The Brand and Consumer Triangle

A brand is like a promise.

Say you run a roofing company. You make the brand, you hand it to the customer, the customer receives it. That is the straight line most owners picture, and if it were true, every business with a nice logo would be successful. Branding is a triangle with three corners: the business, the brand and the consumer. Perception is what gets formed in the space between the three, and once you see it as a triangle you stop being surprised when the customer’s version of your brand does not match yours.

The three corners

The first corner is the business. That is you, your people, your internal brand, the actual work, and every decision you make on a Tuesday. This is the corner you control most.

The second corner is the brand. It is separate from the business. It is the set of signals the business sends out: the name, the look, the message, the experience, everything from the last several lessons. You build it, but once it is out there it starts to live on its own. Your truck is driving around forming impressions while you are asleep.

The third corner is the consumer. They bring their own history, their own beliefs, their own idea of what a plumber or a restaurant or a consultant is supposed to be. The book defines perception as whatever someone believes to be real or true to them, and that definition is why the same brand can look premium to one person and overpriced to another. The consumer interprets your brand using tools you did not give them.

Where perception is actually made

Here is the distinction that changes how you spend money. Perception gets made along the edges, where the corners meet, and that is where you look.

Between the business and the brand is the question of honesty. Does the brand tell the truth about the business? When the look says premium and the follow-up call never comes, that edge is broken, and the customer trusts the experience over the logo every time. The chef with the red chairs and the green logo had a business he was proud of and a brand that told a different story. That edge was broken before he served his first plate.

Between the brand and the consumer is the question of fit. Does the brand speak in the consumer’s language, show up where they look, and answer the problem the way they describe it? This is the avatar work. A brand can be true to the business and still miss the consumer completely, because it was designed for the owner’s taste. The coupon clipper and the high-end product sit on this edge.

Between the consumer and the business is the question of experience. This is the edge the brand does not control, because it is what actually happens when the customer deals with you. It is the phone call, the job, the invoice, the way a complaint is handled. If this edge is strong, the brand can be weak and still survive on referrals. If this edge is weak, no brand can save it for long.

Perception is the shape of that whole triangle. Strengthen one edge and ignore the others and the triangle leans, and the customer feels the lean without being able to name it.

What you control and what you do not

You are not in full control of your reflection to the market. The book is honest about that. What matters is what you can control, and using that control to the fullest, because the more you use it the more you get. It is cumulative over the life of the business.

So look at the triangle again. You control the business corner more than any other. You control the brand corner mostly, at least what you send out, if not how it is received. You do not control the consumer corner at all. You can only choose which consumers you are building for, and make sure your branding and image are set up for those groups you want to attract.

That is why the avatar comes before the logo, and why the internal brand comes before both. You are choosing the third corner on purpose so that the other two can be built to meet it. An owner who skips that is building a triangle with one corner floating in space and wondering why the shape keeps changing.

One edge this week

Draw the triangle on a page: business, brand, consumer. On each of the three edges write one sentence describing how strong that connection is today, in your honest opinion, and one piece of evidence for your answer. Then circle the weakest edge and decide on one action this week that strengthens it. Leave the other two alone until that one moves.

It takes an hour or two and it is free. The evidence for the consumer-to-business edge is the hard part, because it lives in your customers’ heads. Two or three short conversations with past customers, asking what they expected and what they got, will tell you more than a month of guessing.