The meaning a customer associates with your company upon hearing your jingle or seeing your name, logo, or color scheme profoundly influences how well you're remembered. Associations are the mental shortcuts to a company's brand promise and an important part of creating customer loyalty. Successful associations help you develop deeper customer relationships by influencing in a positive way your customers' senses, minds, and emotions during the buying experience.

We've all experienced the powerful emotional effect of associations. A song comes on the radio and we're immediately transported back to a specific place or to a moment in time. A whiff of lilacs or old leather, and we're in our grandmother's garden or our uncle's car. One of the most famous examples of this kind of experience is the foundation of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." For Proust, it was the sweet taste of a madeleine — a small, rich cake — that evoked the involuntary recall of a childhood memory.

Brand associations exist whether you manage them or not. If you know which associations your customers react positively to, you can build them into an even stronger online asset. Coca Cola has done a masterful job building both the color red and the contoured-bottle shape as visual and tactile brand associations. Its home page is saturated with the company's signature red.

McDonald's golden arches are the universal symbol for fast food, close by. Morton Salt continues to use its well-known and immediately recognizable little girl with the umbrella, as well as the color blue from its cylindrical box, throughout its Web site.

Apart from the initial cost of creating them, visual associations can be used throughout your Web site or on affiliate Web sites and add considerable leverage to the brand for very little cost. Visuals also lend themselves to creative uses — from simple movement to full-fledged animation.

Make your association obvious. Good associations should be so obvious that anyone looking at them for three seconds will understand what they represent. Pretend that your association is on your home page and visitors need to grasp its meaning in three seconds or less. Will they be able to figure out what your association means? The Motley Fool's court jester passes this litmus test with flying colors.

Redenvelope.com, the upscale gift site, also sends a clear message with its brand image. It ties its name and association to the Asian custom of giving precious gifts on special occasions in a simple red envelope. When you purchase a gift, your personalized message is printed on a gift card and carefully tucked inside a red envelope, gifts are wrapped in red boxes with white ribbons, and the site has a simple and elegant color scheme of red and tan with a lot of white space.

Make your association reflect your promise. The Seattle Children's Home offers a number of programs to Seattle's at-risk children, developing partnerships within the community and improving kids' futures. When looking for a brand association, they wanted something that was simple and elegant, and that visually represented the concept of transformation and improved futures. The solution? A butterfly. Butterflies come in a myriad of shapes and colors, appeal to all ages, and are a metaphor for miraculous transformation. This association has been so successful for the Seattle Children's Home that butterflies are now used in therapy sessions with the kids, their annual fundraiser is The Butterfly Ball, and the newsletter is now called Transformations.

Reinforce your company name and product. The bunny used in Energizer batteries was very memorable in tests, but viewers couldn't remember what product it represented. People were confusing Energizer with Duracell. The bunny was then clearly named the "Energizer Bunny," and displayed a picture of an Energizer battery on its drum.

Similarly, early dot-com advertisements were more concerned with rising above the clutter and getting recognized than with building long-lived brand equity. Many were eye-catching and clever but failed to reinforce the company name. Everyone remembers the naked guy or the gerbils being shot from cannons, but few remember which companies or products they represented.

On the other hand, pets.com's sock puppet is memorable, engaging, clearly tied to the company's mission, and has spawned a popular line of sock puppet merchandise, extending the brand.

Use associations for the life of the brand. It takes effort to build associations. Companies might get tired of their own associations and be tempted to abandon them. This is a costly mistake. It hurts customer loyalty and makes it more difficult to sell subsequent branded products because the customer has lost his or her emotional link to the product.

RCA's dogs, Nipper and Chipper, have been enlivening company communications since early in the company's history and now appear at the very top of its home page, welcoming visitors: "Nipper and Chipper would like you to ride the digital wave …"

When you develop great associations as part of your online brand-building efforts, you'll create not just the stuff of memories, but deeper customer relationships and loyalty.

About the Author:
Joe LePla co-founded Parker LePla, an integrated branding, public relations, and copywriting agency.

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