Charities could be damaging supporters’ confidence in them and even promoting competitors if they chop and change their brand properties, a new study suggests.
The study, a collaboration between Phil Barden (pictured), managing director of Decode Marketing, and David Taylor, managing partner of international consultancy the Brandgym, said that the strength of a brand's awareness was based on a number of properties including shape, slogan, sound, symbols, and celebrity.
It is these assets that activate the brand in people’s minds and build 'brand equity', the report says. Removing them could lower the public's recognition of a charity and damage its ability to communicate.
Although the study was not based on charity brands, Barden, the author of Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy, told Civil Society News: “The same principles apply to any brand whether it is a product or a service, whether it is financial, telecommunications or something more intangible like a charity.
“The key thing behind this is that any entity or equity is communicating, sending signals to donors, potential donors and fundraisers," he said. "These signals are composed of many things: advertisements, logos, colours, symbols; all of these are properties that could evoke the brand in people’s minds.”
These properties create ‘brand memory structure’ and organisations should be careful about chopping and changing them based on subjective decision-making, he said.
Barden said: “A rebrand or a relaunch can risk damaging brand memory structure and may unwittingly change the meaning of what the brand properties convey.”
He said he had noticed a lot of charity rebrands as a consumer and said charities had a particular need to demonstrate they were getting value for money from their new look and maximising return on communication and marketing investment.
The study asked people to respond to deconstructed brand properties, such as shapes, colours and symbols, and put them against those of the company’s competitors.
Barden said the approach could enable charities to protect their ‘brand memory structure’, avoid common branding pitfalls and save money on misdirected rebrands.
For example the ice cream brand Magnum had one of the most powerful properties in the shape of the bar itself, he said.
Barden gave an example of a charity client that changes the colour of its normal brand in its communications when it responds to a crisis. The charity said it did this so that the colour was more linked to convey a crisis or an emergency, so it acted as a call to action.
But research based on which charity brands people thought had responded and been most active in fundraising and on the ground in emergencies, has shown Barden’s client has very low attribution and the most attribution is going to their competitors.
Barden said the same approach can be used to find out whether celebrities fit with the brand values of the charities and companies they are chosen to advocate on behalf of.
