Walking up to the breakfast table not long ago I noticed a fresh new look on the table. “Great Value” cereal.

Within a few trips to the grocery store, there were several boxes of Great Value cereal. Then came Great Value chips (which are tastier than Lay’s, by the way).

At some level, I am sure that I knew that this was Wal-Mart’s house brand. But I didn’t think about it.

Instead I did warm to the crisp, clean branding. Here the brand name of the “generic” was features prominently along with a singly, colorful dominant image. There’s ample white space.

In a recession economy, here was Wal-Mart tyring to do the unthinkable with a store brand: call your attention to it.

And that’s about where it remained in my mind. Until yesterday.

With my wife out-of-town at a PTA conference, I took all four kids to the grocery store. After turning down the first aisle, my 11-year-old shot over to a “Great Value” box. And then the next aisle. And the next.

And then the entire shopping trip turned into a giant scavenger hunt for “Great Value.”

And guess what marketing folks? Packaging matters.

In the cheese aisle, the Great Value shreadded cheese still had the old script yellow font with a picture dominating the package.

My daughter wanted none of it. Sure, it said “Great Value.” But it did not say Great Value.

I clearly knew that my kids deep and profound brand loyalties, but I never imagined such a deep attachment could be forged so quickly with a store brand.

Whenever my own brand loyalties overrode Great Value, my daughter was dissapointed. By the time we left the store, I’d probably spent $10 with the Wal-Mart brand that would have gone to a brand leader without her insistence.

Then when we got home she spelled “Great Value” with the refrigerator magnets unprompted.

Well played Wal-Mart. Well played.

The first rule of getting noticed online appears to be “go comment on a lot of blogs.”

I’ve been trying to increase my online presence this December, so I have been reading all the suggestions that I can find.

Each blogger has a slightly different take on the grand enterprise, but they all agree: comment on related blogs as if you were voting in Chicago: early and often.

Blog comments serve two purposes.

First, for those blogs that allow the links to be followed by search engines, you get credit for links back to your site. This is actually a complicated topic, and I encourage you to learn more over at Jim’s Marketing Blog.

The second benefit is for actual human beings to read your comment and follow that comment back to your (presumably) blog.

That makes sense. Web 2.0 is about the conversation, after all. So I’ve read a lot of blog posts in the past month. And I’ve left a whopping five or six comments. Not a day, total. If you’re to believe all of the advice, then I should have been posting that many before lunch.

But I just haven’t had that much to say. And it just seemed dumb to go spouting “I agree. You’re brilliant” on a bunch of blogs. It seemed like comment spam.

Then this morning, Twitter pointed me to a post titled, “Are You Commenting for Traffic or Relationships?” by Kimberlee Ferrell on Remarkablogger.com.

Ferrell did write an excellent post (no false comment praise here), and it coalesced my thoughts far better than my own mind had accomplished.

So what is the point of commenting? To engage other members of the blogging community. You are building relationships: with the owner of the blog, with the other commenters, and with the other readers of the blog. You are working on the social side of social media. You are establishing yourself as part of the online community.

Web 2.0 must be foremost about conversations. If we’re not interacting — with multiple iterations — then Web 2.0 is merely an illusion. Without genuine conversation, even powerful bloggers are nothing more than traditional media outlets with small audiences.

And my way hasn’t been especially fruitful in driving traffic to this blog (yet?), but I have made one really solid connection that will be intellectually fruitful, and I have arranged two interviews for my 5 Questions feature.

So my ROI exceeds my expectations. I’ve forged new relationships.

But, you see, the thing is, this should not have been news. We got so busy being social that we, perhaps, forgot to be human.

When is it not the case that you should only say meaningful things? Why speak for no reason?

A friend and former co-worker of mine once quipped, “advertising ethics means never telling a lie you don’t have to.”

It’s funny because we’re all familiar with puffery, bait-and-switch, and other less-than-noble practices in this industry.

But more than the George Washington-like notion of not lying, we should reaffirm our commitment to not speaking just to hear ourselves talk.

Practitioners in advertising and public relations work to craft a brand. If you’re online in any professional sense, then you represent your brand.

And whether it’s McDonald’s, Apple, or you, you need to understand your brand. Who are you? What is your personality? Even if you know, take a moment to refresh you memory. It never hurts to be reminded.

And once you know, then make sure that everything you say is on message. Reinforce rather than dilute your brand.

Now, let me backtrack a bit and say that’s not nearly as boardroom MBA jargon-speak as it sounds.

I’m just saying: Be true to yourself. Even if you’re invading social media only to make a quick buck, you’ll do so more quickly with sincere relationships more quickly than fleeting ones.

But hopefully you do value relationships more than receipts!

And although initial hits might not skyrocket the way that you’d hope, those who follow links from diligent, relevant comments are precisely those visitors likely to return.

And long-term success demands repeat visitors.

And this is about relationships. A basic human tendency.

This is simply basic communication science for any brand: even if it’s Brand You.

Photo credit: iStockPhoto.com, Nikolay Kropachev.

Sunny beach with 2009 written in the sand.

Using tools from the basic science of human cognition can help you differentiate your brand and get it off of the long tail (check out Chris Anderson’s excellent Long Tail blog here).

In about 10 days, millions of people will celebrate and then crank out their New Year’s resolutions. I say don’t wait.

Today is the day to begin anew. Yesterday was the winter solstice, and today begins the best six months of the year: Every day will have more sunshine than the day before. What an exciting time to let science help build your brand and reach its potential.

This blog is about where the mind meets the message. In this case, the message is your brand. For many readers, their blog is their brand and their message. Make your brand effective.

1) Ensure that your brand has a personality

Stanford University professors Byron Reeves (my academic grandfather) and Cilfford Nass eloquently demonstrated in The Media Equation that people treat mediated messages just like they treat real people. That is, social rules apply.

Research in my lab and many others confirms that this extends to brands. We treat brands as if they are real people, and we form especially strong emotional connections when we feel that their personalities matches our own.

Seth Godin does a brilliant job with his blog. The blog has a personality, and that matches the personality of his books. It’s a mixture of sagacity and informality (see the picture of half his head).

But Godin cannot simply pretend to be a sage, he must live up to it. He provides excellent insight, and he is a talented writer. If he had everything but writing skills, I assure you his pageloads would be far poorer.

His brand’s personality is genuine. You have to mean it. As Lovemarks guru Kevin Roberts says, you must respect your customer.

So do some diagnostics. Ask people. If [my brand] were a person, who would it be. What would that person be like?

It may seem silly, but our data are always telling in this regard. Your consumers know your brand’s personality. And if seven different consumers tell you seven different answers, you have an identity crisis.

Decide who you want your brand to be, and then make sure that everything that you do is “on message.”

2) Pay attention to attention

I spend a lot of time studying human attention, and it remains one of the great puzzles of my lifetime.

William James said in 1890 that everyone knows what attention is, yet it’s incredibly multi-faceted and complex to study.

Importantly, you should keep in mind that attentional capacity is finite. Every bit of your brand is competing with the rest of the world for attention.

You need to make brand communication compelling. Your message has to be the most relevant thing in the room, or you have no chance of keeping attention.

In the blog world, ProBrogger had a brilliant post about three ways to engage readers. Enagagement leads to attention. Find ways to meaninfully engage consumers with your brand.

3) Emotion tells your brain what to do

The overly serious ancient Greeks (and philosophers as recent as Descartes) that emotion and cognition were separate.

They’re not. They are inseparable, and they are always working in concert.

You need to know that attention is motivated. Your brain may like to read literature, sip a fine French wine, and listen to Motzart, but it’s number one job is to keep you alive.

So it is especially attuned to cues related to survival: food, violence, and potential mates.

Imagine that a naked person or a salivating tiger walked in the room right now. Regardless of how you felt, imagine not paying attention. Now look at standard book page with lines of black serif type against an offwhite background. Not so compelling, eh?

Sadly this is why there’s so much sex in advertising.

I’m not urging you to add sex, but I do urge you to generate some excitement within your readers. Excitement leads to physiological arousal, which leads to attention (at moderate levels).

Don’t be the News Hour of your product category. Be a little bit exciting. Understand that, for example, we like to look at people. So show people, for example. Find the appropriate emotional connection for your brand.

Just don’t be boring. Attention is lost.

But don’t forget about personality! Sex for sex’s sake is stupid, and it draws attention away from your brand. Find a way to add emotion to your brand that is consistent with the brand itself.

Putting them all together

You still have to have a good brand and a good message. But getting your message noticed and remembered is no simple task.

Your brand needs a personality, and you need to be true to that personality. But if you pick a bad one, you’re doomed.

Your personality and your message should be constantly engaging. There’s simply too much world competing for limited attentional capacity.

Write from the heart, as Glen advises in an excellent post at PluginID about driving traffic to your blog.

Effective use of emotion will help you engage readers. Look at these human connections phrases in a recent post by eminent social media blogger Chris Brogan: “She remembered my name,” “she was a book lover like me,” “she loved hand-selling books,” “She …had lots of great conversational information,” “I had a beer with him,” “That is the feeling I want from social media.” And finally:

It’s this thing where people can spend a few extra moments to make a human connection instead of an “off the shelf” connection.

That genuine human connection may be the most basic human emotion. Make those connections in a meaningful, genuine way, and 2009 will be a better year for your brand.

Finally, it’s your turn to add to the conversation. How does your brand (or blog) make an emotional connection?

Originally published at: http://commcognition.blogspot.com/2008/12/3-cognitive-tips-to-build-your-brand-in.html

Largely, this is lost on them. Sad, really.

Matching your brand to a small group of consumers may be the most important thing that you ever do.

My lab has done a lot of research of brand personalities, and to me the fascinating bit is just how easily people assign personalities to inanimate brands.

Right now I’m working on an exciting new project with Tim Laubacher. We’re using Darwin’s principles of natural selections to find out just what personality is attached to a given brand. More on this in coming months (read more on the underlying principles here).

What do targeting and personality have in common? Tailoring your target market. Sure, my last post blasted Burger King for too narrow a target, but most companies aren’t Burger King.

In the Dec. 8, 2008, Advertising Age, there is an article amazingly buried on page 4.

Under Jack Neff’s byline, “That 80% of sales comes from some 2% of buyers; Study: Package-goods brands’ consumers bases very small, yet diverse.”

Think about that. Two percent of all buyers make up the lion’s share of your sales.

Numbers like those start to make a strong case for broader use of customer-relationship management among package-goods players who’ve questioned its applicability because of the high cost per consumer.

This means that even the narrowest of traditional markets are likely to fail. This small yet diverse bit is tricky.

Tools such as the one that I am developing with Laubacher will allow real-time diagnostics of a brand’s multiple personalities. We can uncover these niche markets.

And then the real work actually begins. How do we reach these people when mass media will terribly overshoot and overspend. Then, how do we keep them among our 2%.

As Neff correctly identifies, relationships are the key. And compatible personalities are key to relationships. Think of this as a brand version of eHarmony: 29 dimensions of compatibility.

And you have to be careful not to drift. Once you establish your brand personality, you have to remain true to it. Google used to be one of my absolute favorite brands, but today I referred to them as the “Wal-Mart of the Web” due to their control of some of the features of this blog (Google owns Blogger).

I’m impressed with some corporate efforts on Twitter (e.g., @Starbucks). However, following 21,355 people (at present), this is more like a casual hook up than a committed relationship.

It’s a great time to study communications. I’m counting the days until the word “Mass” is toppled from the front of my college like a statue of Lenin or Hussein.