’m sure you get exposed to 200,000 pieces of information every day that are meaningless to you, that are not important to the way you see yourself, what you do, et cetera, et cetera, and they just disappear in the ether. You don’t memorize them, you don’t remember them. But there’s something that stands out to you because it’s relevant, because it taps into, you have a kid that is sick all of a sudden, that’s a piece of information that is relevant to me because you offer me a solution for that specific problem. So that’s number one, it needs to be personal. Number two, what we know, it’s the science of learning, right, is any form of emotional involvement strengthen the memory you will have about something. So if you are emotionally engaged, you learn faster and better and memorize better and longer than if you are not emotionally involved. And that’s where things like storytelling come into place, right? Storytelling is a great way to help people to memorize things stronger. And again, all these principles I’m mentioning are supported or identified in science on what makes memory strong and what allows you to recall memory faster. Repetition is another one, right? Right now in the world of marketing, there’s a lot of discussion around consistency. You know, advertising campaigns don’t wear off as quickly. You got to run them for a longer time, especially if they’re proven successful. Why? Because repetitions, that’s really what it is. It’s like you repeat your message and you get bored by it, right? I get bored by my messages. But the reality is most consumers don’t get to see your brand once, second every month in their life. And so consistency and repetition is a key element. So those are different principles that are proven and that are boiled down into a scorecard basically, which basically gives you like six or seven questions to help you understand is the way I position my brand or the associations I want to build around my brand. Are they going to be strong and are they going to be successful based on the scientific principle? And the weird thing is once you know those principles, and what I’ve mentioned to you, it’s not rocket science, right? Nothing, I hope, that I told you surprised you. It needs to be story telling. It needs to be emotionally engaging. It needs to be relevant, personally relevant. It needs to be repetitive. None of that is sort of like a new piece of information, right? But if you combine all these things and you look at your brand through that lens, all of a sudden you’re like, my god, it’s actually fairly straightforward and simple to poke holes in poor strategies or poor positioning statements, because you know what six criteria to look at. It’s almost like finding how simple it becomes once you get it.

So Ulli, let’s get a bit specific here, right? Like give listeners a bit of a flavor for, well, I guess the type of associations they should be focused on and then maybe some of those questions that you mentioned that will help them assess. You don’t have to give all of them because they’re in the book, right, folks? You’ve got to get the book. But just give us a flavor, like one or two, so that folks can kind of understand the thinking.

When I wrote the book, I went through this discovery myself. I learned through science. I learned all this data from these different companies and stuff like that. And I went through this journey myself, which then made me realize, oh my God, if I look at a brand from that specific angle, I’m sharper in my thinking. But going through those learnings, ultimately realized how many issues there are in the world of branding. So the first one, it sounds ridiculous, right? But it’s literally, what category are you actually playing in? Now, this sounds like an obvious one. And I thought, you know, do I really need to write about this? Because, you know, you think it’s obvious. But then I encounter so many brands and frankly, so many clients that are not sure exactly what they’re playing in. So it’s easy in the B2B world, right? Because you see advertising, where you don’t know what the guys are offering to you. But I see that also in packaged good brands. It’s like, you know, is your brand a juice? Or is your brand a refreshing drink? Or is your brand an energy drink? Or is your brand all three? But then what category does it fall in? And it sounds ridiculous, right? But for a consumer to remember you, it needs to know what you are. Would you say, if I say, for example, you know, think about all the brands of fruit juice that are out there. Would you think about Red Bull? No, absolutely not, because Red Bull for you is an energy drink. You know, but I’m surprised by the amount of brands that are not clearly in a easy to recognize bucket for consumers when they think about them. So it literally starts with that. The other one is really, why are you, Matt, and you, Jacob, buying something? You know, what are the core drivers? And what I’ve learned through my career is that the worst question you can ask, the worst thing you can tell in the context of managing a brand is, this is a category, this is a cost of entry. A fruit juice needs to taste good. I don’t need to speak about that. It’s like, no, consumers buy fruit juices because they taste good. So you need to be the brand that is associated with the best taste. You know, basics like that. And that’s what I said, it becomes so essential and so basic. It’s almost like childish when you think about it in terms of managing a brand. Then you have, you know, you know that people will remember things if there is an emotional engagement. So a simple question is out of your brand, what is the emotional response you want to elicit with your customers? Because you need to elicit an emotional response. What is it? And again, you think that’s a simple question. It’s like, yeah, but the answer to that question is kind of challenging, but you need to have that answer if you really want to succeed. And you’d be surprised on how many brands. I don’t know if it’s a global phenomenon. I think it’s a US phenomenon, which is very rational in its marketing, very selling, the selling point driven in the marketing. But the question is, what’s the emotional reaction? Why should I connect emotionally with your offering? And so on and so on and so on. And as I said, it’s really not rocket science. But once you have an awareness of this list of questions, you become more focused, you become sharper in your thinking, if that makes any sense, because you know what questions to ask and you know what questions to ignore. Maybe I’m just getting too old and focusing on the basics and the essentials as I’m getting older. That could be true, but that’s one of the benefits I got out of writing the book, actually.

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s funny, because I often observe as I work with clients as a consultant, and I often observe the phenomena, which is that within companies, when you get a lot of people involved, particularly over long stretches of time, we as human beings, we like to complicate things for many reasons. The biggest reason and the most concerning reason that I see is that often, we like to come with our own ego and add a stamp on it. Be that in a leadership team, in a marketing role, even designers. Designers do it all the time. They’ll take the brand guidelines and go, yeah, that’s kind of nice, but I want to do it my own way because I’m better. It’s like, okay, well, you might be better, but the thing is strategically, we need to think about this over the course of managing a brand. Therefore, there are different priorities when you’re looking at it that way. So we add this complexity to things and over time, it gets more complex. So you’re right, I think, Ulli, to kind of get us back to what are the basics, what are the principles, and what are we doing about managing brands through those lenses, because we often forget, and we often go down this complexity route, it seems to be.

I think you’re 100% right, and we love to talk about this, right? So simple example, which is also relevant for designers, brand personality, right? I mean, the three of us could speak for two weeks about brand personality and still not exhaust the subject, right? And we have all our tools, and how do we define it? And maybe you should look at it from archetype perspective, and maybe it’s the values associated with it. And all of that is great and nice. But ultimately, you play with all these tools, and we do that because why? You want to create an emotional reaction. And as long as you know what this emotional reaction is, whether you put your information in a bubble, in a mood board, in a personality statement, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the outcome. So yes, I think we love to complicate and discuss all these things for… I think it’s ego, and I think we like to listen to each other talk, right? It’s like, you know, pay attention to how smart I sound, you know, because I use all these big words and have all these great frameworks. And at the core, it’s really get consumers to remember you with the right information that will make them choose you at the moment of purchase, period. That’s what the core of marketing is.

That’s the key, isn’t it? The purchase drivers. But here’s the thing, right? Let’s imagine we’ve gone through this. We’ve defined what we’d like the consumers to attach to us. That’s kind of like part of it. But as you said right then, it’s the outcome that matters, right? So how do we get from a point, let’s assume for the sake of argument, Jacob, me and you have got this brand, we’ve defined the associations, we’ve gone through some of the key questions, we’ve got it in place, we’re all happy with it. But then how do we take that and really push it through so that we do see an outcome that helps our brand grow in the market? What are your thoughts on taking it forward?

That’s a great question and I think you are probably the best suited to answer that question because I know you do a lot of leadership workshops and stuff like that. Again, it comes back to the basics. The first thing I noticed is the three of us were to manage a brand is first, we would have to align on what is it we want to manage, what are the associations we want to create. Now again, this sounds obvious, but a part of all my engagements, I do stakeholder interviews with the company stakeholders and talk to the CFO, the CEO, CMO, customer service guy, sales guy, whatever. And one thing that strikes me is that in 80% of the cases, they all have a slightly different opinion of what the brand is or what the brand should be. That’s where it starts, right? So your customer service guy, when he does his work every day, has a different opinion than your CMO that develops an advertising campaign. Bad, bad starting point. So alignment. The second thing is understanding of your consumers. Does everyone in the organization have the same understanding of what matters to people? And then you’ll also be surprised how often there is no alignment, because what you get is a lot of guesses, right? Yeah, the 26 reasons why I think people should buy my book. That’s another way to say, I have no idea why people are buying my book, but I hope that one of these 26 is the core driver. You know, but that’s what it is. And that’s what you have in organization. The third one is very simply being clear on our strategic approach. And what I mean with that is if you want a brand to grow, it needs to acquire new customers. I have one client in my whole portfolio, where the exception is that his growth is coming from existing customers and growing his share of business with existing customers. But in 99% of the cases, we need to be aligned. Now, again, this sounds obvious, but it’s not the case. So if the three of us are aligned on what are the associations we want to grow, we have the same shared understanding of what drives our consumers, and we are all focused on customer acquisition as a core strategy, then you are, I would argue, at 60% of the equation there already, because all these frictions, internal friction, are gone. And then it’s building your brand. So you have the associations that is understanding the role of communication. The role of communication is, and I’ll talk a bit about that in the book, is building these memory structures, is creating these associations. Advertising folks will often tell you it’s about creating attention, because if someone doesn’t pay attention to you, your communication is useless. I think like, well, paying attention is like cost of entry of every form of professional marketing. If you’re not able to catch consumers’ attention, maybe you should look at another job. You know, it’s like the purpose of my car is to drive. It’s like, well, I assume that all the cars that are being sold around the world know how to drive have this feature built in, right? So, but building memory structures, I think, is an important element. The second one is that understanding what we talked about earlier is consistency. Repetition across all touch points is really a core element of successful brand building. And the third element is simply, and that’s what design comes into as well, is distinctive brand assets, right? Let’s say if I take your quotes, Matt, and put them in a different context and go online and use your quotes as my own, I don’t associate them with you as the brand. Put differently, the stronger you associate your own content and messaging and association with your own brand and your own brand assets, the easier it will be for people to remember what Matt said, and easier to see when they see content that is relevant from Matt. Oh, that is Matt content. So building distinctive brand assets is another important element. And again, we can go like that for another 60 minutes. But again, nothing I’m telling you, I’m sure is surprising you. I’m sure you would agree that it’s about internal alignment, you’d agree that it’s understanding your customers, you know, all this kind of, yes, you need to be recognizable, and all these kind of things. And it’s surprising how often these principles are not being applied. I’m working with a client right now that where we’re going through the exercise, basically developing the scorecards on effective brand building for them. And one thing that struck me is in the last three years, they changed strategy five times. And it’s absolutely mind-blowing. And then you wonder why the brand is confused and why consumers are confused. So you encounter that in the marketing world everywhere basically.

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We’re very short term, aren’t we? Unfortunately, in a lot of businesses that we think about, we’re sort of quarterly sales cycles, yearly planning. Sometimes these things take more than that to kind of embed themselves. We don’t give them enough chances or that a new person comes in and wants to build through their ego, their own approach, which might be wrong or right. But from a consumer’s perspective, you’re right. The worst thing is to confuse everybody and to kind of change it because you’re almost doing damage to the equity of the brand rather than building on the past.

I think Funtar has this data point that shows that 70% of your future consumption or your future demand is driven by the clarity of your positioning. So meaning if consumers are clear about what you have to offer, 70% of your future demand will be driven by that. Why? And that’s another big important part of brand associations. And you guys are familiar with that concept too. It’s like you don’t just communicate to people who are in the market today, you communicate to the whole market so that in two months, if you guys think about who I should maybe buy a book on brand marketing or brand strategy, you think about my book because two months earlier you’ve listened to the podcast, you’ve heard about the book and you’re creating this future demand by being clear on what you have to offer.

Well, that’s the two speeds of marketing, isn’t it? The longer game, 95% are not in the market to buy 5R, but we all tend to focus on the five. Why? As you say, the science, the stats is focus on both, right? But so don’t exclude one group for the other. A lot of brands, I often go in like yourself, Ulli, and a lot of brands are just in performance based marketing. They’re not thinking about longer term thinking. So it’s a tricky one. It’s a tricky one. I’ve got a lot of work to do, it seems to me. So I had a question for you on this associations business, because it seems to me there’s two things going on here. There’s the brand and alignment internally around what associations, the leadership team, I guess, would connect or define in order for them to see growth that they believe. But then also the brand might be already out in the market, out there. I don’t know what your thoughts are, but sometimes when I do discovery work, I also talk to customers as well as internal audiences, external, and sometimes there’s a huge gap in why customers are buying, what value they see, and then what the internal business sees. There’s a complexity there, and then there’s an added complexity because you’re not just dealing with something at this moment in time. The leadership team are often thinking about, if they’re a good leadership team, they’re thinking ahead, they’re thinking five, five odd years in the future. So then there’s this expression like, hit the puck where the player is going to be, right? Then there’s this challenge there. So that is why it’s also tricky, right? Like even if you’ve got a team fully understanding it, they might define something which then consumers are not attaching to it now and don’t see relevant. And also it might be that they will find it relevant in the future. I just wondered if you had any thoughts on those dynamics. Like, do you listen to audiences out there and mold around them? Or how do you sort of approach that in your work, Ulli?

Absolutely. Well, first of all, yes, you need to listen to the consumers, right? Because the challenge is that the way these perceptions and associations are being formed, the influence of marketing is minimal. And again, it comes back to your memories, right? What creates a memory? It’s your personal experience with a brand or with an offering. That is going to have the strongest impact on what you associate with the brand. The second strongest impact is going to be what people say about it, what people you know, trust say about it. You’re looking for a new lawn mower. Your neighbor is mowing his lawn every Saturday morning from 6 to 9 a.m. The guy is obsessed about his little lawn mower. You’re going to go and talk to him and ask him for a recommendation because you know this guy knows about the subject and what he’s going to recommend. So this is going to inform your perception of a brand. Then you have media, right? The press, what you see in social media, what influencers talk about and all these kind of things. At the bottom of the totem, you have marketing, right? This brand itself say, hey guys, I’d like you guys to associate this with my specific offering. So because of that understanding what consumers associate with your brand is crucial. Both in understanding why they really buy you, and that comes back to the core drivers, what the equity you’ve built over the years. So one thing that I see a lot of brands don’t do is they have like 30, 40 years of equity in the market and they don’t ask, what is it that made us successful? What is the equity we’ve built over the last 30 years? We can continue to tap into to succeed. New marketing director, as you said earlier, wants to do everything different, ignores everything that has been done before and tries to do something different. Very, very poor approach. But then you also want to know what consumers think because you want to know what are potential barriers to purchase. And I’ve seen it in many of my, not many, but several of my projects, where you talk to consumers and you’d ask them, what do you think about this brand? And all you hear is positive statements. And there’s nothing negative about it, but they still don’t buy it for whatever reason. And then you probe a bit more and then you get, okay, well, maybe the price point is just too high for me. That’s an obvious barrier. But it’s more be a brand I don’t identify with. And that’s, for example, a problem Harley-Davidson has. A lot of young riders, motorcycle riders, don’t identify with the old white guy, which I will realize that I would be the old white guy seen to ride a Harley-Davidson. A lot of young people don’t identify with me. So that’s a barrier for me to buy. So understanding the barriers helps. So understanding where consumers are and what they think allows you then to determine, okay, are there old associations I need to refresh? Are there associations or equity that needs to be brought to life in a more interesting way to make it more relevant again? Or are there negative associations I need to actively target and go against to change people’s opinions? So that is why understanding consumers is so essential. And then you need to ask yourself, well, which one do I want to build on top of the ones consumers have already? Now, and you guys know that as well as I do is, what you say doesn’t matter is what you do that matters, everything that matters. So you can tell me Volvo, which I may associate, let’s say, with safety, can tell me they’re all about design now. If their cars continue to look like Lego cubes, I’m not going to buy the design angle. I’m not going to think, oh yeah, great. Lego cube design is really actual and modern. I think, no, the product needs to embrace and help create these associations. So it takes time to build over time, but the proof needs to be in the pudding, right? It needs to be in your product. It needs to be in your consistency over time. It needs to be in whatever the brand does, more so than what the brand claims it wants to do. And so there’s a lot of information here, but you cannot fight negative emotions, negative barriers. You need to work with them. You can try to overcome them, but you cannot ignore and fight them. And you cannot, you know, you will not become a beauty queen in Brazil, Matt. Sorry, you’re great looking and everything, but the stretch to you becoming a beauty queen in Brazil is a bit too high. Oh, really?

I was really banking on that for the next week of my career.

Sorry for that. But just like Volvo probably will never become the gold standard in car design, you know, which other brands might be, because the stretch, they don’t deliver against it. And the stretch in consumer’s mind is a little bit too big, so to say. But great question. You cannot build a brand without understanding where consumers are at mentally and associate with you.

Ulli, I had a follow up question to that.

Yeah.

When the brand is a little bit more abstract, so for example, like insurance, and there’s like mascots like the Gecko for Geico, where there’s like no meaning behind it apart from like the name and the character, but is there a relationship between like distinctive assets like that, meaning and memory?

Absolutely. Thanks for asking this very leading question, Jacob, because yes, there is a clear correlation. Now, the interesting thing is, and that’s the big debate between distinctiveness and differentiation, right? Is if I recognize you and develop emotion towards your offering, you’re already winning the branding game, and that’s exactly what Geico does in the insurance business. They do very intangible things, and that’s the power of mascots and distinctive brand assets, right? And that’s what I said earlier. It’s like when you create these brand assets and you get exposed to them, you’re driving on the highway and you see the archers, McDonald’s archers, and you’re on a road trip, suddenly you’re hungry and you’re like, oh, maybe I should stop at McDonald’s at the next exit. Seeing these brand assets triggers the memories you have, but if you have an intangible product, creating these assets, and a mascot is perfect, because a mascot is like, how do you call it? It’s a difficult word. It’s like anthropomorphization. Basically, projecting human trace to an object is a great way to create sympathy for that brand that is very abstract. Yes, it’s an extremely powerful tool, and especially mascots. You guys know that too. For me, it’s one of the most underutilized brand assets, potential brand assets for a brand. What you’ve seen is, I think there is research that shows that over the last 30 years, the use of mascots has decreased in marketing, and yet the effectiveness of mascots is at an old time. It’s one of the most powerful devices in branding you can use. Just like your flamingos, Jacob, it’s like, you see the flamingos, you think about Jacob and your community right away. When you think about, talk to me about a global community of brand people, it’s like, let me think, I don’t know, to think a bit about, it takes more time. Show me the flamingo, I’m like, duh, of course. Yes, very powerful devices.

You’ve mentioned Jacob’s brilliance, but perhaps just for folks, in terms of global brands, obviously we’ve got people tuning in from all over the world. Have you got any sort of examples? Because people love examples of brands that have built powerful mental associations well. Perhaps while you’re just thinking of a couple, I always think the classic example is Coca-Cola, right? A lot of people have that when they’re a child, right? So they get it as a treat on a hot summer’s day, mom comes out or mom allows you to buy it as a treat because it’s not normally something you’d have when you’re very, very young. So you come of age, maybe you’re eight years old and you’re giving your first Coca-Cola and you associate it with a hot summer’s day, fun, you’re probably out somewhere, it’s a treat. Then as you grow, you build on those mental associations and Christmas time comes around, you see the adverts with the Santa Claus and all of this stuff. So obviously, that is a juggernaut of a brand and has been around for ages, but it’s a powerful idea. It’s a drink at the end of the day, but it builds such mental, emotional pictures because perhaps some of those things that I’m just suggesting that that’s probably attached to the brand. I’m just wondering if you’ve got any other ideas perhaps through your research or you think, oh, this is a great example of a brand that does this.

There are a lot of, and it depends by geography as well, or even the global scale. But before I go there, just to point out your Coke example, the amazing part about Coke is the consistency of its branding. So I grew up in Africa, and you can be in a small village in Africa and go in one of the small stores on the side of the road, you will see a freaking Coke logo and a Coke sign. I can go into a 7-Eleven here in the US, I will see a Coke sign somewhere. We get exposed to this brand, and I’m sure you do the same. You’re like the outback in Australia, where there’s really nothing.

Yeah, probably the outback.

But during your vacation or your weekend, you do a road trip right through the outback, you will find a Coke logo somewhere, so absolutely. Other brands for me is that are very successful doing so. McDonald’s is another one, that’s another no-brainer, right? But then you have things like Kit Kat in the confectionery business, Kit Kat global recognition in Japan as much as in Germany or wherever else. Taking a break, taking a Kit Kat, it’s a strong position. I think the FIFA football organization is part of that as well. I think Netflix has turned Formula One into a global phenomenon as well. Facebook, Timo, TikTok. I mean, yes, we use them as platforms, but again, that’s probably the brilliance of these things, right? So those are extremely strong brand. Why? Because we interact, we have personal experience with them, not because we see advertising from. So there are a lot of brands out there that really provide that. Then you have things like Rolex, luxury brands, Yves Saint Laurent, whatever luxury couture and categories you want to focus on. Verge Clicquot, you see the color scheme and you recognize the brand around the world. So there are actually a lot of brands that do it properly. But again, they are consistent and they consistently repeat the associations they have and they consistently use their brand assets up to wazoo, right? I think it’s Mark Ritson who says it’s like use your brand. He calls them brand codes. Use them in every touch point, every touch point. And then when you get sick of them, continue to use them even more because, and it’s true. That’s really what you need to do. So yeah, there are tremendous amount of brands out there.

You have to be really hot on that. And I think this goes back to the original conversation we were saying. At a leadership level, this needs to be understood. Because I was working with a brand, a global brand, was it last year? I think it was. And we got a positioning. I was grateful enough to be honored really to work with a very talented brand director and they got it and they were very keen to connect my work with say their design teams. So I was working with the head of design. And then I was talking to them about the challenges of executing anything across this organization, a global organization. And they said, Matt, the challenge is, is that we’ve got teams in Africa, we’ve got teams in APAC, we’ve got teams in India. And what we find is, that what I was talking about before, like these local teams, they want to add their own stamp to everything. Like this is just a nightmare. So they showed me these examples, so they’ve created a mood board. They were so upset about this. And they were showing some stuff that had gone on in China, that was like so different, so off-brand, so wild. This team in China had created its own brand identity that was overpowering the corporate identity. And we were just like, what is going on? So the governance side of that is absolutely crucial. And I think that’s what we perhaps don’t realize, is the power of consistency, the power of control needs to be there. And controls are a horrible word in some companies, culturally. But ultimately, if you want to build a powerful brand, you have to control the way it goes to market. And you have to get these principles into the people on the ground, in those local markets, so that they understand it. And when you talk about brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, these are brands that take that seriously. They invest in getting those design teams on boarded, and they meet regularly. There’s cadence behind all the execution. It’s a machine that goes on behind it. And that’s the bit I often think the design of the designers is sometimes missing in some of these organizations. So I think this is a great point. We should aim for the output. But tricky to do, right, Ulli? Tricky.

I totally agree with you. The interesting thing is, you want to leave the… I don’t know what it is, the desire to imprint our own work, personality, whatever, ego to your point on something. Because early in my career, I was working in Budapest at Leo Burnett. And one of the big clients of Leo Burnett was Marlboro. Now, Marlboro at the time, we were still advertising in Eastern Europe. And it was one of the biggest client of the agency. Now, if you’re familiar with Marlboro, it’s all red. It’s the conventions, the design convention of the brands are absolutely rigid. And the way it happened at the time is you didn’t mess around with the brand. But what you get is you get from headquarter of the US. Once a year, a massive database of brand assets, including videos, films, print ads, posters, whatever. And you could select them and choose them for your own market and then apply them. But you didn’t mess with them. And I remember we had a yearly meeting where, the following day, we had a meeting where we wanted to discuss with the marketing director of, it was a Philip Morris Central Europe, what are the activities for the next six to 12 months, we’re going to focus on Marlboro specifically. And so we had a bunch of assets that our designer, our art director at the time, was trying to put together and visualize for the Central European market. And so the creative director and I go out for dinner, have a few too many drinks and come back to the agency at 11 o’clock at night to look at the work before it was presented to the client the next morning at 8 o’clock. And the art director, real sweet girl, talented woman, had turned every Marlboro ad into green. So, when you know Marlboro, it’s all about the red, and it’s part of, you know, the, it’s like Ferrari, a highly recognizable equity of the brand. And so he asks, why did you change that in green? It’s like, I was getting a bit bored, you know, I thought maybe we need to mix things up a little bit, so I thought green might be a great change. Now, needless to say, the poor girl spent the night at the office changing everything back to red. But yes, so it’s, but the reality is you can, you know, you see that with brands like KitKat, where the strategic platform is global, where the design assets are global, but where the storytelling is local and culturally influenced by the local region or the regional aspects. And that’s a great way to do it as well. As I said, KitKat and a lot of the mass brands do that. So there are ways to play with that. But yes, the control is, the truth is we have problems ourselves. I don’t know, Jacob, how do you feel about that? But I love to see, coming back to your Flamingo, how often do you think about changing the Flamingo or making the Flamingo do something different than what it’s supposed to be doing? I don’t know how often you have to drive to want to change things. I know I have that with my visual identity and my core identity on my branding, so to say, the drive to change things because we spend day in, day out with it is strong. You probably see my content or my branding once every six months, if I’m really lucky, and not every day like I do. So yes, it’s the rigor behind that is really hard to maintain.

I’ve kept the same pink color since 2007 when I started. So that’s been there from the beginning. The flamingo is much newer, it’s probably only a few years old. So it’s still quite fresh, but my office is covered in flamingo stuff. I’ve given flamingo gifts, my kids draw flamingos and give them to me. There’s so much flamingo stuff, and it has been really associated with the brand, and people just recognize it, and I’ve ruined flamingos for a lot of people. I apologize for that, but yeah, it’s true.

No, it’s great. Have you thought about changing the shade of pink since 2007?

I kind of go through a little gamut, so sometimes it’s more purple, some more pink depending on the context, but it’s always around magenta, give or take, so yeah. But definitely not, I haven’t gone to a totally different color.

But it’s interesting because I think your flamingo shows something else that is important about brand assets, if I can just come back to that real quick. And I’m sure you have a meaning behind the flamingo. I don’t know what that meaning is, and I have no idea what the connection to brand design and brand strategy is. But the reality is, it doesn’t matter. You know what I mean? We’re able to create the flamingo association with your work, and so that every time I see it, I think about you and your work. I don’t have like a big cerebral brain that has a designer outfit that tells me, Jacob is a great designer and great strategist that does design work. So the visual doesn’t embody the benefit you provide or the expertise you provide. It’s just a point of distinctiveness. So that’s the interesting part about brand assets as well, right?

That’s why I was asking about the gecko, because there’s no real connection. But if I think of insurance, that comes to mind. So that’s the difference. The meaning behind it, it was, yeah, we just saw the pink obviously related to the mascot. And then I just shared that. And whenever I was sharing creations, I’d use the flamingo as just a point of reference as an animal. And people just associated that with me over time. And then I leaned into it more and it really became more ingrained in people’s memories. And I kind of explored some language around it, like stand the flock out and flock ordinary and had some fun with it and really built an identity around that flamingo. So now it’s really about that idea of standing out, which is what we do as branders. Everyone says it, but this is a new spin on standing the flock out. So now you know.

No, and you just described how you created that association, talking about it in your meetings and people hearing you talk about it consistently or consecutively. All of a sudden they make the association themselves and then you build on it. So that’s what brand associations are.

So can we get a little bit practical here for our listeners? We talked about some great examples. So rather large companies. So maybe for smaller brands that want to build these brand associations that are up against these big brands that already have strong associations, where do they start? How can they compete? How can get these memory structures going?

Well, first, that’s a great question, right? Because the marketing science suggests that big brands with big budget that have been established for a long time have it easier than smaller brand. As a smaller brand is you need to be very clear on how you want to grow. So where do you want to take the business from? So if I launched, let’s say now an energy drink, it’s kind of easy, right? I know I need to go after the energy drink brands in the category. So I need to provide something that is different from them. It cannot just be energy drink number 12 for consumers to buy me. I need to provide something that really makes consumer think, oh, they do something different, different type of energy, different type of flavor, different type of way to absorb or eat the flavor. Maybe it’s not cans, liquid in a can. Maybe it’s an energy popsicle as a delivery system. So you need to find a way to really stand out and be different from what the category has to offer. And you need to be better, basically, at least one certain level. And then I think the part that most people, especially in the design world, don’t, it’s hard to implement, is you need to be louder and more extreme than you think you can or you should be. And what I mean with that is, so typical example, I don’t want to put all the designs in one category, but I look at it in the United States, right? I look at the chocolate category, I wrote about that in the book as well. It’s like all the chocolate brands out there have the same design convention, you know, and the reason is when you think about what are sort of like the cues of the category, it’s like, well, it’s brown, it’s black chocolate, it’s white chocolate, it’s these kind of things. So when you look at the wall of chocolate brands at a whole food or a grocery store, you see all these different shades of brown and black basically. And what you need to do as a brand to really stand out is to break with those category conventions and do something completely different. And the example I mention in the book is one is Milka, which I’m sure you guys are familiar with, which is the purple cow. What does cow, I understand what the cow has to do with chocolate. What does purple have to do with chocolate? I have no idea, but it stands out. It really helps me stand out in a sea of brown and dark chocolate brands. And the second one is Tony Chocoloni, right? When you think about Tony Chocoloni, it’s like all these bright colors, which again have not much to do with the conventions of the chocolate category, but they allow you to stand out at point of sale basically. When I go at point of sale, I see brown, maybe a bit of white, dark chocolate. And then I see purple cow. Oh, interesting. And then I see colorful splash being Tony Chocoloni. But to have the courage to break these conventions and to go out of these conventions takes a lot of courage. It’s like you thinking like, okay, I’m going to associate my business. And I mean, it’s your business, it’s your sustenance, it’s your life, you know, lifeline. I want to associate that with the flamingo. Why would I do something that’s silly? You know, maybe I should show like a university logo in the background to show how, you know, smart and what an authority is. No, you took the courage and it helps you. But a lot of brands I’ve learned or I’ve noticed don’t have the courage to break out of their conventions to the point where they need to. They get scared, they think consumers are going to be shocked or turned off. But no, the reality is you need to push the envelopes so that you can break through and that people notice you in the sea of other brands that are already, that have already established memories in the mind and the brains of consumers.

Awesome. Well, look, Ulli, it’s getting to a bit of a close in terms of time on our podcast. There’s loads I know we could have gone through.

Sorry, I’m talking a lot. I know.

No, no, no. It’s been so helpful. I guess that the main thing is to refer folks back to your book. We’ve got a quick fire round in just a minute. But before we get into that, just so that folks know, where can we get hold of this book and how can people follow you?

So you can everywhere around the world where you can get books digitally on print on demand, you’ll find me. So initially, I was only on Amazon, but now you find me on all the major platforms in Asia, in South Africa, and so on and so on. That’s the beauty is no one has written a book on science association yet. So search the science of brand associations with mind with markets, and I’ll pop up somehow somewhere around the world. So that’s the benefit of being the first one here.

All right. So are you ready for your quick fire closing round?

No, but I don’t have a choice to I know, definitely not, definitely not.

You’re now thinking, what the heck have I got myself into? But hey, here we go.

So I hear my wife calling me. I hear my wife calling me.

Yeah, dinner time. So question number one, what is the most underrated brand association in the market that you can think of?

Like an example or a type of brand associations?

Give me a type. Give me a type. And an example if you have one, but just a type of…

The core motivation on why you buy, why you read books, why you buy lemonade, why you use detergent. It sounds ridiculous, but trust me, it’s the most underrated one, the core driver of a behavior in a specific category. That’s the one. Guaranteed.

I like it. Right, Jacob, your turn.

Yes. One brand that owns a clear memory structure that we haven’t mentioned yet.

That we haven’t mentioned yet. Victorinox. Are you familiar with that? The Swiss Army Knife.

Oh, yeah. Nice.

And the little… What is it? It’s a shield that they have on the Swiss Army Knife, which is Victorinox. That is a brand of assets that most people I know would recognize. I’m sure you see it too, would recognize it.

Yeah, for sure. Certainly in Europe. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. All right, cool. Biggest myth marketeers believe about branding and associations?

Biggest myth about brand associations? It’s hard because a lot of people use the word without really knowing what it is and how to use it. So I don’t think we made it to a point of having a myth around it. About branding is that you need to reinvent the wheel every single time and every week you have a new trend you need to follow. It’s not all I get. Maybe I’m getting lazy, but it’s like focus on the basics, but do those rights and that’s where you want to focus on.

Awesome. One word to describe a great brand strategy?

Behaviour changing, sorry, that’s two words, but that’s ultimately what you do.

You put a dash in it, it will be fine.

That’s right, thank you. And I’m a German, so for me it’s like one word, you know, a German construct, we put two words together and make one of them, so behaviour changing, that would be it. Because the rest is just intellectual BS. If it doesn’t change behaviours, it’s not a good strategy.

All right, last one. One piece of advice for marketeers trying to grow brands today.

It sounds ridiculous, right? But use any AI platform that you use. It doesn’t matter if you change GPT or cloud, whatever. And make a query about highlighting and pulling out all the evidence-based marketing principles that the LLM can identify. Based on the data, mentioning the sources, yada, yada, yada. You’d be surprised that all this knowledge is already available out there and that you need to buy my book because I went through the effort to summarize everything. But the knowledge is out there. There is no excuse. If you search principally based on data-driven principles of brand building, you’d get a whole report from CADGPT nicely packaged and formatted. That would be my advice.

Awesome. Well, listen, Ulli, thank you so much for carving out some time. It’s been a great time to talk about brand strategy and brand associations. As I say, folks, jump on it. Ulli, how do people actually follow you personally though? Because you mentioned the book. Is there like a website or a LinkedIn or something that you post on? Substack?

I’m really bad at posting on social media. That’s one of my to-do’s for the next few years, but that’s why I admire you guys so much. LinkedIn is the best way to find me. So Ulli Appelbaum on LinkedIn, follow me there. And that’s the rare times I post, that’s where I would post it. I’m trying to build an Instagram page and followers, but I stopped posting six months ago and beyond my parents and my brother, no one really follows me there. So if you want to check it out and help me grow that, you can go at First The Trousers on Instagram.

A massive spike now. A massive spike.

That’s exactly right. Tripling my fan base from three to nine. And the simplest part is really LinkedIn. Or if you want to go to my website, firstthetrousers.com, what you’ll find there is you’ll find a whole bunch of scorecards that you can download for free that allow you to analyze, is my positioning strong, are the activities I develop to build my brand strong, etc. So simple, easy, free tools. I’ve learned you got to get free stuff to attract people. What I haven’t learned is how to attract people with free stuff. But the free stuff is available. That’s an easy access.

We all love free stuff. So appreciate that. Thank you for all your hard work and particularly for putting this book out there. As you say, there was a gap in the market. It’s certainly needed. So we appreciate you here on JUST Branding and thank you for coming on again. All the best, Ulli. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me. I’ll talk to you again in three years for my next book.

All right.

We’ll hold you to that one. Thank you. Thank you at home for tuning in. You might not be at home. You might be on your commute. You might be at work. You might be gardening. I have no idea. But thank you for tuning in. We’ve really appreciated being in your earbuds. So take care, folks, and have a great rest of your days. Thank you.

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