Kapferer's brand identity prism: six facets and no measurement
Abstract
Jean-Noel Kapferer's prism, first published in French in 1991 and in English in 1992, describes a brand's identity in six facets: physique, personality, culture, relationship, reflection and self-image [1]. It is the most used identity framework in European brand practice and it has almost no empirical validation. That is not a contradiction. The prism is a thinking tool for making a brand's intended identity explicit, and it is good at that. It is not a model of how buyers receive brands, and the evidence on how buyers receive brands suggests they notice far fewer of the six facets than the prism assumes. Use it to write the brief. Do not use it to predict the result.
Origin
Kapferer, a professor at HEC Paris, published Les marques, capital de l’entreprise in 1991, with the English edition Strategic Brand Management following in 1992 [1]. The problem he was addressing was the one Aaker and Keller were addressing in the same years in the United States: the brand had become a balance-sheet item through the acquisitions of the late 1980s, and nobody had a vocabulary for what the asset consisted of.
Where Aaker built a list of equity dimensions and Keller built a pyramid of buyer knowledge, Kapferer built a prism. His framing was that a brand is a speech act, something a sender says to a receiver, and the prism maps what gets said. The six facets sit in pairs. Physique and personality belong to the sender. Reflection and self-image belong to the receiver. Culture and relationship sit between them. A second axis splits the outward facets, physique, relationship and reflection, from the inward ones, personality, culture and self-image.
Kapferer’s own summary of the purpose: the prism exists “to define the brand’s identity” [1], as distinct from its image, which is what the market makes of it. That distinction between identity, which the brand controls, and image, which it does not, is the most useful thing in the book and the one most often dropped by people using the diagram.
What the evidence shows
The honest statement is that the prism is a framework, not a finding, and the literature treats it that way.
It has not been validated as a model of buyer perception. There is no body of studies showing that buyers perceive brands along six facets, or that these six, or that identities built with the prism outperform identities built without it. Searches of the marketing journals return applications of the prism to particular brands and comparisons of the prism with other frameworks. They do not return tests of it. It is used, which is a different thing from being supported.
The evidence on buyer perception points the other way. The Ehrenberg-Bass work on distinctiveness finds that buyers of most brands hold few and shallow associations, that most cannot name a point of difference, and that recognition rather than meaning does the commercial work [2]. If that is right, then of Kapferer’s six facets, buyers reliably register perhaps one, physique, and a brand investing equally in all six is investing mostly in facets its buyers will never perceive.
Where it is strong is as an internal discipline. A brand team that fills in the prism has to answer six questions it would otherwise leave implicit. What does this brand look like. What character would it have as a person. What values does it carry. What relationship does it offer the buyer. Who does the buyer imagine using it. How does the buyer feel about themselves when they do. Making those explicit is useful, and the usefulness is in the writing, not in the diagram.
Physique and personality are what the brand sends. Reflection and self-image are what the buyer receives. Culture and relationship sit between. The prism defines an intended identity; it does not predict what the market will notice.
The prism is reproduced as a schematic, labelled Illustrative, because it is one. A reader who wants to use it needs to see the six facets and the two axes. Nobody should read the diagram as evidence of anything.
The challenge
The sharpest critique is the one in the previous section: the prism describes what a brand wants to be, and the data on what buyers perceive suggests most of that never lands. Kapferer would answer, and does, that identity is upstream of image, and that a brand with no coherent identity cannot build a coherent image. That is a fair point and it does not require the six facets to be the right six.
The second critique is from inside the positioning tradition. Aaker’s brand identity system and Keller’s pyramid cover similar ground, with the difference that Keller’s model has a measurement tradition behind it and a stated sequence, salience first, then meaning, then response, then resonance [3]. The prism has no sequence and no measurement. A team using Keller knows what to build first. A team using Kapferer has six boxes of equal size.
The third is practical. Six facets in two axes produces a diagram that looks complete and is very easy to fill with adjectives. The output of most prism exercises I have seen is a hexagon of pleasant words that would fit any brand in the category. The framework does not prevent this. It invites it.
The literature is not split in the sense of two sides with evidence. It is a framework that practitioners use and researchers do not test, and that is the state to report.
Where I see this go wrong
The prism is treated as research. A completed prism is presented to a board as if it described how the brand is perceived. It describes how the team would like it to be perceived. The two are different documents and only one of them was produced.
Six facets become six campaigns. Every facet gets a message and every message gets a budget, and the buyer, who registers one or two things about any brand, receives six quiet signals instead of one loud one. Kapferer wrote about coherence. The diagram gets used for coverage.
The adjectives are interchangeable. “Confident, authentic, innovative” in the personality facet. “Partnership” in the relationship facet. Run the completed prism past a stranger with the brand name removed and ask them to guess the category. If they cannot, the prism has described a mood, not an identity.
Working across markets in Europe and the Gulf, the facet that travels is physique. Colour, shape, mark. Culture and self-image are read differently in every market and have to be rebuilt in each one. A brand built on the facets that travel is cheaper to run than one built on the facets that do not, and the prism gives no guidance on which is which.
What to do with it
- Use the prism to write the identity brief, once, with the whole team in the room. It is good at forcing six questions into the open. Finish in a day.
- Then put it away. Do not present it as research, do not put it in front of a board as a description of perception, and do not build a measurement programme around facets nobody has shown buyers perceive.
- Test what you wrote. Take the physique facet to the distinctive assets test: fame and uniqueness, name removed. Take the other five to a sample of category buyers and ask what they actually associate with you. Expect most of the five to come back empty. That is information.
- Pick one facet to lead with, and make it the one buyers can register at speed. In most categories that is physique. Let the rest follow it rather than compete with it.
- Strip the adjectives. Any word in the prism that would fit a competitor comes out. What remains is the identity. If nothing remains, you have a category description, not a brand.
- If you need a sequence and a measurement, use Keller alongside. The prism tells you what you meant. Keller tells you what order to build it in and how to check.
If you run the company rather than the marketing
Someone will present you with a hexagon. It will have six facets filled with words, it will look finished, and it will be described as the brand’s identity.
It is the brand’s intended identity, written by the people who intend it. That is a legitimate and useful document, and it is not evidence of anything about how customers see you. Before you approve spend against it, ask one question: which of these six have we tested with buyers, and what came back. If the answer is none, you are looking at a brief, and a brief is a fine thing to have as long as nobody mistakes it for a result.
The follow-up question is cheaper and more useful. Cover the brand name and show the completed prism to someone outside the company. If they cannot tell which industry it belongs to, the exercise has produced a mood board, and the money it is asking for would buy a lot of recognition instead.
Sources
- Kapferer, J.-N. (1992). Strategic Brand Management: New Approaches to Creating and Evaluating Brand Equity. London: Kogan Page. First published in French as Les marques, capital de l'entreprise, Paris: Editions d'Organisation, 1991. The prism appears in all later editions, including the fifth (2012).
- Romaniuk, J. (2018). Building Distinctive Brand Assets. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. See also Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Keller, K. L. (2001). Building Customer-Based Brand Equity: A Blueprint for Creating Strong Brands. Marketing Science Institute, Report 01-107.
Every source cited across the Hive is listed in the Library.