Established model
Brand identity planning
David A. Aaker · 1996
A core identity that holds still, an extended identity around it, and an explicit statement of what the brand offers.
Its place in the frameworkBrand Core›Brand Identity
What it does
It asks a brand to be considered as a product, an organisation, a person and a symbol in turn, then to separate the few elements that must never move from the many that can flex by market and campaign. That separation is what lets a brand be consistent without being rigid, which is the practical problem it exists to solve.
- Reach for it when
- When a brand has to work across several markets or product lines without fragmenting.
- Where it stops
- It is a planning structure of considerable size. Applied to a small business it produces more document than brand.
David A. Aaker, Building Strong Brands, Free Press, 1996.
Why it sits at Brand Identity
What the brand is made of on the outside: what it stands for, how it behaves, how it looks, how it sounds, and the discipline that keeps those recognisably the same thing.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- Brand valuesKapferer’s identity prism, in which culture — the value system the brand draws on — is one of the six facets; and Aaker’s brand-as-organisation perspective, which treats organisational attributes as part of identity rather than as background to it.
- Brand personalityAaker’s brand personality dimensions (1997), and Kapferer’s identity prism, in which personality is one of six facets rather than the whole.
- Visual systemWork on distinctive brand assets: the finding that recognition attaches to specific, consistently used elements rather than to overall design quality.
- Verbal systemBrand architecture and naming literature, and the tone-of-voice practice that grew out of it.
- ConsistencyIntegrated marketing communications: consistency across channels as the mechanism by which brand associations accumulate rather than compete.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Brand Identity lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Brand PerceptionIdentity is what is sent; perception is what arrives, and they are measured separately.
- Market CoreThe identity is executed through channels, and each channel constrains what can be expressed.
- Business CoreBrand assets are assets, and belong in the register with an owner like anything else.
- Omni CoreConsistency is tested where customers actually meet the brand, not in the guidelines.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Brand Identity too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- The brand identity prismIdentity has six facets, some projected by the company and some constructed by the people who buy.
Elsewhere in Brand Core
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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