Editor’s note: Reyn Kinzey is vice president, Kinzey & Day Market Research, Richmond, Va.

The scene: Not so long, long ago, and not so far, far away, Hungarian farmers, their wives, and their children huddle around a storyteller in a crowded farmhouse. They hang on to his every word as he builds to a climax: “And then, despite all his valiant efforts, the Prince died trying to rescue the princess.”

The crowd is hushed. Finally, a small boy in the front of the crowd starts laughing: “You’re kidding us, of course. The Prince rescues the Princess, they get married, and they all live happily ever after. That’s how the story goes.”

Okay, did that really happen in Hungary, and what’s it got to do with branding, anyway? Well, while I did make it up, it could have happened, according to folklorists, and it’s got everything to do with branding, advertising and market research.

Brand = a great story

It’s become common to say that a brand “tells a story.” I absolutely believe that. I encourage everyone to read Tom Peters’ The Heart of Branding. He’s passionate about the equation “brand = a great story.” The idea that we can create a brand like a story is very liberating. It makes us more than mere marketers: suddenly we’re creative artists. All we have to do is tell a good story.

Perhaps, but if we are storytellers, that means we are bound by certain rules of storytelling. We sometimes like to think that creative artists have unlimited freedom, but that’s not always true.

Back to the Hungarian farmers. Roger D. Abrahams, the folklorist and founder of the Center for Folklore and Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, maintained that in a “traditional” society, a storyteller’s individual creativity is always in tension with the social constraints of his audience. He has certain creative freedom within the story - the Princess’ dress can probably be either blue or red, the audience doesn’t care - but if he strays too far, some kid is going to step in and say, “No, wait, that’s not how the story goes.” The storyteller cannot kill off the Prince.

“But,” argues the storyteller, “it’s more realistic! I’ve got to bring these peasants into the 21st century!” And we certainly feel for him. Here’s this guy trying to be inventive, move his people forward, and some snot-nosed kid is telling him how to do his job.

On the other side, you have to understand the farmers’ position: They are not simply being small-minded or slavish followers of tradition. Linda Deigh, a Hungarian folklorist, studied the Szeklers of Transylvania and their society (yes, the ones whose legends led to Bram Stoker’s Dracula). She maintained that there is a fundamental unity between traditional stories and their societies: The stories maintain their importance only so long as the societies maintain the beliefs and the world view established by those stories. Once the belief wanes, so do the stories. The stories are the way the people anchor themselves to reality.

The story of the brand

By now, you probably see my point about branding, and particularly re-branding. Perhaps consumers don’t anchor their reality to brands, but the audience already thinks it “knows” the story of the brand, and if the storytelling brand-maker moves too far away from what the audience thinks it knows, some consumer is going to stand up and say, “No, wait, that’s not how the story goes.”

It happens all the time in focus groups. We go in with clever, bright new logos and advertising campaigns designed by the best creative talent, ready to move brands into the 21st century, and the consumers say, “No, wait, that’s not the brand we know.”

We have to tell a story that is within the audience’s comfort level of belief. Realizing this fact provides a healthy counterweight to the freedom that the “brand as story” equation can imply.

Some people might object, “But Abrahams was talking about a traditional society. America is far from a traditional society.” Well, it is about some things. For example, my experience with testing logos with consumers convinces me that consumers are very, very “traditional” about some things. They think they know their brand stories, and they can be very resistant to change.

I once did a 12-group project with an agency and design firm that had been asked to modernize the logo for a major gasoline company. Gasoline logos are very important, and they are often very well-remembered by consumers, because drivers use the 50-foot high emblems to guide them from the interstate into the station.

The original logo of this gasoline company was good - it told a story - and it was recalled fairly well by participants in groups. But the company wanted to modernize it. Aesthetically, I agreed; it was a little dated-looking.

But a lot of the participants took the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. They didn’t want any change at all. And they certainly didn’t want any major changes. They were particularly resistant to any change in color. The current colors “said” this company, and they wouldn’t buy any change. They understood that the use of green in a proposed version might say “ecologically concerned,” which might be a good thing to say, but they were not buying it - and not because they didn’t believe the company was ecologically concerned. It was just that green wasn’t the company’s color.

So, after 12 groups and countless revisions by very good graphic artists, we settled on a “new” version so close to the original that most people wouldn’t notice the changes unless someone placed the old and the new logo side by side and pointed them out.

I’m not trying to dismiss the importance of the subtle changes that were made. I think they make the logo more attractive, more modern, and it tells the story the company wants to tell, including that the company is “keeping up with the times.”

My point is simply that consumers can be resistant to changes in branding because they think they already know the story, and we have to understand and respect that resistance.

And that’s been my experience with most of the logos I’ve tested. The better known the logo is, the more resistant consumers can be to changing it. I would imagine most researchers have found this. In other words, you can’t change the story too much, or, at least, not very quickly.

Logos aren’t the only way of creating a brand, of course, but I think our experience with them is very illustrative because they are a very pure form of brand-building. A perfect logo “tells the story” instantly with one quick look.

Mechanism of change

On the other hand, I certainly don’t mean to suggest that brands can’t reposition themselves or that companies cannot rebrand themselves. Abrahams himself argued against some folklorists who seemed to suggest that storytelling is always an entirely conservative enterprise; the storyteller does have the power to be a “mechanism of change.”

We’ve all seen that happen with rebranding, but it doesn’t happen easily and it doesn’t happen overnight. For example, in another project about small-kitchen appliances, I found that consumers were very receptive to a proposed “higher end” product coming from a brand that they thought of as lower to mid-range, because they felt that the brand had been established for a long time and had produced good, reliable products, even if they hadn’t been high-end. They reasoned that the company could move to another, “higher” level. It didn’t stretch their understanding of the brand story too much. (In this case, it helped that the consumers could see and touch the prototypes which “felt” high-end to them.)

But because we aren’t always sure what “story” the audience thinks it knows about the brand, market research is very important in beginning the branding or rebranding process. (Peters would argue that branding and rebranding a company has to actually begin internally - the company has to determine “who we are” first. I don’t disagree, but no matter how much a company believes it is one thing, it’s a tough sell if that’s not what the consumer thinks.)

Even when consumers don’t know a company or a brand - when we are truly creating a brand instead of re-branding - they already think they know the story they want to hear from a particular kind of product or company. Abrahams makes the point: “Even if this is a new story, it must present a progression of actions that are recognizable in their fictional setting to receive approval. The audience will only enjoy and accept what they can understand and therefore enjoy and profit by, and this acts as a conservative force.”

In another project, I tested logos for a company that participants did not really know. The company conducts pharmaceutical research, and it wanted to approach doctors more directly. It had a design team put together several proposed logos, and I tested them with doctors in one-on-one interviews. The designs were good, and the doctors liked them, but the question, of course, is not whether the doctors liked or disliked them, but whether they told the right story for a company that conducts pharmaceutical research.

Two of the designs were strikingly creative. They were identical except that the wording in one version was black and in the other design it was blue. From my work with consumers, if I had to choose between the two without market research with the proper audience, I would have advised going with the blue. Consumers almost always prefer color to black and consumers like blue in particular.

I would have been wrong. That’s why we do the research. The doctors said that the creative design “said” “innovative,” “cutting-edge,” and “creative,” all the things they wanted to hear about a company that does pharmaceutical research. But adding the blue to an already creative design pushed it too far over the edge and “said” “not solid enough,” “not grounded,” and the killer: “not responsible enough.” (Some doctors even commented that they “liked” the blue version better, but that it sent the wrong message.)

So the details can be very important. Peters makes the point that we always have to ask ourselves, “Who cares?” Often we don’t know who cares or what they care about. I said earlier that it probably didn’t matter what color the princess’ dress was in the opening story. But whether a dress was blue or red was tremendously important in religious iconography well into the Renaissance. In the West, Mary Magdalene gets the red dress; the Blessed Virgin Mary gets the blue or white. Switching the colors would have been unthinkable before the Renaissance. (Of course, this is all culturally conditioned. In the Byzantine tradition, the Blessed Virgin Mary wears patrician purple.)

My point is that branding and advertising are very important and they are creative, storytelling experiences, but they are somewhat constrained by what the consumer thinks he or she already knows about the brand. The consumer, of course, doesn’t think that he or she knows the “story” of the brand: they think they know the reality. (Those of us who spend all of our time in the “perception-is-reality” world sometimes forget that most consumers don’t live there.)

Has to resonate

Consumers can be moved and they can change their perception of a brand, but generally, not rapidly, and not more than one step at a time. The story that we tell as we brand or re-brand a product or company at least has to resonate with the story consumers think they already know. And there’s no way of knowing what they think they know - or which details are essential to them (whether the dress is blue or red, whether the wording is black or blue) - without the research.