Give Customers Something They Can Identify With: A Brand Strategy Lesson from Choong Whan Park USC

Why identity, aspiration, and belonging can make a brand more meaningful

People do not choose brands only because of what products do. Sometimes they also choose them because of what those products represent.

A running shoe can provide support and comfort, but it may also become associated with discipline or the identity of being a runner. A camera can capture images, but it can also become connected with creativity. A vehicle can provide transportation while also representing independence, achievement, or adventure.

This is where brand strategy moves beyond function and into identity.

The research associated with Choong Whan Park USC offers a useful framework for understanding why that matters. His work on brand meaning, consumer psychology, and brand attachment helps explain how brands can become connected with goals, memories, values, and a consumer's sense of self.

The important point is not that every company should try to become a lifestyle brand. In fact, forcing symbolic meaning where none exists often makes branding feel artificial. A better question is: what important part of the customer's life does this brand genuinely support?

Identity Cannot Simply Be Declared

Brands often want to be associated with qualities such as creativity, confidence, ambition, adventure, intelligence, or success. The temptation is to communicate those qualities directly through advertising and assume customers will accept them.

That rarely works by itself.

A company can say it is a brand for innovators, but that does not automatically make customers feel innovative. A business can claim to represent adventure while offering an experience that feels ordinary. It can talk about community without giving customers any real reason to feel part of one.

Identity has to be supported by the product, the experience, the people surrounding the brand, and the way the business behaves. When symbolic meaning develops naturally, it is more credible because customers have found their own reason to connect the brand with something that matters to them.

Start With the Customer's Life

A useful way to approach brand identity is to stop asking what the company wants to symbolize and start looking more closely at the customer.

What are they trying to become better at? What are they proud of? What activities matter to them? What goals are they pursuing? Which communities or values shape their choices?

These questions often reveal opportunities that basic product positioning misses.

Consider someone buying professional tools. The immediate value may be reliability and performance. But the deeper context may involve pride in craftsmanship and professional competence. If a brand consistently supports that work, it can gradually become associated with the customer's identity as a skilled professional.

A fitness product may help someone exercise more effectively, but it can become more meaningful if training is tied to progress, discipline, or confidence. A travel brand may solve practical planning problems while eventually becoming associated with exploration or independence.

The brand does not invent those aspirations. It earns a place within them.

Symbolic Meaning Works Best When Real Value Comes First

Identity cannot compensate indefinitely for a weak product.

A company may create compelling imagery around performance, but if the product repeatedly fails, the symbolism eventually loses credibility. A brand may position itself around professional excellence, but customers will struggle to maintain that association if the service feels careless.

That is why the earlier stages of brand building matter. A brand first needs clear meaning, real value, and an experience that supports the promise. Once those foundations exist, identity can become another layer of the relationship.

This helps explain why many enduring brands developed symbolic meaning gradually. The identity did not appear out of nowhere. It accumulated around years of product use, customer experience, and cultural association.

Brands Can Help People Express Who They Are

Consumer choices sometimes function as signals. Those signals can be directed toward other people, but they can also be directed inward.

A customer may choose something because it feels consistent with the person they believe themselves to be. Someone who values craftsmanship may prefer products that emphasize durability and care. A creative professional may prefer tools that fit the way they want to work. A person who values sustainability may favor companies they believe better reflect those priorities.

These choices are not always dramatic or even consciously articulated. The customer may never say, "I chose this because it reinforces my identity." The product may simply feel right.

That feeling can be strategically important because a product that fits someone's self-concept may become more difficult to replace. The customer is no longer comparing only price and features. The product has become part of a broader personal context.

Aspirational Identity Matters Too

Brands can also connect with who people want to become.

A beginner runner may choose equipment associated with serious training because it reinforces the identity they are developing. Someone starting a business may choose tools that make them feel more capable and professional. A traveler preparing for a first independent trip may gravitate toward brands associated with confidence and exploration.

This creates an opportunity, but also a responsibility. The brand should help the customer move toward the aspiration rather than merely sell an image of already having achieved it.

That distinction separates meaningful symbolic value from superficial status signaling.

Belonging Can Strengthen the Relationship

Identity is often social. People define themselves partly through professions, hobbies, communities, and shared interests. Brands can sometimes become part of those relationships.

A sports brand may become connected with a running community. A technology company may develop strong associations with creative professionals. A motorcycle brand may become part of a broader culture around travel and machinery.

But real belonging cannot be created simply by calling customers a "community." There has to be something worth participating in.

People need reasons to interact, share knowledge, recognize one another, or feel connected through a common activity. The strongest brands in this area tend to support something that would still matter even if the brand itself disappeared.

That makes the relationship more credible because the activity comes first and the brand earns its role within it.

Do Not Reduce Customers to Stereotypes

Identity-based branding can become shallow very quickly.

Businesses sometimes create overly simplified pictures of the people they want to attract: the entrepreneur, the adventurer, the creative, the rebel, the high achiever.

Real people are more complicated.

A customer can be ambitious and cautious, practical and creative, status-conscious in one category and indifferent in another. Identity changes depending on context.

Strong brand strategy leaves room for customers to interpret a product within their own lives. It offers meaning without dictating who the customer is supposed to be.

This matters even more as companies gain access to more customer data and personalization tools. Greater information about consumers does not necessarily mean brands should become more aggressive in defining them. Personal relevance can strengthen a relationship. Feeling categorized can weaken it.

The Brand Should Support Identity, Not Replace It

A healthy relationship between identity and branding is usually additive.

The brand supports something the customer already values. It may help them create, travel, perform, learn, build, connect, or accomplish something meaningful. Over time, the brand can become associated with those experiences.

That is different from trying to make the brand itself the center of the customer's identity.

The distinction matters when thinking about brand attachment. A stronger relationship can develop when the brand becomes connected with important goals, memories, or routines. But the meaning ultimately comes from the customer's life.

A useful example of how functional value, customer experience, identity, and attachment can reinforce one another is explored in Choong Whan Park USC: Apple and the Architecture of Brand Attachment.

The lesson is not that every company should try to imitate Apple. It is that a brand can become harder to replace when it participates meaningfully in activities customers already care about.

Look for Evidence in Customer Behavior

Companies do not have to guess whether identity is becoming part of the relationship. Customers often reveal it.

Reviews, interviews, social conversations, and customer-service interactions can show whether people describe a product only through performance or whether they also mention confidence, creativity, belonging, progress, or personal significance.

Long-term customers may also use different language than new customers. Someone who has used a product for years may describe routines or experiences that a first-time buyer does not yet have.

These patterns can help a company understand what the brand has actually come to represent rather than assuming the intended positioning has been accepted exactly as planned.

Let Identity Guide Business Decisions

Once a company understands the role it can credibly play in the customer's identity, that insight should extend beyond advertising.

Product development should support it. Partnerships should make sense within it. Customer service should reinforce it. New product categories should be evaluated partly by whether they fit the meaning customers already recognize.

A brand associated with craftsmanship, for example, can weaken that meaning if it begins putting its name on products that feel cheap or unrelated. A company known for simplicity can confuse customers if its offering becomes unnecessarily complicated.

Identity creates value partly because it creates coherence. Protecting that coherence is part of protecting the brand.

Personal Meaning Is Earned Over Time

Companies often want customers to feel emotionally connected quickly. In reality, identity usually becomes part of a brand relationship through repetition.

A product performs well. The experience is positive. The customer keeps using it. The product becomes part of routines and activities. Those activities accumulate memories and meaning.

Eventually, the brand may become connected with more than the original purchase.

That process cannot be rushed simply by adding more emotional language to advertising. A brand becomes personally meaningful when it repeatedly participates in something personally meaningful.

That is the idea behind Step 4: give customers something they can identify with.

Not a manufactured personality. Not an empty lifestyle image. Not a slogan telling customers who they should be.

Give them something that genuinely supports an identity, aspiration, value, activity, or community that already matters to them.

This idea is part of the broader 7 Steps to Build a Brand People Trust, Remember, and Choose framework, which connects brand meaning, customer value, experience, identity, consistency, trust, and attachment.

The principle is simple: people rarely develop stronger relationships with brands because companies tell them to. They do so when the brand earns a meaningful role in something they already care about.