Established model
The brand identity prism
Jean-Noël Kapferer · 1992
Identity has six facets, some projected by the company and some constructed by the people who buy.
Its place in the frameworkBrand Core›Brand Identity
What it does
It separates what the brand sends — its physical qualities, its personality, its cultural roots — from what the recipient builds: the relationship, the reflected image of the typical user, and how buying it makes them see themselves. The separation is the contribution, because the second half is where most brands are actually decided and is the half nobody controls.
- Reach for it when
- When identity work keeps producing adjectives, and when the brand a company describes and the one its customers describe do not match.
- Where it stops
- Six facets invite six pieces of filled-in prose. Completed for its own sake it documents a brand rather than deciding one.
Jean-Noël Kapferer, Strategic Brand Management, Kogan Page, 1992.
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.
- Brand identity planningA core identity that holds still, an extended identity around it, and an explicit statement of what the brand offers.
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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