When you just developed your AIR application you are presented with one major, but not unsolvable problem: how to get exposure? Over the next four weeks I'll share my ideas about my personal quest and lessons learned the hard way.

Branding 101
Welcome to branding 101. Take a seat, its going to be a fun ride! Since this is branding for developers, I want to keep it plain and simple. We are all developers and want to create exciting stuff so I don’t want to bore you with all the fluff that mystifies branding. Don’t believe anything I say, later you'll notice why.

Remember when you were a kid and saw another kid playing with some fancy toys? You wanted those toys badly! They had more shine than your toys, it still had four wheels, or a head. No matter what it had, you wanted it, even though it did belong to the other kid. A perfectly human response and not only for when you were a kid. This is exactly the secret to a product or service that has success: desire.

Nothing creates more desire for a product or service than its exclusivity. If no-one can play with it, everyone wants it. Lets look at some examples. Everyone remembers Gmail in 2003 where you got 1 gb storage and you could send mails up to 10mb! Or Yahoos Fire Eagle in 2007? Both services were going to be the next big thing. Everybody was talking about how cool it was and everyone wanted to try it out. There was just one catch: you could only join if you had an invite, and these were scarce.

This teaches us two things;
- Exclusivity creates desire.
- If everybody wants to use that product or service then it must be good. Why am I not using this? You want to be part of that group dynamic. (Don’t worry, this is perfectly normal)

This is what is called ‘Brand management’. Wikipedia tells us: "Brand management is the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand. It seeks to increase the product's perceived value to the customer and thereby increase brand franchise and brand equity. Marketers see a brand as an implied promise that the level of quality people have come to expect from a brand will continue with future purchases of the same product."

The interesting bit in the above text is : ‘It seeks to increase the product's perceived value to the customer’. Especially the 'perceived value' part. So brand management is about perception. And the value that a product has in the mind of the user / costumer / consumer.

This also talks about 'a brand'. So first we must define what branding is.
Or actually what it’s not. A brand is not a logo, a brand is not an identity and a brand it not just a product. A brand is the 'gut' feeling someone gets about a product, service or company/organization. Brands are defined by individuals, not companies or markets.

This all sounds very nice, let me say that a bit more crude: it’s not what you say it is, its what they tell you what it is. If you are paying attention : the one who’s telling others, is you. But what IS branding? It is the way you are perceived, your image. The goal of branding is to build positive associations that stays in the mind of the receiver, in this case the customer or the one who’s buying, downloading / using your product, tool or service.

Branding is basically putting a value with an object to an emotion.

To go a bit deeper in to this: we are not after the product or outcome, but the feeling we get from it. Some people call this the 'primary driver emotion' or PDE. We are not after the fancy Italian car, but the feeling we get while driving it. So it’s the emotion that drives us. We get a PDE-high by just buying products from brands we associate with. Actually we get a PDE-high just by thinking about it and placing / thinking our self in that moment of buying or experiencing. For instance: close your eyes and imagine the smell and the taste of that first cup of coffee in the morning. When we do this our body gets that same physiological effect as if we were actually drinking it. This is because our mind doesn’t or can’t distinguish a memory we actually experienced from something we visualized and haven’t experienced yet. Another example are athletes. Athletes tend to visualize the outcome of the goal they want to achieve. Because of this visualizing they’ve already done that specific move in their head, the only thing left to follow is their body.

This PDE becomes familiar and eventually, trusted. So branding is also about trust. Branding is about the relation with your customers. But how do you get people to trust you? More on this next week in part 2.

Read more from Sidney de Koning.