Brand Management 2026, Part 4: What Makes Brands Indispensable
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What makes brands indispensable
Brand management 2026. Part 4 of our series.
By Johannes Roth, CURTH+ROTH
In Part 1, I stood in front of a long row of vacuum cleaners. The features were similar. Many of the devices looked alike. Anyone buying one for the first time can hardly tell them apart.
It is not just vacuum cleaners. Looking at German grocery retail, a YouGov analyst says the big manufacturer brands have become more interchangeable. According to Havas' Meaningful Brands study, 78 percent of brands could disappear. Hardly anyone would miss them.
So what makes a brand indispensable?
While I was working in California, I had the privilege of collaborating with Steve Diller. He is a respected expert in strategic brand management. For me, his work on meaning and trust is a valuable complement to the Hamburg School of brand sociology founded by Prof. Alexander Deichsel. His book Making Meaning gives a clear answer to this question: meaning.
The staircase of meaning
Diller wrote the book in 2005 with Nathan Shedroff and Darrel Rhea. The authors describe five steps. Each one answers a question people ask about an offer:
Function: Does it do what I need?
Price: Is it worth it?
Emotion: Does it make me feel good?
Identity: Is this me?
Meaning: Does it fit my reality?
The higher the step, the deeper the bond. Shedroff puts it in a nutshell: "Meaning lasts longer than emotions."
The authors name 15 core meanings. Among them are community, freedom, security, truth and beauty. None is more important than any other. And one more point is central: companies do not invent meaning. They can only evoke what already matters to people. Consciously and repeatedly. Through product, service and experience.
At first glance, the vacuum cleaner shelf is all about the first step. Suction power, battery life, filters. But what tips the balance in the end? Is it security? Or harmony, a home that is in order? Those would be questions for an in-depth interview.
Is this me?
The fourth step is well researched. Researchers call it self-congruity. We choose brands that fit our self-image. A meta-analysis of numerous studies confirms the effect. It is robust, but moderate (Aguirre-Rodriguez et al. 2012).
It is particularly strong for brands with symbolic value. And for brands used by one's own group (Escalas and Bettman 2005). Conversely, people avoid brands linked to a group they do not want to be associated with (White and Dahl 2007). That is why Lonsdale reacted so decisively when the wrong crowd claimed the brand as its own (Part 3).
Why meaning alone is not enough
This is where it gets uncomfortable. There are three serious objections to meaning.
Function comes first. As early as 1991, Sirgy and colleagues showed that purchasing behavior is better predicted by functional fit than by self-image. But the two are connected. Meaning does not replace the lower steps. It builds on them.
People do not always act on their values. Many say they buy ethically. Few actually do (Carrington et al. 2010). A survey often captures who we would like to be. Not what we do.
Meaning can be copied. Byron Sharp warns that purpose is easy to imitate. Researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found little perceived differentiation between brands across many categories. People bought them anyway (Romaniuk, Sharp and Ehrenberg 2007). For Sharp, what counts is distinctiveness. A brand must be easy to recognize and easy to find.
We take these objections seriously.
Where the schools meet
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the Hamburg School are often seen as opposites. Yet they are closer than they seem. Both rely on a recognizable gestalt. Alexander Deichsel wrote about the attraction of a distinctive gestalt as early as 1999 (see Part 2). Jenny Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute speaks of distinctive brand assets.
The difference lies in meaning. For Sharp, it is secondary. In the Hamburg School, it grows out of performance. Over years. For Diller, too, meaning is not claimed. It is experienced.
This is how I read it:
Distinctiveness makes a brand easy to find.
Performance makes it reliable.
Meaning makes it indispensable.
This is an interpretation, not a finding. But it helps to make sense of the scene at the vacuum cleaner shelf. Distinctiveness makes a device stand out. Performance builds trust. Meaning tips the balance.
Meaning needs balance
Meaning does not only arise between a brand and its customers. John Foley described this in his 2006 book Balanced Brand. He has advised companies on brand and reputation since 1986.
His observation: many companies assume their brand is strong as long as sales are good. Yet every stakeholder judges a company by their own values. Customers, employees, shareholders, the media, government and the community. If these values do not match the company's, backlash looms. Often where nobody expects it.
For meaning, this means a brand cannot stand for something externally that it does not live internally. The German soft drink Bionade experienced how quickly a core target group turns away when attitude and action drift apart (Part 3).
What this means for market research
Meaning rarely lies on the surface. Ask people directly, and you often hear values. Buying follows other rules. In one study on ethical consumption, implicit attitudes predicted choice. Stated attitudes did not (Govind et al. 2019).
That is why we at CURTH+ROTH use depth-psychological interviews. And we test what we hear against actual behavior. Three questions help:
Which step of the staircase is our brand on today?
What meaning do customers attach to it? And does that match what we deliver?
Does the company live this meaning internally, too?
A word of caution
I feel connected to Steve Diller. And to the Hamburg School. That shapes my view. Sharp's objections are well supported. Whether every category needs meaning remains open. That is one more reason to welcome an outside view.
What's next in the series
Part 5 is about self-similarity in dialogue. How does a brand grow with its communities without losing itself? With LEGO, Patagonia and the question of how much say a brand can handle.
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