IN CLEAR FOCUS: For our 300th episode, strategist Ulli Appelbaum, author of “The Science of Brand Associations,” reveals why brand associations are the operating system of marketing. He explains how brands exist as memory networks, and why their strength predicts 80% of future purchases. Ulli also discusses his evidence-based framework, grounded in neuroscience, for building stronger associations that drive growth and command premium prices. Hear why advertising should reinforce brand memory through associations.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS
Ulli Appelbaum: You can determine based on the strength of your brand today, how successful it will be in the future. Brands with the strongest association networks are the most successful in the market. They grow faster than anyone else and they have the strongest position than anyone else in the market.
Adrian Tennant:
You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. What makes a brand stick in our minds while others fade into obscurity? Well, the answer lies in brand associations, the mental networks of meanings, feelings, and experiences that determine whether a brand grows or stagnates, commands premium prices, or competes on cost alone. Today’s guest has spent over 25 years studying what actually works in brand building. Ulli Appelbaum is an internationally recognized brand strategist who’s worked with clients including Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Nestle, and Harley-Davidson, among many others. After senior strategy roles at BBDO Germany and Leo Burnett Chicago, Ulli founded his consultancy, First the Trousers, Then the Shoes. Ulli is the author of “The Brand Positioning Workbook,” which analyzes over 1,200 case studies to identify 26 universal success triggers, and the accompanying Brand Positioning Method Cards used by thousands of marketers worldwide. His latest book, “The Science of Brand Associations: Win Minds, Win Markets,” is the first comprehensive evidence-based guide focused exclusively on how brands are formed, stored, and retrieved in the human brain, grounded in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. To discuss why brand associations matter more than ever, I’m delighted that Ulli is joining us today from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ulli, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Ulli Appelbaum: Hi, thanks for having me. Very excited to be on your show.
Adrian Tennant: Ulli, you’ve built an impressive career in brand strategy across multiple continents, from BBDO in your native Germany to Leo Burnett in Chicago. What drew you to the strategy side of advertising?
Ulli Appelbaum: That’s a good question. I’m not sure I built a strong career. I think I stumbled into a career and into different job opportunities, but I was always interested, what drove me always was understanding people, as basic as it sounds. So at the time when I was at university, a long, long time ago, you know, it was still the great era of magazines and stuff like that. Every magazine I would pick, I would first look at the interview. They typically had an interview of some kind of like famous person or business person or celebrity. I would always read the interviews first. And that has always driven me, whether it’s trying to understand a Hungarian housewife or the attitude a Hungarian woman has with washing her hair when trying to launch P&G brands in Eastern Europe. has always been a core driver. And to me, it doesn’t really matter if it’s B2B or B2C. At the end of the day, it’s always people making decisions and people trying to solve problems. So that’s really what has driven me. And over the years, it’s been almost 30 years, I’m still as interested in the subject as I was before. But the focus of my interest has changed, like the latest one being brand associations. So it just evolved over time, which keeps it fresh and interesting, you know.
Adrian Tennant: Ulli, how did you end up making Minneapolis your home?
Ulli Appelbaum: So that’s a good question. Initially, I got a job offer from a company called Fallon that is based here in Minneapolis. And when they offered me a job, it was early 2000. They were at the peak of their global reputation in terms of creativity. So, you know, you didn’t really think about, “Am I going to do it or not?” You literally ask, “When can I start?” And so they brought me over at the time. And Minneapolis is a great city. And then I met my wife. And then in between, we spent a few years in Chicago and one year in Los Angeles. But then we were expecting our third child, and we decided, “You know what, let’s move back to Minneapolis for lifestyle choices.” So it was really to be surrounded by my wife’s family, because the quality of life here was fantastic. It’s a great place to raise a family. And the job was – I decided – the only chance I have to survive in Minneapolis if I didn’t want to take like a 40% salary cut coming from a big city like Chicago or LA was to start my own business. That’s when I decided to start my own business as well. So lifestyle, personal reasons led to Minneapolis.
Adrian Tennant: Well, it was 2014 when you founded your consultancy with the wonderfully unusual name, First the Trousers, Then the Shoes. Can you tell us the story behind that name and what it says about your philosophy on strategy?
Ulli Appelbaum: So first is first, the trials, there’s an order to things, right? So I believe in strategy first, and it’s a recurring theme. It’s funny, a couple of weeks ago, I talked to a CEO about how he wanted to grow and direct his growth a bit more. He was successful already in what he was doing, and I offered him a brand strategy project to clearly define who their core audience is, how he needs to position his company, and stuff like that. And so he turned me down and instead decided to do a package redesign for $500,000, which would have been like five times more than what I would have charged him. So it’s a recurring theme that I experience still to this day, where people just want to put the cart before the horse, or the shoes before the trousers. So, strategy first, but I also believe strategy is a creative problem-solving exercise. It’s not a rational, logical, deductive process where you look at data and then come to the conclusion, because we are all smart. Everyone who works with competitors has the same level of education, access to the same data, the same brain power, so we automatically come to the same conclusions, basically. And that’s where I think creative problem-solving kicks in, because using specific techniques to make you look at a problem from a different way, or makes you think about the solution about a different way, leads to innovative and novel solutions to an existing problem, which is basically the definition of creative problem-solving. I wanted to express it in the title, I didn’t want to be like “Applebaum Brand Consulting” or whatever, and decided to call it First the Trousers, Then the Shoes. I’m not going to confirm or deny that a little bit of liquor was involved in the process, but the following morning, when I woke up, this was the name that stuck with me.
Adrian Tennant: Nice. Well, it’s certainly memorable. Your first book, “The Brand Positioning Workbook,” is based on analysing over 1,200 case studies of effective brand building. Well, Ulli, what motivated you to undertake such an extensive research project?
Ulli Appelbaum: This was over a period of like 10, 12 years, so to say. So writing the book took me like a long time because you want to write a book and then life takes over, and then you focus on other things, and then you come back and all these kind of things. Early in my career, when I started to work in advertising and marketing, I started to notice patterns, and I was lucky enough to work on international businesses. And I was always fascinated by case studies as a way to learn. And I started to observe patterns. A pattern could be a British olive oil company claiming its source of origin as a way to add value to its brand. And then you’d see a German brand claiming its German source of origin to promote its brand in Japan. At the same time, there was also Foster’s Beer claiming its Australian origin. So I said, “Okay, there are brands that claim their origin. Other brands claim their ingredients. Other brands try to connect with their consumers at a shared value level and all this kind of thing. How many of these patterns can I identify?” And over the years, I collected case studies. And I still have, like, at the time, and you probably know that, too, there were, like, big books of case studies. You didn’t have it digitally, so you had, like, big libraries. And very pragmatically, I looked at a case study, “Is there a new pattern I identify, or is that an existing one? If it’s a new one, I’m going to add it to my list.” And then after like 1,000, 1,100, something like that, I started to always fall into my 26 patterns. And then I decided, “Okay, that’s enough is enough. I’m going to stop here. I can’t find more patterns.” And that’s how I came up with these 26 territories. You can argue either 25, either 27. I’m not going to nitpick that. You can slice and dice it the way you want. But I ended up with these 26 territories. And the idea really of that methodology is if you try to position a brand and you explore these 26 sources of association, you really come up with an interesting list of hypotheses on how to position that brand that you then need to, you know, narrow down, match with your objectives, try to see if that aligns with your consumers, and then validate it if you want to. But it’s a way to stimulate your thinking when looking for a potential solution to a positioning problem. That’s really what it does. It accelerates the process significantly.
Adrian Tennant: Well, you also created the Brand Positioning Method Cards as a practical toolkit. How do marketers typically use these cards in their positioning work?
Ulli Appelbaum: So what I’ve noticed is, weirdly enough, it’s not so much for workshops, it’s for individuals who feel like they are stuck in their thought process. So they’re working on a problem, on an assignment, and they are stuck. They don’t know how to move forward. So what they do is they pull a card out. So it’s basically the 26 territories summarized into 26 method cards, which, you know, a short description of what the territory is, and then a couple of questions to stimulate your thinking along the lines of this territory. So a lot of people just use it as a thought starter or a stimulant for, you know, “I’m stuck, I don’t know how else to approach this problem, let me grab a card. Oh, now you want me to look at it from a competitive weakness perspective or from a user occasion perspective.” It’s going to release new ideas and new thoughts in the process. But the irony, frankly, is that I really put the cart before the horse here because initially, I put all this content for free on the internet. But that’s when the internet shifted to mobile and people were not interested in long content. So I decided, “Okay, how do I repurpose that content? Let me do these Method Cards so I can have like a marketing device that I can send to potential clients.” People started to ask me to send it to them, so I started to sell them basically. And then I decided a few years later, “Okay, so the cards are out, but I’ve never explained the methodology.” So I wrote “The Positioning Workbook” to explain the methodology that applies to the cards. And then three years later, I’m like, “Okay, so the first book focuses on sources of brand associations, but I never really talked about brand associations.” I literally went the other way around on working myself up to explain basically what I’m doing over the years.
Adrian Tennant: Great segue, let’s talk about your latest book, “The Science of Brand Associations: Win Minds, Win Markets.” Now Ulli, you’ve said that despite everyone discussing brand association, there isn’t a single book on Amazon dedicated exclusively to this topic. First of all, what made you realize this gap existed?
Ulli Appelbaum: And I realized that all the people, the thought leaders that I follow in marketing use, whether it’s large global research companies, whether it’s like academia, like the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, whether it’s like marketing professionals, they all use in one form or another this term brand associations to explain their work. And then I was like, “Okay, well, if they all use it, what can we learn about that more specifically?” And that’s when I started on Amazon thinking like, “Okay, what is my competition if I want to write a book about that?” And I realized there is no competition because there is not one single book that either has “Brand associations” in its title or that focuses exclusively on explaining this concept. And at first, to be honest, I scratched my head and I thought, “Well, maybe it’s not worth writing a book if no one literally has written a book about that. Why would they be interested in that?” But then I realized, as I said, all these marketing people I follow use the concept actively in their work. Companies like Kantar and Ipsos – global research companies have this literally embedded in their methodologies and in their thought leadership pieces. So I decided to further research brand association and what’s behind it. What I realized is there’s a tremendous amount of science behind it to explain how brand association, in a nutshell, it’s really brand memories, right? It’s memory structures. So there’s a lot of science to explain that. And there’s a lot of data and quantitative studies that support the need for brand association and that support the strength of brand association. You have the science, you have the data. No one bothered to curate this content. So basically, the book is a curation of what I look at the best-in-class thinking around brand associations. And so, since no one did it, I decided I’m going to be the one to write this book. And here we go.
Adrian Tennant: In the book, you argue that brand associations aren’t just one component of branding. They’re the – quote – “operating system of marketing” – end quote. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Ulli Appelbaum: Absolutely. There’s actually a friend of mine who came up with this analogy of the operating system. But when you think about it, brand associations are networks of memories that you have about a specific offering. And these memories can be semantic, things that the brand communicates about itself, can be based on experiences, or can be based on emotions. And these networks compose what basically is a brand. Without this memory, there is no brand, period. Because that’s what the nature of the brand is. It’s the sum of these memories. So that’s number one. Number two is the way these memories are formed and interact with each other and the role they play together, for me, very much explains how we learn about brand, how we form an opinion about brand, how we strengthen the opinion, and the associations we have with brain, which for me is the mechanism of an operating system. It literally brings together the input through our senses, the memory-formation process, and our interaction with our own value system, and this whole complexity is managed, basically, in this network of associations. So that’s why I call it the operating system. Very simply, without brand memories, if I tell you, “What do you associate with the Indonesian brand Jaja” – I’m making some of them up here – and you’re like, “I have no idea what that brand is, I really don’t associate anything with that brand.” Well, there is no brand, it doesn’t exist in your mind at least. And the example is totally fake, but just as a way to illustrate it.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with brand strategist Ulli Appelbaum, the author of “The Science of Brand Associations: Win Minds, Win Markets.” Ulli, your book draws heavily on neuroscience and cognitive psychology. You outline 10 data-backed reasons why brand associations drive business results. Could you share just a couple of the most important ones that marketers should understand?
Ulli Appelbaum: Absolutely. And this data is readily available, and there’s plenty of data to support this. The number one is brands with strong brand association networks. And the core concept is that the strength of the association network determines how quickly you think about this brand in a moment of purchase. Other call this like mental availability, for example. “I need to buy … I don’t know … a dressing for my salad for dinner. What brand comes to mind first?” That is like the mechanism. And the stronger the association network, the faster this brand will come to mind, hopefully with the right associations that makes me think, “I want to buy this brand because I remember the taste was great and my family loved it and it’s all natural” – making stuff up here as potential association. So, data shows very clearly that brands with the strongest association networks are the most successful in the market. They grow faster than anyone else, and they have the strongest position than anyone else in the market. So, market leaders will have the strongest brand association networks. A company like Kantar, the research company, shows that brands with a strong brand association network, they call it “brand predisposition,” explain 80% of future brand purchases. So you can determine, based on the strength of your brand today, how successful it will be in the future. And Kantar quantifies this to 80%. But then there are a whole bunch of other metrics which show you that brands with strong brand association networks typically command a higher price premium than brands without, recover faster from recessions, etc, etc. So, I mean, look at the evidence out there. It’s just overwhelming not to think about brand association when you see all that data to support that. It’s just mind-blowing.
Adrian Tennant: Well, your book provides practical frameworks, including nine science-backed strategies and 14 evidence-based principles for building stronger brands. Ulli, how do these translate into actionable steps for a marketing director or a CMO?
Ulli Appelbaum: All these principles and steps and learnings are summarized in scorecards. And it’s literally that allows you to self-assess how strong your brand is. And I break it down into three sections, basically. One is when you think about the network of brand association you try to create, it’s basically your desired brand association. It’s basically your positioning, right? It’s what do you want in three to five years consumers to associate with your offering? Which is basically how do you want to position your brand? Now, these networks, science and data shows that they need to fulfill a certain number of criterias. And these include things like for the positioning itself, it includes, it needs to clearly reference the category you’re playing in. Now, you know, consumers need to know that if you’re selling a sports drink, it needs to be classified as a sports drink. Now, for packaged goods, that seems a bit more obvious, but when you think about IT companies or software companies, often you have no idea what they’re actually offering because it’s not clear where it is organized in the consumer’s brain. So, the second thing is you need to systematically use distinctive brand assets. So, you can ask yourself when you look at your positioning platform, “Do we have brand assets as part of the strategic mix?” The third element is obviously, do those associations tap into core drivers of the category, reasons for why I purchased category XYZ. And you’d be surprised by how many companies don’t tap into the very core drivers of a given category, for example. It’s just mind-blowing. You know, they assume it as being like a cost of entry, or table stakes, or everyone claims it, so why would I do that? And one example I can mention, which is Tide, the detergent. Tide spends millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, associating itself with the concept of clean. Tide equals clean. The generic benefit of each detergent out there, of any soap, of any cleaning product out there, and yet they’ve decided they want to claim the high ground of the category and promote that in the advertising, and it works very successfully for them. So relevant core category drivers. And then the other part that most people tend to forget is every brand that is really strong elicits an emotional response. That may be an emotion associated with the brand, that may be the personality that is meant to engage consumers emotionally. And why? Because science clearly tells us if we learn something, if we create a memory while in an emotionally aroused state, to put it this way, or while being emotionally engaged, we’re going to remember it better. We’re going to remember it longer. So it’s going to work harder for my brand than if I give you a rational sales argument. So those are like criteria for the positioning itself. And then you have a second scorecard that literally focuses on “Are all the activities I’m doing to build these associations the right one, and am I doing this properly?” And those then become things like, as basic as it sounds, but internal corporate alignment. Does every executive in my company, are they aligned on what we are trying to achieve? And in my experience, in many cases, they are not aligned. It can be, “Do you use emotional storytelling?” And again, the emotions kick in, but the storytelling format, again, science shows us, makes it easier for people to memorize, to organize the information in the brain, because the story is structured. and to recall it. So again, those are all things you can look at that make strong brand association networks. And a marketing director can look at their communication plan or marketing plan and say, “Are we checking all these boxes or not?” So it’s very simple, very pragmatic, very action-focused. And then if, let’s say, you see in your scorecard there’s a weak spot on, I don’t know, the usage, again, of distinctive assets, there are some clear recommendations on what to do about it and how to overcome a weakness and turn that into a strength. So it builds on theory and science and data. It’s very pragmatic and very action-oriented, which is my working style. So I’m not a philosopher, I’m a practitioner. So I use tools to do stuff with, you know.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Well, recently I spoke with Sorin Patilinet, who’s the Global Marketing Effectiveness Executive at PepsiCo. He mentioned during our conversation that marketing mix modelling (MMM) studies typically show that advertising contributes, on average, from 0% to 15% of a brand’s revenues. In your book, you highlight what you call the often missed opportunities of advertising. Ulli, can you explain why it’s not all about grabbing attention?
Ulli Appelbaum: Yes, this is my pet peeve in advertising. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in advertising myself for over 15 years. I’ve drunk on the Kool-Aid, I’ve shared this mantra with my clients, so I’m as guilty as everyone I’m pointing my fingers at right now. So first of all, these marketing mix modeling studies, in my experience as well, what they always show is that the biggest driver for brand success is distribution and market presence. It’s as simple as that. That’s like the biggest driver. And I think the role of advertising is always described as “we need to grab attention. Consumers are not interested in advertising so we need to catch their attention before we can even communicate our benefit or our problem.” I think that’s lazy. I’ve been lazy for 15 years because I think attention is the cost of entry. It’s like you telling me “a car, yes we’re a car builder, but what a car needs, it needs to roll on a road. It needs four wheels. It needs to roll and that’s really the most important thing we need to achieve. Make sure the wheels are round and in rubber so that they stick on the road.” And attention to me feels a bit the same. I think advertising needs to go a step further and either create this brand association, reinforce these brand associations, or refresh these brand associations. So that’s really what brand advertising needs to do. And I think there are people like David Ogilvy that said, “Great advertising,” I’m paraphrasing here, “makes people say, ‘what a great product,’ not ‘what a great ad..’” And that’s, for me, the logic behind it. You see an advertisement and you need to see, “Oh my God, this product is amazing!” Or “This brand is amazing!” As opposed to “This advertising is really cool. What was that for again?” So, advertising needs, in my opinion, to reinforce this brand association and what’s called mental availability. And there’s a study actually done about Effies in Australia that shows advertising that builds this mental availability or nourishes these brand associations, effective longer, acquire more customers, work harder for a longer period of time. So again, there’s plenty of data that shows that this works. And that’s the difference between your 0% and 15% impact on the brand growth. I’d rather have the advertising that has 15% impact on my business than 1% impact on my business. And I think that’s the difference between the two. A lot of people will push back and disagree with that, but the argument is always people don’t like marketing and don’t like to be advertised to. This is America. This is the most commercial country in the world. When Taco Bell has a deal with Doritos, it blows up the internet for weeks. So don’t tell me that we are not interested in commercial marketing products! We are. I think the excuse is always that we don’t make it interesting enough. And that’s another point that is interesting in the study that came out recently is that you need up to seven brand asset touch points in your advertising for 100% of people to recall it. So that goes against this “No one wants to see your logo or show your logo at the end of it.” I’ve argued with clients, you know, “No, no, no, we need to draw the consumer in, tell them a cool story, and then at the end, in the last three seconds, we put the logo in to reveal what brand that is.” I think that’s complete BS, to be honest. Now, when I look at the data that is available out there, it’s the complete opposite. Show immediately what brand it is, have brand cues throughout your advertising to make it hard to forget, and that leads to effective advertising. It’s proven to lead to effective advertising. As I said earlier, I learned for 30 years about people and how to communicate with them, but I also changed my opinions and had to revise my own assumptions of what works and what doesn’t work based on what we’ve learned over those years.
Adrian Tennant: Well, Sorin and I also discussed retail media networks. As you know, many businesses today prioritise short-term performance marketing over long-term brand building. Now, from an evidence-based and brand association perspective, what are the risks of this approach?
Ulli Appelbaum: The major risk is that you miss out on future sales. The data point I mentioned earlier from Kantar, this predisposition leads to 80% of future sales. I’m sure you’re familiar with the 95-5 rule, which basically says that at any given moment in time, only 5% of category buyers are actually in the process of buying. Performance marketing focuses on this 5%. Brand marketing focuses on the 100% of the market. So they include both the 95% who will buy your product next week or next month, and the people who are literally an hour away from going to the grocery store to fill up their shopping cart. So, brand-building activities secure this future growth because if you only do performance marketing, you’re going to focus on 5% of the market. Good luck finding this 5% in the nation. And then next week, you’re going to focus on the other 5% without previously having built this awareness, these brand associations. So, you may help yourself in the very short term, but ultimately you hurt yourself in the long term. And again, there’s so much evidence right now that shows that the perfect balance between the two is a combination of brand-building activities that prepares the future sales and performance-driven activities. And the magic, the theoretical number is 60-40, 60% brand building, 40% performance focused, but that changes by category. So some categories will require 80% brand building, other categories will require 60% performance. But the data is there that shows that the combination of the two really leads to the highest success in the market, as opposed to either one or the other. So even just brand-building activities alone are less successful than the combo between brand-building activities and performance-driven marketing. So the combination is the magic mix.
Adrian Tennant: Understanding that brands do exist as mental networks of meanings, feelings, and experiences in consumers’ memories, how should companies approach brand management?
Ulli Appelbaum: Very simply, so what I’ve realized is, and I think in the beginning of the book I talk about all the benefits of looking at the world through brand association, is you shave off 80% of the time you spend discussing useless things in marketing. And I’ve sat in meetings where you discuss, you know, the size of the head of the main character in the brand strategy. I’ve sat in all these weird meetings and what I’ve learned is, if you really think about “What are the three or four associations I need to create?” And finding them is not easy, they need to be validated by data, etc. But once you have them, any other discussion that doesn’t focus on building those associations is futile in my perception. So when you look at advertising, you ask the question, “Do they help me build those associations or maintain or refresh them if the brand had them already?” If not, we don’t need to discuss this. Is a corporation partner that knocked at our door a good fit to help us support these brand associations or slightly? If not, we don’t need to discuss this. Even this whole notion of creating an emotional reaction to your brand activities. You and I probably sat in two days worth of meetings discussing the value of a brand personality. “Is it quirky or is it funny? Is it funny or is it subtle funny?” And you spend hours discussing these things. The simplest way to cut through that is simply to ask, “What is the emotional reaction we want from consumers? We want a chuckle.” That’s enough to define for me the personality. We don’t need to discuss for 26 hours what it’s going to be. Creative is going to help us determine this type of thing. You really understand what are the 3-4 associations you want to build, and the name of the game is reduce it to 3-4 that you can manage. If you have a list of 26 associations, there is no way you can build them, especially if you have a limited budget. And then ask yourself, “Is everything I do, my website, my email marketing, my advertising, my posters, etc, etc,, the content I post on LinkedIn for small businesses, do they support these associations I want to build or not?” If the answer is “no,” I would forget about it. If the answer is “yes,” I would continue to focus. So it gives you a focus and a sharpness of thinking that, as I said, saves you 80% of time that you typically waste on useless discussions and decisions that are really not important in building your brand. And the third point is simply be extremely consistent. I suffer from that, and I need to remind myself is I bore myself with my own content. So I post three times on LinkedIn about brand associations, and I’m like, “Gee, do I need to post a fourth time about brand associations? Seriously?” But there’s so much content, and if I want people to associate me with brand associations, I need to do that for two years. After three posts, I haven’t even started yet. I’m just not even warmed up. But I need to find new ways to speak about association, the value, etc, etc. So being consistent in your clarity over time is what’s going to build your brand successfully. If you chose the right associations, obviously. So those are the three simple things I would do. Determine the two, three associations, decide whether everything you do supports them, or help build them, or help reinforce them, and then be consistent and don’t wear off that strategy. Execute, execute, execute. If you take KitKat, for example, KitKat the candy bar, the tagline, “Take a break, take a KitKat,” is 70 years old. You gotta imagine that. Or Mars with the hunger satisfaction platform. This platform is 20 to 30 years old. There’s something to learn about that. So, me and my three little posts on associations compared to that is nothing. And they spend millions and millions on advertising. So, their wear-out effect should be much higher than my little experience.
Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. If listeners would like to learn more about your books, your strategic consulting work, or connect with you directly, what’s the best way to do so?
Ulli Appelbaum: Thanks for asking. I think the most obvious place is probably LinkedIn, type ‘Ulli Appelbaum’, or go to Amazon and type ‘brand associations.’ I’ll be the only one to pop up, so I like that. Or you can check out my website, which is first-the-trousers.com. There you can see the type of clients I work with, the feedback I get. You get a lot of free content as well on brand strategy, curated by me, things that I find interesting, frankly, very egoistically. But you also have access to infographics from the book, you have access to the scorecards, and you even have access to an online survey, which I call “The Master Survey,” where you can answer 20 questions, and within a minute or two, you’ll get a summary, an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your brand. the power of AI. The results are compelling. Marketing directors, clients of mine, or friends of mine who have taken the survey are impressed by the quality of the analysis that comes out of there. And again, those things are just based on the principles described in the book. So it’s all science-backed evidence validated. So yeah, that’s the way to reach out to me.
Adrian Tennant: Ulli, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Ulli Appelbaum: Thanks so much for having me. Great questions, and I really enjoyed the conversation.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Ulli Appelbaum, the author of “The Science of Brand Associations.” As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com, just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00: Introduction to Brand Associations
2:24: Ulli Appelbaum’s Career Journey
3:59: Relocating to Minneapolis
5:03: The Meaning Behind “First the Trousers, Then the Shoes”
7:05: Motivation for “The Brand Positioning Workbook”
9:54: Using the Brand Positioning Method Cards
11:38: “The Science of Brand Associations”
14:06: Brand Associations as the Operating System of Marketing
17:24: Data-Backed Reasons for Brand Associations
19:32: Actionable Steps for Marketers
24:14: The Role of Advertising Beyond Attention
29:06: Risks of Short-Term Performance Marketing
31:04: Approaching Brand Management
35:23: Connecting with Ulli Appelbaum
