Without question, the modern brand is becoming more human and brand attributes are playing a significant role.

As people, we instinctively assign meaning to things.

It’s a primitive survival instinct that has kept us alive for millions of years.

Our brains create shortcuts to help us to quickly understand whether something represents survival or danger.

We assign meaning to people, places, creatures, things and… you guessed it, brands.

In this article, you’ll learn why brand attributes are playing an increasingly important role in the brand-consumer relationship and how you can define attributes to attract your audience.

What Are Brand Attributes? (Top Brand Examples)

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What Are Key Brand Attributes?

Brand attributes are the characteristics we come to understand as being the quality, features, behaviour or nature of a brand.

Attributes are assigned to the brand by those who experience it and it’s this audience that develops a collective understanding of who the brand is and what it represents.

Over time the attributes associated with a brand become part of the it’s reputation and identity.

Why Are Brand Attributes Important?

As I touched on in the intro, as advanced as humans are, we’re still very primitive creatures.

We make most of our decisions in the primitive reptilian brain rather than the analytical neo-cortex which processes logic and reason.

Our primitive brains are 500 million years old. It still doesn’t know that we’re no longer hunting our prey and doing what we can to escape predators.

It’s still in the driving seat and it’s job is to keep us alive and attributes help it do that.

Brand Characteristics Help Us Understand

The easier our brain can understand something, the quicker it can make a survival decision so it’s constantly making neural connections and creating shortcuts.

The more we experience a brand and the more consistently we see the same characteristics, the more neural connections are made and meaning assigned.

In other words, our brains make neural connections through experiences which develop into an image about what that brand means.

When brands define the meaning they want the audience to have, they can define and display the attributes that will achieve that meaning.