The perspective of an organization’s brand reveals that organization, its approach to its business and its offerings as superior. Its greatest importance — brand’s purpose — is to make these revelations of superiority happen.
However, a brand perspective affects more than just the specific objects brand seeks to reveal — it organizes many incidental things around the view, and these things also indicate the perspective.
However, just as where one stands in a room organizes the entire room within a particular perspective, not only the object of one’s attention to (say, a couch one is walking around to inspect it from all angles), the perspective of the brand changes the appearance of the brand’s context. The brand perspective “tilts its context”.
The brand perspective then is given reinforcing coherence by including all possible cues of where one stands when one sees by the brand perspective — that common ground from which one sees when one really understands what the organization stands for. They intuitively indicate where to stand, or better, indicate in a very immediate way that you stand on common ground with the brand in the way stars indicate to navigators where they’ve sailed their ships.
Brand is primarily a perspective one wishes to share. The word for the understanding one gains through seeing by a shared perspective is synesis. Synesis is the Greek word for understanding (literally “together”, both in the sense of “seeing together with…” as well as “seeing as together”) in perspectival unity. The goal of synetic branding is to bring customers to see the world from the point of view of the brand (the brand’s synetic point), by the brand perspective.
*
The fundamental elements of a brand model are:
- The brand perspective: From where it stands in regard to its purpose, how does the organization see what it is and does?
- The brand position: From where it stands in the competitive landscape, relative to itself how does the organization see its competition? (This is relative positioning: there is no single competitive landscape, only the landscape viewed from competing synetic points.)
- The brand attributes: From where it stands in the world, what looks right? What outward appearances conform to the ideal when one stands here?