Once you’ve identified your keywords for your brand and brand book, it’s important to both test them, and to demonstrate their relationship with regard to your brand position to create your brand essence. You’ll recall from our last post that we settled on the following keywords: imagination, friend, joy, clean, charity, children, dream, chubby, bathtime, and squeeze. To explore the relationship of each of these keywords to each other, we will make use of a Venn Diagram.

Why include a Venn Diagram to Illustrate Brand Essence?

venn diagram brand book

Venn Diagram via Wikipedia

A Venn Diagram is a useful way to illustrate the correlations between ideas in our brand book. You’ve probably seen them before, they look something like what you see to the left. Usually 3 overlapping circles, representing how the different ideas overlap. For instance it shows you, graphically, what happens in a space where A and C, but not B overlap. That’s the green area on the image.

Why is it important to understand what happens when A and C overlap? When you’re talking about branding, the brand only exists in the space where A, B, and C overlap. Where any 2 circles overlap, we’re getting close to the brand, but we haven’t fully delivered it. If you understand each of the two-circle overlaps, you’ll begin to understand what makes your brand special. Articulating what makes your brand special is a critical element in the brand book. This may make more sense as we work through our Venn Diagram for the Rubber Duckie brand.

brand bookTo start, we need to try to identify the three BIG ideas represented in our keywords. Likely suspects, based on the work we’ve already completed include Joy, Charity, Imagination, Friend, Children, and Clean. For the sake of this exercise, let’s assume the big three are: Joy, Imagination, and Charity. As you can see, we label our big circles with our big ideas and then try to work the remaining keywords into their location between the big ideas. For instance, where joy and imagination overlap, dreams exist. Problems start arising, however, when we try to identify what happens when the big ideas overlap with Charity. Somehow, none of the keywords we identified seem to make sense for where Imagination and Charity overlap. In a world of Imagination and Charity — we don’t get bathtime, clean, squeeze, chubby, friend, or children. We might get innovation or fundraisers, though — but we didn’t identify those as keyword brand attributes. So Charity is a bad choice for the big idea — OR we misidentified our keywords.

brand bookLet’s try a different version of the three BIG ideas: Joy, Imagination, and Bathtime. A little more traditional – true, perhaps more reflective of the roots of the brand and not what it is evolving toward, but let’s try it. When we cross Imagination with Bathtime, we get Clean and Children — that seems right. When we cross Imagination and Joy, we our previously identified Dream, but also Charity now. That fits. When we cross Joy with Bathtime we get Friend and Squeeze. Those are both good fits, the Rubber Duckie is a friend at Bathtime, delivering joy to children and adults alike–and I dare you not to squeeze it.

Where Does “Chubby” fit in the Brand Book?

It’s a key element of the brand, all Rubber Duckies are chubby — but it doesn’t really fit at the intersection of the big ideas. There are three ways to deal with this problem for the brand book.

  1. It might be time to reconsider our big ideas and find some that fit better.
  2. We could throw it out.
  3. We could embrace it for what it is and use a marketing technique such as acronyms to help.

brand essenceFor right now, we’re going to acknowledge that it doesn’t fit our brand and leave it set aside in our brand book. We may discover where the word Chubby fits in with future analysis for our brand book, and perhaps we won’t, in which case we will edit the Keywords and Venn diagram as we pull all our pieces together for the final draft. (Remember, I told you writing a brand book could be a bit of a vicious circle at the outset of this process.)

We now have a working model of our Venn Diagram in the brand book. It has helped us to understand that while Charity may play an important emerging role in the Rubber Duckie brand, at present, it does not play a significant role, and that’s OK — Rubber Duckie got its start at Bathtime, and it makes sense that Bathtime should continue to play a vital role in brand position. It also helped us to understand we may have a problem with Chubby. So the exercise helped us further identify our brand position AND helped to articulate our brand position for individuals who may read our Brand Book at a later date.

See more from the Brand Book Tutorial Series
About the Author:

Tisha Oehmen

Tisha Oehmen is a professional brand strategist and a leader in the branding field. She has been named a member of the Global Guru’s Top 30 Brand Gurus. She is also the co-founder of Oregon-based Paradux Media Group and the best-selling author of the book, Finding Brand: The Brand Book Tutorial.

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2 Comments

  1. Create Brand Personality | Brand Book Tutorial | Finding Brand | Paradux Media Group on January 29, 2012 at 10:39 am

    […] helping us identify the true lead dimension. (Note here that one of the main ideas we chose in our Venn Diagram was Imagination – a coincidence? I think […]

  2. Shalin on July 5, 2013 at 3:13 am

    I have used Venn diagrams in probability to represent set theory. I have seen question type Venn Diagrams on the internet. Most of them are funny and clever. I was inspired to draw such diagrams and publish in the blog. Although I would recommend reading different types of Venn diagrams if they want to learn more. I have seen very complex ones as well. Well done on the explanation!

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