Brand Architecture: Etch A Sketch

Okay, welcome back. You probably are getting better at this. You’re, after the Red Bull exercise, are getting better and let’s see what Kyle came up with. Remember our friendly camera person here, Kyle, he worked on the brand personality and I asked him to fill out the brand architecture as well. So let’s figure out what Kyle came up with, okay? So Kyle said if you look at product attributes Etch a Sketch allows you to draw lines. You can do this. It has wheels and it’s smaller. So the benefits Kyle thinks all these product attributes gives is that it’s mobile, you can take in different places.

It allows you to try different things because you can erase it and do it again, and it occupies yourself right. It takes a lot of time but it gives you something interesting to do while you have some time in your hands as a kid. But all of this, product benefits and attributes, give the emotional benefit of fun and expressing yourself through some drawings and some creative pursuit. So the brand personality is someone who is creative and has patience to work through all of this. It does take time. You have to erase; try different things. And the core essence of the brand is then about you the individual, your expressions and your creations, right?

So this brand, as you can see, works from the product attributes, the fact that you can erase, that it is smaller. You can take it to different places, makes it about being fun and expression and about being creative and about you as an individual and your relationship with the outside world. So as a marketer then of Etch-A-Sketch, you need to understand this about Etch-A-Sketch, right? How people use Etch-A-Sketch, what it means to them and hopefully these two exercises have given you a sense of how brands are built. What is a brand in terms of its meaning to a consumer?

So the meaning to a consumer is one aspect of the value of a brand to a firm but it’s the most important aspect in my mind and that determines every other strategy of a brand. So what we have achieved now is understanding what a brand is, what this complex entity is and then we’re going to switch gears into seeing how all of this wraps into identifying the value a brand has for its firm.