Content
- What is the Brand Wheel?
- Components of the Brand Wheel
- Goals and Usage of the Brand Wheel
- How to Build a Brand Wheel
- Examples of Successful Brands
What is the Brand Wheel?
The Brand Wheel is a theoretical model used for a deep understanding of a brand's essence through its characteristics and features. This concept helps businesses realize what core benefit consumers gain when interacting with their products or services. Consequently, applying this model allows companies to plan their development strategies more effectively by highlighting important aspects that can attract and retain customers.
Components of the Brand Wheel
The main idea of the Brand Wheel is that a brand can be viewed as a set of five interrelated components, each playing its role in shaping the company's identity:
- Attributes: A set of obvious and less obvious characteristics that distinguish the product or service from others.
- Benefits: The physical or functional outcomes that the customer obtains by using the product.
- Values: The emotions and feelings that arise in consumers when interacting with the brand.
- Personality: Human traits inherent to the brand that make it unique.
- Essence: The central idea that the brand offers its consumers.
Goals and Usage of the Brand Wheel
In a saturated market where competition is high, it is crucial to have a unique selling proposition. The Brand Wheel helps identify the primary benefit consumers receive from interacting with the business, which in turn aids in creating effective communication. Examples of brand essence include:
- Disney: “Fun family entertainment.”
- Nike: “Innovation and inspiration.”
- Ritz Carlton: “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”
- Volvo: “Safety.”
It is important to note that the essence of a brand is not always a slogan used for communication with the audience. It can be an internal definition that serves as the foundation for strategic planning.
How to Build a Brand Wheel
The process of creating a basic version of the Brand Wheel begins with defining the company's attributes. Then an analysis is carried out, which includes the following steps:
- Define attributes: Create a list of key characteristics of your product, including its functionalities and physical properties.
- Identify benefits: Determine the target audience and analyze what benefits your product provides, distinguishing it from competitors.
- Find values: Identify the emotions and associations that arise for consumers when using your product.
- Describe personality: Create an image of your brand as a person by defining its characteristics and behavior.
- Formulate essence: Highlight the core idea of your brand that will be clear and appealing to consumers.
Examples of Successful Brands
To illustrate the principles of the Brand Wheel, examples of well-known companies can be provided. For instance, Mercedes-Benz attributes include: German quality, elitism, and high price. The benefits lie in the reliability and safety of the cars. The brand's values are associated with enhancing the owner's prestige, and its personality is expressed in a solid and authoritative image. The essence of the brand can be characterized as “engineering excellence.”
The development of the Brand Wheel is often carried out by teams of marketers and product managers who gather data through market research, customer surveys, and competitive analysis. In some cases, companies create two versions of the Brand Wheel — the current and the desired — to determine how the brand is perceived now and how it would like to be in the future.
Applying the Brand Wheel allows not only to establish internal understanding of the company's identity but also to develop a clear strategy for attracting and retaining customers. For example, the company "My Family" changed its marketing strategy when it realized that consumers did not identify with the brand. Shifting the focus to family values and warm relationships significantly improved brand awareness and increased product consumption.