| What is Brand-Framing?
Latino Brand-Framing, The Architecture of Marketing to Latinos.
By Paul T. Goya
The best brands spend years defining their advertising ideas, carefully framing the language in which they present them, building a structure to encase the brand-equity of their message. Doing this pays off; by harnessing the real and actionable language that the consumer actually speaks, these brands unravel their competition by firmly and inescapably placing them on the defensive.
Few marketers understand how best to get their messages across. The rest are exhausted from cursing their bad marketing results and frustrated by not being able to "see" what is going wrong... making them feel helpless. Some advertisers don't get advertising, period. They don't know why some brands win the consumer's attention, nor why will they continue to define the rules.
But some Latino marketers have figured it out!
Why can the successful brands in the Latino marketplace laugh all the way to the bank? Because they have framed virtually every issue from their own and exclusive perspective, creating a powerful viewpoint. They have put a huge amount of money into framing the language from their own market view, getting it out there, repetitively, congruently. Whereas other brands targeting Latinos have done virtually nothing but send messages, announcements, promises, translations and promotions. Many Latino market brand managers and their agencies haven't thought about it at all. That's the problem. They don't understand that "Latino Brand-Framing" is what they have to master.
Latino Brand-Framing is an exponentially powerful marketing operation, and it understands what the whole system is about: setting the rules, laying out the "grid" of the game. It basically builds infrastructure. Why? Because for the Latino market framer, the highest value is preserving and defending the "exclusive frame" that the brand itself stands for in the Latino consumer's mind.
He or she who sets the frame wins the game. In fact, our job as Latino marketing people is to "reframe" the marketing discussion in order to create brand leadership from a different perspective than the promise-benefit classic paradigm. It's one thing to make a claim, it's another thing to encompass the whole discussion. That's what framing is about. It's a matter of taking a slice of real life and framing it within the terms of marketing. Few Latino marketing people recognize that the correct Brand-Framing is what really moves consumers, so they don't understand how to defend themselves against it. Only a few brands are constantly updating their consumer research and insight-mining to learn how best to encompass the market as to create and preserve their own Latino Brand-Frame. You can probably spot them with little thought.
"Can you hear me now?"
Successful Latino brands always have a solid "Brand-Framing," where every word is defined relative to a conceptual marketing "framework". If you create a message like the expression "get the crunch" as the promise of what fried chicken lovers can get only from a place called Church's chicken, (and which you won't get anywhere else) that's a Brand-Frame. If you say for example that a certain brand represents the "now," you promise the consumer a "fresh start", and that the competition represents the past, and that all things are going to be valid only "in the now" you are implicitly mentioning your brand, (and making an allusion to the competition) because your brand has been mentally attached to that benefit becoming a synonym with the "right thing". The expression later gets picked up by people as if it were a “neutral term" (like Xeroxing a document), which it is not. Since we all want to live in "the now," then the brand that helps us achieve this is the hero, whereas that which tries to "take us to the past" is the villain.
Latino Brand-Framing works in every possible form of communication, even in politics and religion propaganda. If an ideology says: "revolution is love" it means that the opposition of that idea are war mongers and evil people. If a candidate frames an opponent's changes of opinion on critical issues as "flip-flopping" every time the latter gives a new opinion, people will be driven to think that he is an indecisive person and the other guy is a bold and steady leader. Once the Latino Brand-Framing is working, it's not about the brand any more. It becomes about "right and wrong", and approving of it becomes implicitly about choosing good over bad. Even though a lot of consumers may not approve of the brand, that doesn't mean they are opposed to what is "right", because the advertising has Brand-Framed the issue on its side. It can even be that the product is rejected, but its Brand-Framing is a totally different story and will remain intact.
You've been Brand-Framed. Ouch!
Every successful brand in the Latino market has already framed itself and has also reframed the competition in advance. The other brands don’t have a clue what is hosing them because they have been intelligently framed as "not good" for satisfying the consumer "good" (and also the voter's, and so on).
Why are some marketers much better at Latino Brand-Framing then? Because they've invested their attention and intentions into it and to what is traditionally called the "brand-equity" (the message, the content). Over the years their marketing departments have made a heavy investment in pushing it. When the idea finally becomes mainstream, the media (news, talk shows, stand-up comedians, pop music stars, etc) will happily use it. It does not matter whether they mention the "brand" or not. The Brand-Frame agenda includes "word of mouth” and every possible kind of free publicity to keep it top-of-mind and tip-of-tongue. Later, the framing will be part of the popular jargon, comedians will mock the frame, intellectuals will write books stuffing it with other content, hijacking the Brand-Frame, enhancing this exclusive perspective even more. In the meantime, the product will have become a "best seller" a marketing success, a culture brand. Latino Brand-Framing sets up the whole outcome in advance.
Why haven't competitors leveraged Latino Brand-Framing? There's always a good reason for that.
You can see it in the way that some marketing and advertising people are always trying to say something new, funny and "creative." They’re lost in short term tactics. That's how most of the marketing and advertising departments work: pursuing as their highest value the act of "satisfying and entertaining the consumer". They will use their Latino marketing budgets to just follow the latest trend, the next best thing instead of feeding the system. They just assume that the consumer looks for satisfaction and this is what advertising needs to do to beat the competition. They work in the promotion of brand equities that benefits the consumer and functions to promote sales only in the short term.
Only a few marketing people really pay the price for taking care of both their "brand equity" and their "Brand-Framing", with the continuity and discipline it takes to reach the tipping point (critical mass). Architecturally speaking they in essence create a mental framework. Latino Brand-Framing understands that the consumer (the voter, the religious person, the Latino citizen) is always making decisions, and every human choice is always "right or wrong". Latino Brand-Framing projects the brand perspective onto the market and beyond, and finally the whole society ends up encompassed by that framework.
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