In Austrian Capital Theory, Brands are valuable financial assets. Brands are architected in response to the subjective value preferences of consumers, and the more accurate the responsiveness, the higher, faster, longer and more reliable are the future cash flows. Brands are promises of value and, when the promise is kept, the result is delighted, enthusiastic and loyal consumers.
In this episode of the E4E Podcast (Mises.org/E4E), global branding expert Trini Amador explains how every business and every entrepreneur can methodically build a strong brand to deliver consumer value and unleash cash flow.
The entrepreneur makes a promise that the consumer will experience value. The brand is the promise. Here are the principles for building a strong brand:
Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights
There are two pillars to the construction: Relevance and Differentiation.
Pillar 1: Relevance
It’s central to economics, because economics deals with individuals and their preferences and their choices. Your brand is not for everyone, it’s for specific individuals. It’s important to know them and understand them deeply.
Relevance Box 1: Core Target
Many brand owners think that the more customers they target, the more they will sell. The opposite is true. Define your target audience as narrowly as possible.
Relevance Box 2: Core Needs and Insights
Strong brands are built on unique entrepreneurial insights into the motivations of their core target audience. Entrepreneurs use the deductive method: observing behavior and deducing motivations from those observations, using tools like the Means-End Chain.
Relevance Box 3: Customer’s Frame Of Reference
This component is based on the Austrian value principle that the customer finds value in meeting a need in a way that is better (for them) than direct substitutes, indirect substitutes, or than non-purchase or deferred purchase.
Pillar 2: Differentiation
In Pillar two, we build an implementation of the Austrian principle of uniqueness in your entrepreneurial offering. A brand is the ideal platform for communicating uniqueness.
Differentiation Box 1: Brand Promise
The brand promise is to deliver in a unique way the highest possible level of benefit, which is an emotional benefit, the consumer feeling that your offering assures they will achieve their highest fulfillment.
Differentiation Box 2: Brand Delivery
Brand delivery is how the brand keeps the promise it makes.
Differentiation Box 3: Brand Character
Customers are people and they relate to brands subjectively — almost as if the brand were a person.
Building the 6-Box Brand Foundation brings clarity about what your brand stands for, defines your competitive advantage, and ensures that your entire team knows what they must deliver, and what the customer expects.
Additional Resources
Download the free “Brand Uniqueness Blueprint” (PDF) to help you implement your own brand-building process: Mises.org/E4E_30_PDF.
The Mises Institute exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian school of economics, and individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. These great thinkers developed praxeology, a deductive science of human action based on premises known with certainty to be true, and this is what we teach and advocate. Our scholarly work is founded in Misesian praxeology, and in self-conscious opposition to the mathematical modeling and hypothesis-testing that has created so much confusion in neoclassical economics. Visit https://mises.org