Brand Onion
Expressing a brand's layers from tangible benefits to core essence.
Brands aren't one thing—they're layers. The Brand Onion maps the journey from what customers see on the surface to what the brand truly stands for at its core. Attributes describe features. Benefits explain value. Values express belief. Personality gives it character. Essence captures everything in a word or phrase. Peel back the layers, and you find what makes a brand irreplaceable.
Attributes
The tangible, functional characteristics of the brand. What it does. What it offers. The rational, provable facts.
Example (Volvo): Safety features, Swedish engineering, durable construction, family-sized vehicles.
Benefits
What those attributes deliver to customers. The practical and emotional outcomes. Why the attributes matter.
Example (Volvo): Peace of mind, protection for loved ones, confidence on the road, longevity.
Values
The beliefs and principles the brand stands for. What it cares about beyond profit. The moral and ethical foundation.
Example (Volvo): Responsibility, care, sustainability, putting people first.
Personality
If the brand were a person, how would it behave? The tone, style, and character. How the brand shows up in the world.
Example (Volvo): Thoughtful, dependable, understated, protective—like a responsible parent.
Essence
The single word or short phrase that captures the brand's core identity. Everything distilled to its simplest, truest form.
Example (Volvo): "Safety" or "Care"
The power of the onion is that it forces you to work from outside in—starting with what's visible and digging to what's essential. Most brands can list attributes. Fewer can articulate benefits. Even fewer have defined values. But the brands that reach essence? Those are the ones with enduring identity.
The Brand Onion emerged from BBH London's planning department in the late 1990s. Like many of BBH's tools, it wasn't formally published—it spread through practice, presentations, and planners moving between agencies.
The model became a core planning tool because it answered a practical problem: how do you get teams to move beyond features and think about brand meaning? The onion gave planners a visual way to guide conversations from surface-level attributes to emotional essence.
By the 2000s, variations of the Brand Onion were being used across the industry. Some agencies added layers (like "emotional benefits"). Others simplified it. But the core idea remained: brands are layered, and you need to understand all the layers to build something coherent.
Late 1990s Planning: Strategic planning had become a distinct discipline in agencies. Planners weren't just researchers—they were translators between consumer insight, brand strategy, and creative execution. They needed frameworks that could organize complexity without killing creativity.
The Depth Problem: Clients and creatives often talked past each other. Clients focused on product features. Creatives wanted emotional stories. Planners needed a tool that could bridge both—showing how functional attributes ladder up to brand essence. The onion provided that bridge.
Visual Thinking: The onion's power was partly visual. You could draw it in a meeting. You could explain it in 60 seconds. It made abstract concepts like "brand essence" feel concrete. The layers were intuitive—everyone understands that brands have surface and depth.
Why It Endures: The Brand Onion survives because it's simple enough to remember but comprehensive enough to be useful. It works for startups defining their first brand strategy and for legacy companies refreshing after decades. The questions it asks—what are we? what do we deliver? what do we believe? who are we?—never go out of date.