How Does Consistent Branding for Festivals Affect Brand Equity?

Rachel Grant

ID: 20117832

Critical Practice (VIS6037)

Tutor: Colette Jeffrey

Word Count: 6578

Abstract

This essay explores how a consistent festival brand identity affects brand equity, including visual consistency, consistent brand associations and consistency within a brand’s core values. Accordingly, this research was conducted through interviews with industry professionals, an online survey and a virtual industry talk. Further secondary research has been acquired through journals, books, websites and documentary films. The analysis of this research indicates that a successful festival with a high level of brand equity is supported by a cohesive brand identity, where the visuals emulate the event experience and represent the brand’s purpose and core values. Additionally, festival brands should anticipate trends and adapt elements of the brand design to maintain a current and refreshing identity.

Introduction

Designing for festivals can be challenging due to the fact that you are marketing an experience, a feeling, an array of emotions, rather than a tangible product. The festival brand needs to be able to emulate this sentiment, and visually describe their event through illustrations, images and typefaces to create an all-encompassing identity. Additionally, a festival brand needs to appeal to a rather wide target audience of unique people with a range of interests, who would all enjoy the event. People often attend a festival when the messaging resonates with them, therefore it is important for a festival’s brand identity to clearly communicate their values and brand purpose throughout the brand identity as well as remaining consistent with these values as a company to build trust with their customer base.

This essay explores whether consistent branding is fundamental for festivals and how it affects brand equity. This will be investigated through various points across four chapters. These points include visual consistency, whether or not brand values are consistent with the identity and how companies can use brand associations to their advantage. This essay looks at the most effective ways to communicate a festival’s message through their identity and explores which branding techniques improve brand equity, all of this information can be applied when building a new brand identity for a festival. This research has informed the thinking on an ongoing design project to create a cohesive brand identity for the Birmingham Fringe Festival. The first chapter explains the origins of brand identity and how visual differentiation is crucial in an oversaturated market and goes on to give an overview of the definition of brand equity. It also covers what brand associations are and the way in which an Afrikaans art festival utilises the associations people have with the festival brand and how this affects its brand equity. In Chapter Two, this essay investigates the relationship between a brand’s core values and their brand identity and how an honest brand can build a high level of loyalty. The third chapter goes on to examine the consequences when a brand does not fulfil all of their public promises and finally, Chapter Four explores some examples of successful festival brand identities, such as Latitude Festival and Green Man Festival, who are visually consistent, consistent with their core values and messaging and with their brand promises.

Chapter One: The Origins of Brand Identity

Early humans developed clothing, markings, dances and other visual symbols to classify themselves into tribes. As communities grew and evolved, the identifying marks that were once just for categorisation, became a symbol of ownership within trade for example, the branding of cattle, a practice of the ancient Egyptians to visually signify their possession (Airey, 2019). There is even evidence of wall markings in the city of Pompeii that seem to have been used for branding purposes as well as electoral campaigns. These wall markings allowed tradesmen to visually present their company to the public (see Fig.1), and with the invention of paper and block printing in China, visual communication boomed (O’Neill, 2015). The use of visual symbols meant that tradesmen could promote their stock to the common people, who were primarily illiterate. Throughout the centuries more and more branding techniques developed as a way for businesses to distinguish themselves and build a loyal customer base. In the modern era that we live in, ‘most companies have carved out their own niche in an increasingly overcrowded market’ (O’Neill, 2015) and visual brands now range from the event branding that this research will focus on, to the branding of political parties, small hand-crafted businesses and personal brands of reality TV stars. To succeed, all of these companies need to appear unique within their industry. Airey (2019) explains that ‘when the difference between two functionally similar products is minimal, there’s a need to create an emotional differentiation’ (p. 07), a quality product is not enough in an extremely saturated market, a brand needs to connect with the consumer on a personal level to give them a motive to purchase their product over any other similar brand. What effect does this visual variation actually have on the market performance of these companies? This response is known as brand equity and is defined as ‘the differential effect of brand knowledge on customer response’ as referenced in Kohli and Leuthesser (2001). They break this definition down into three parts, the differentiation, the brand knowledge and the customer response. The consumers ought to be able to recognise the distinction between brands and acknowledge that this variation means something to them, and consequently respond positively to it by aspiring to be loyal to the brand and prepared to pay more for their preference.

A brand’s image has a significant effect on their market performance, so it is crucial to ensure that all elements of the brand persona resonate with the target audience (Kohli and Leuthesser, 2001). The brand name is a colossal part of the company identity, and it holds a lot of importance when it comes to creating brand awareness in the mind of the consumer. Positive connotations, easy to recall and related to the product are all factors that produce an effective brand name. Unlike other components of the brand identity, the name is something that is much more difficult to change without losing a large part of the loyal customer base because a lot of the brand knowledge revolves around it and customers are likely to not recognise the product, therefore selecting a strong name before building the brand is highly important.

An effective way to increase brand equity is with an iconic logo. To be able to stand out amongst a large amount of visual chaos, brands require a strong logo because ‘consumers are more adept at processing visual information’ (Kohli and Leuthesser, 2001). Logos are one of the most valuable components within a brand’s image for creating differentiation, especially on the shelf where all of the product’s competition is adjacent to it. A bold, meaningful and compelling logo can be hugely important to build brand awareness because when a logo is recognisable to customers, it becomes familiar to them and the brand is no longer a ‘stranger’, thus increasing their confidence in the product and making them more likely to make a purchase. Brand awareness is the customer’s adeptness to connect the brand to its product category. Brand awareness can be developed through the simple repetition of advertising, but frequent exposure through promotions and contests is another way to make people aware of the brand (Kohli and Leuthesser, 2001) and is an advertising technique often used in festival and general event advertising. These event promotions are particularly successful because there is a clear audience that is being appealed to, so choosing sponsors that align with the values of the event demographic, leads to high sales for that company. Furthermore, customers may create a mental link between a brand sponsoring an event and the actual event brand, this is known as a brand association. Essentially, brands have the ability to ‘be linked to other entities that have their own knowledge structures in the minds of consumers’ (Keller, 2008).

Consumers may infer that any values or characteristics of one entity is true to the brand they have mentally linked it to. Keller (2008) describes this as the brand borrowing a certain amount of brand knowledge of the entity it’s associated with because of the connection made by the customer, and even suggests that the brand gains a small amount of their brand equity. These links may be to the country an item is produced within, the store in which the product is sold, another product or an emotion. Brands can and often do use these associations to their advantage. For instance, brands may carry out a charity campaign to capitalise on the emotions associated with the cause and establish their brand personality as one that embodies trust, care and social activism and evoke positive feelings of self-respect, generosity and altruism in the consumer (Keller, 2008). A combination of these brand associations come together to construct a brand image for the company and represent the general, wider impression of the brand (Kohli and Leuthesser, 2001). It is necessary that brand associations are consistent with each other and don’t send the customer mixed messages or contradict the values of the brand. The brand equity can be harmed if the associations that correspond to the brand image are inconsistent.

Once brands understand the associations consumers have with their company and other entities, they can utilise this knowledge for future changes to their branding, and upcoming companies can also use this information when developing their initial branding. A study of an Afrikaans art and culture festival in South Africa by Dreyer and Slabbert (2012) delves into the associations made with the brand and the factors that influence them as well as the impact of demographic characteristics on the festival associations. Their research focuses on the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK) which is a festival in the town of Oudtshoorn and focuses on visual and performing arts. Having a powerful brand that appeals to everyone within the target audience is what a festival requires to build a large base of customers that return to the event year after year, it is with ‘the creation of a distinctive brand image, a tourism product such as Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK) can position its product effectively leading to a competitive advantage’ (Dreyer and Slabbert, 2012). In order to investigate the brand associations held by the KKNK festival goers, Dreyer and Slabbert (2012) carried out a survey over five days at the event and focused on two main points, the demographic profile of those answering the questionnaire and their associations with the main brand building blocks. Within the results, it was found that the associations were positive which adds value to the branding in place at the time of the survey. A high percentage of festival goers stated that the branding was fun, interesting, creative and can be associated with high levels of service as well as high quality productions. These responses reinforce the importance of taking brand associations into consideration when designing for a festival because the consumers of KKNK associate its visuals with a high-quality experience. This is important to focus on in event branding because the product is intangible and when customers can picture the experience they will have at the festival from the visual identity, a quality brand image has been created. Ensuring that aspects of the consumer’s positive associations are consistent with the visual branding and brand values of the festival will increase the amount of return visitors.

The branding includes bright and playful illustrations depicting acts at the festival (see Fig. 2). The brand associations the customers have with the festival have clearly been taken into consideration in the designs. A large number of customers stated that they associated the KKNK brand with high quality productions and the way the performers are illustrated in a visually exciting and colourful way supports this. The KKNK festival appeals to a wide target audience and is open to a range of ages and interests so it is important that the branding can reach a broad pool of people but also stay relevant to the event. The example of the festival identity shown in Fig. 2 achieves this with an illustrative style that is attractive to both adults and children as well as being creative and representing the artistic nature of the event.

Although this festival’s brand associations are consistent and are reflected in the branding, this has not necessarily increased the brand equity of the festival. Dreyer and Slabbert (2012) state that ‘the profile of visitors to this festival has stayed very much the same over the last five years’ and suggest that due to the fact that the current brand appeals so effectively to their audience and their associations, the festival is not attracting new visitors. The KKNK festival identity has developed a high level of brand awareness and loyalty with their customer base but to be able to attract a new market they may need to adjust the brand identity or develop a subbrand to support the main festival brand ‘where the basic format of the brand stays the same, but an image or wording is added when developing marketing material for new markets’ (Dreyer and Slabbert, 2012). Acknowledging the returning customers is a way to for the festival maintain its brand loyalty, in an interview with Luke Tonge, director of Birmingham Design, he stated that brands can reward their loyal customers ‘with appealing and relevant branding… including the dates or themespecific brand elements, so they can easily tell each year’s collateral apart’ (see Appendix 4).