Psychology of Branding

This book explores the psychological factors underlying brand choices we make. How we encounter brands (and how often we), think about them, feel about them, and how we experience them in relation to competing brands, has a big effect on which ones we choose, and keep on choosing. At the same time, presumably there are neural events occurring when we encounter and mentally respond to brands. These represent ways in which we can explain and understand why people choose and remain loyal to brands. These explanations of branding are related and intuitive. But how does the psychology of branding work? This book offers answers to that question. Brands are all around us and in a sense represent any person, place, or thing to which people attach associations anything that represents something for someone. This insight has led those trying to improve society, not just to sell products, services, and organisational reputations, but to take up the mantle of branding. The branding of social and health behaviours has become widespread and is now a central approach in social marketing the use of marketing to benefit society rather than the marketer. In an earlier volume, my co-editor Gerard Hastings and I noted that by learning about concepts such as brand development, identity and equity, we can do for public health what Philip Morris had done for teen smoking. This is exactly what’s been happening for some 20 years, and now branding represents a powerful strategy to change social and health behaviours for the better. Branding is now truly a systemic approach to modifying human behaviour for commercial as well as socially beneficial purposes.