psychiatric marketing

Psychiatric Marketing

Psychiatric: a branch of medicine that deals with the science and practice of treating mental, emotional, or behavioural disorders especially as originating in endogenous causes or resulting from faulty interpersonal relationships

The first step to recovery is made when we decide something needs to be changed. It doesn’t mean something has to be fundamentally wrong, it merely suggests that we don’t feel we are where we need to be.

The same is just as true for a brand or brand identity.
One of the more brilliant cases of brand identity being reinvented is BP. Until recently known to most of us as British Petroleum, with one simple yet elegant word replacement, the brand has become Beyond Petroleum and with it a whole new opportunity to re-invent itself upon a public fed up with Oil companies, gas prices and environmental pillaging.

Psychiatry is a process which enables change; it allows people to understand themselves and use that understanding to act as a catalyst for change. I would suggest that BP went through what we are calling psychiatric marketing.

So, what exactly is psychiatric marketing (PM) and how can we harness its potential to build an agency?

Not every brand was as fundamentally in need of change as BP, however that doesn’t mean the scope of the practice is limited to cases of such dire cause.

A brand’s identity is reflected through many mirrors;
The one, which is directly positioned to the consumer in the form of direct advertising,
The one in which its actions belay it’s nature (environmental, legal and community responsibility)
The one in which the consumer actually interacts or uses the brand.

I would suggest that very few brands are truly healthy in each mirror and in some cases are fundamentally un-healthy. These three perspectives give us a truly holistic understanding of a brands overall health.

There are three macro steps in the process of psychiatry, Understanding, Learning and Recovery. Each step is a linear descendant of the other and as we change, as our lives change, the process can be repeatable. The same is just as true for a brand’s identity, each time a brand changes or evolves, its health needs to be assessed and reassessed from each unique perspective.