What caught my attention at Brand Restart 2024

What stayed with me most from this year’s Brand Restart was definitely Hanka Kloučková’s talk on the subconscious and how to test it in advertising. Even though you could more or less guess most of it, I had not heard such a well-rounded, engaging and useful talk in a long time.

Every person makes around 35,000 decisions every day, and for most of them we run on autopilot, as Daniel Kahneman describes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

For correct association with a brand, we need people to have a strong link between the two terms. Not only a conscious link, but a subconscious one too. In American society, most people will say on a declared level that education + white person is a good combination and education + black person is almost as good a combination. On a subconscious level, however, there is a major difference: the response time for a black person is much longer. People do not connect the two as naturally, so they have to think about it.

The same approach can be used for measuring brand positioning, an unclaimed benefit, the strength of a slogan, fit with the brand and more.

As the education example showed, conscious and subconscious decisions are not always aligned. In the last set of four slogans, what stands out is that the second-best conscious answer performs best subconsciously.

What Effie winners have in common is very high subconscious activation and the communication of positive emotion, which is how they create enthusiasm.

Finally, a few tips. Hanka also explained why it is not essential to have a prominent logo throughout the entire ad, which is often mentioned as a must (too many stimuli).

Visual identity change or rebranding

Two very different examples (Švihej and the Diocese of Brno (Biskupství brněnské)) were used to describe the process of rebranding or changing a visual identity. The talk on heavenly rebranding was certainly interesting.

CX

Lukáš Pítra spoke about the currently popular topic of customer experience and how Czech brands and companies do (or do not) pay attention to it.

The map of touchpoints where companies can collect feedback is certainly interesting.

• Marketing and customer support do not talk to each other, which is a shame
• Little mystery shopping or qualitative research is done, even though the costs and required expertise are not high

The customer journey map is also interesting.

Liftago to finish

The last talks always have a hard time, but Lukáš Musil handled it well. I came to the conference with the little green monster, and Liftago’s search for its brand proposition was interesting.

The following slide shows what Liftago’s journey looked like. I particularly liked the part about understanding the current situation and the brand strategy.

Liftago’s creative execution did not really appeal to me. It felt rather grey and a bit stock-photo-like. Maybe that is why I did not actually notice their campaign, even though I do notice their funny social media posts.

And there was more. This year Brand Restart had a shorter format, but the talks were all the better for it.