We've seen that an attitude is a complex mixture of beliefs, feelings and behaviors. In a prior module on the self, we also talked about the way you have attitudes toward your own self. And of course, you have attitudes towards other people. So let's take that perspective, a step farther. And talk about how your customers form attitudes toward your brand, and toward those of your competitors, much like they do toward other people. Several years ago, I had an interesting experience.

I gave a talk in Tokyo at an advertising agency. And after the talk, young woman came up to me to tell me that she had enjoyed the talk and so on. And she asked me an interesting question. She said, may I ask, what brand are you and I I was kind of puzzled by this. And I said, Well, I'm, you know, I'm Michael, that's my brand. And she said no, but but what brand are you and and I realized eventually that she meant what luxury brand like coach or Louie Vuitton and so on, did I identify with.

And I realized that, especially in Japan, people, many of them are extremely taken with luxury products. And to the extent that they really think of them as peers, they really think of them as people and identify with them very strongly. And that experience really opened my eyes to the importance of thinking about a concept that I want to share with you now, which is the brand personality. And we describe this as the set of traits that people attribute to a product as if it were a person. And we know that the brands that people use tend to To really color our perceptions of those users, we've already talked about that. Here.

Here's a great example. Let's think about Apple users. And we know that there's a certain snobbery that comes with many Apple users when they look down upon their poor PC brethren. So are Apple users really better than the rest of us? Do they believe that they are? Well, a lot of people seem to believe that whole story.

In one survey of 20,000 people in fact, many respondents claimed that iPad users are unkind and have little empathy. They describe these users as quote a selfish elite. respondents were also highly likely to describe Apple users as wealthy well educated, but power hungry overachieving, unkind and non altruistic. So that's quite a complicated attitude to have toward a group of people who have just chosen to buy one product over another. Let's look at another example of brand personality at work. And advertising agency wrote the brief that you see here to help it figure out how it should portray one of its clients.

They described the client as creative, unpredictable, and imp. He not only walks and talks but has the ability to sing blush, wink, and work with little devices like pointers. He can also play musical instruments. His walking motion is characterized as a swagger. He has made a dough and has mass. Now that last sentence should be a good tip off.

Can you guess based on this description of the client exactly who he is. The answer is the Pillsbury Doughboy. So what you've read is the creative brief that went into the generation of this particular brand personality. Now, this approach, which is widely used in advertising, is also the basis for a fairly new technique that I'm seeing a lot of nowadays, in advertising agencies. And that is the approach that's come to be called brand storytelling. I think this is a really smart way to think about how you can create a brand personality and bring your brand to life.

Essentially, this technique relies upon giving a product, a rich backstory, so that you can involve customers in its history or in its experience. And I talked a bit about this approach in the earlier module on involvement and motivation. A lot of these brand storytelling techniques are based upon reader response theory. And this is a widely accepted perspective in literature that focuses on the role of the reader in interpreting a story, rather than just relying upon the author's version. So reading in this sense is very much an interactive experience. This approach recognizes that people and consumers don't necessarily just want to listen to a manufactured set of details in a very passive manner.

Rather, they want to participate in the story by filling in the blanks. Some of these tactics are based upon a tendency that many people exhibit and that is known as anthropomorphism. This refers to our tendency to attribute human characteristics to objects or animals. And this tendency, of course, has come in very handy for advertising creatives over the years. And certainly you would agree that many of the great advertising or brand stories that have been told, have been based upon characters. In some cases, they're talking objects or certainly talking animals, or a food item like a peanut.

Animals like a Jaguar, or a cheetah. Even mythical elves are Jolly Green giant's so many characters that have captivated our imagination, and really helped to bring a brand to life. Researchers have identified some personality dimensions that are particularly potent as a way to create a brand personality For example, old fashioned, wholesome and traditional, surprising, lively, and with it serious, intelligent and efficient, glamorous, romantic and sexy. And finally rugged outdoors he tough or athletic. So brand marketers worked very hard to develop these brand personalities and to present a picture of a brand that that people want to know that people want to hang out with, because that's what's going to make people buy the brand. They also employ a variety of techniques to help them understand the brand personalities that people think about when they think about their brands, whether these are the ones they intended or not.

So for example, Adidas asked kids in focus groups to imagine that the brand came to life and was at a party and to tell them on what they would expect the brand to be doing there. The kids responded that Adidas would be hanging around the keg with its pals, talking about girls. Well, maybe that's not so bad, until you consider that they also told the researchers that Nike would be with the girls. The takeaway here is you should ask yourself this question and I know it's kind of a weird question, but indulge me for a moment. If your brand came to life as a person, who would he or she be? If you can't give a detailed response to this question, it's possible that your brand identity is too vague to be useful, especially if you are able to give a detailed response about the personalities of some of your competitors.