Brand Misinformation Vs. Back End Thinking

“Advertising is a seduction, not a debate.”
--David Ogilvy

“Branding is an extended seduction, not a color palette.”
--Ben Mack

Branding is often discussed as irrelevant to small business marketing. That’s bunk! If you are running a con-game, then branding is irrelevant. However, every form of legitimate business will benefit from branding. Branding is often described in absurd and outlandish ways. For the record, branding is:
– NOT an exact discipline
– NOT about always using the same logo or colors
– NOT about limiting yourself

Don’t use the dictionary for industry terminology.
brand (brnd)
1. n. a. A trademark or proper name identifying a product, service or a
manufacturer.
b. A named product or product line: a popular brand of shoes.
-Most American Dictionaries of the English Language, Standard Editions

Please abandon this common definition of a brand. A doctor needs a medical definition of manic, or he would be prescribing everybody lithium. Marketers need a business definition of brand…
brand (brnd)
1. n. a. The positive or negative inclination to purchase, either in an individual or
among a target audience.
b. The aggregation of stories and associations around a trademark, distinctive name or a product line.
2. vt. a. To increase a target audience’s likelihood to purchase now and in the
future.
b. To imbue positive characteristics into a marketed proposition.
3. n. a. Slang. A colloquial word for a logo, product name or product line.
-Ben Mack Dictionary of My Language, First Edition

A brand is not a physical thing, but the relationship between consumers and a product or service.

On this blog, product names, product logos, and the products themselves ARE NOT BRANDS. They are accessories to your relationship with a customer.

Few products really make a statement about its user. HUGE budget products can become a flag. Flag? What do I mean by a flag…well, carrying a Heineken at a party is a flag that says you’re sophisticated, or in dating terms MATURE. Holding a Corona says relaxation, that you don’t have an attitude…you’re chillin’. The beer you drink says something about you: at minimum it says you aren’t an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

You’re probably not playing this kind of FLAG branding game.

Often I see the word brand bandied about as synonymous with logo. Some brand managers treat their logo like a sacred flag. I saw an off-colored logo on a weekend sales brochure and the brand manager said they didn’t want to use the brochures…they told me I would NEVER hang an American flag with pink stripes instead of red and they were right. I wouldn’t hang a pink American flag. I wouldn’t buy a pink American flag. But, we were selling fertilizer, not flags. I would have preferred the color was perfect, but I would rather have the collateral SELLING my product than not having SALES material.

This flag notion of branding works for HUGE budget advertising, but it doesn’t scale down to small businesses. For a “flag” to have meaning folks must recognize and agree on what a Corona means, which requires a ton of advertising. Big budget advertising can create meaning that is virtually impossible for small budget marketers to garner outside of a very small niche audience. Corona becomes a flag that says, “I’m cool” but without using the word “cool” and seen as cool to a wide variety of people.

Flag branding, being able to turn your product or logo into a meaningful flag, is not a viable strategy for most advertisers. If you have that kind of budget, the rest of this book is important. But, if you don’t have anywhere near that kind of budget then what follows is even more important, because every single touch you have with your dear customer is meaningful and can substantively affect your relationship and their likelihood to buy again.

If a customer or prospect interacts with your product or your communication and is more likely to buy your product or buy your product again you are building brand equity. This is often mistaken as likeability. I have nothing against likeability. I just don’t think likeability should be an overriding business objective. Remember that nice guy in your high school that all the girls liked but none of them slept with? He may have been liked but his brand equity was squat because he could never close the deal. When Ogilvy said that advertising is a seduction he is talking about getting laid, not endless flirting. If you aren’t getting laid you aren’t seducing your prospect. If you aren’t getting sales you aren’t building your brand you’re merely buying media.

I suggest you think of the word “brand” as the likelihood for a customer to do business with you, again. In the next two chapters I’ll discuss nurturing a relationship with somebody you’ll never know personally. Then, in chapter five I show you how all branding schemes are basically the same and how to use these constructs to increase retention for big and small businesses. But, I’m not finished discussing misinformation about branding.

Branding is big business. Millions of dollars of custom and syndicated research is sold in the name of brand planning. If somebody sold you research or a branding process that didn’t generate more profit than it cost…I’m sorry. But, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. There is value in branding, there’s also a ton of money wasted in the name of branding.

Before a client spends money on research I like to agree on what actions we will be taken based on the possible findings. I trust sales data more than I trust most tracking studies that report awareness levels. Tracking studies are where target customers are polled at regular intervals to measure product awareness, awareness of advertising, or to discern who’s considering your product. Neat, but I’ve rarely seen profitable steps taken from tracking data even when glaring insights were screaming to be used. A notable exception was working on Mitsubishi with planning guru Jeffrey Blish. Usually, I see tracking data used to justify marketing inefficiencies. Our sales are down? The whole category is down!!! I’ve seen millions of dollars spent a year so that when sales go down somebody can reply with confidence that our sales dip is consistent with the category average.

Measuring metrics is how research companies make money…that’s what they sell. Their primary job is to sell you on the importance and value of their research. When your advertising agency recommends a research company, Chances are it is owned by the same holding company as your advertising agency. For instance, BBDO is owned by Omnicom. Omnicom owns over 300 communications companies, plus DAS. Never heard of DAS? DAS is their company that helps cross sell clients between Omnicom companies. At BBDO, if I were to recommend 3 research vendors to a client, it was an unwritten expectation that at least two of them be Omnicom companies. Same with branding companies, and for good reason: if Cingular hired a branding company that wasn’t an Omnicom company they would likely undermine our efforts and elaborately detail exactly what we were doing wrong…making Cingular more likely to switch advertising agencies.

Finding problems with your brand is going to happen even if the branding company is an independent and not out to undermine your ad agency. Why? Because if your brand is all-good, then they can’t sell you any more services. Have you heard the expression “never take your car to a bored mechanic”? A bored mechanic is hungry for work and likely to find things wrong with your car. A branding consultant gets more money by finding things wrong with your brand so they can dive down into those issues and help you.

Research should be treated with skepticism. Research is an interpretive tool. After we launched Rollover Minutes, our second round of commercials featured a dance troop that made music on a variety of props in an engaging way with placards that touted the value of Rollover Minutes. Our market-share went up. The ads worked. The research company conducting the tracking study, a company not owned by Omnicom, said this execution was a waste of money—one of the worst ads for the wireless category in recent years. I asked them to explain our increase in sales and increased market-share. They said it was on the strength of the product offering, of Rollover Minutes. Here’s my take: the research was a telephone-interview study. The dance troop spot had very few words in the spot. When research participants were asked over the phone if they recollected a TV commercial with dancers drumming on unusual objects they said, No.

Conversely, we had a spot with a cute dog that would rollover every time the announcer said the word “rollover” in his voice-over. This spot scored off the charts according to their research methodology. The word “rollover” was said 17 times during a 30 second commercial. Customers remembered the commercial and stated over the phone that it made them consider shopping Cingular. Despite sales being flat, the research company released a press release stating this was the best commercial the wireless category had seen in years. Bunk! This spot just happened to test the best against their measurements. We beat the test. We scored an A, but that didn’t make us money.

I’m skeptical of consultants with fancy formulas that derive brand equity. I should know. I’ve been one of these consultants. I’m registered to interpret data on Millard-Brown’s BrandZ study, which is far better than most black-box methodologies.

I’m a huge fan of data but often, general category studies give a marketer as much data as they will ever wisely use. If your sales are plummeting and it isn’t a seasonal deal…get hustling. I don’t care what’s happening to the rest of the category.

When I started my own research company I eventually implemented a policy of charging $1,000 if I could talk a client out of research. I wasn’t a great salesman. Often small companies would come to me wanting to invest $20,000 in four focus groups and I would talk them out of doing research. I still wanted to be compensated for my value but many prospective clients would balk at this. So, with those clients, I became a great salesman…whatever they said they were interested in is what I told them they needed. I stopped doing this because I couldn’t charge them enough for my upset stomach.

Hiring a consultant can be a great way to get somebody else to do your homework. I’ve been that consultant. I’ve been doing other people’s homework since the 8th grade at John Burroughs Jr. High School when Rachel of the Miller twins batted her eyes at me. Rachel, I’ve learned a couple things since I was 14. Next time I’ll charge you.

The successful entrepreneurs I know don’t view digging through data as work. They are driven to know, understanding data is part of the processes of knowing. They either enjoy understanding the underlying dynamics of their projects or they simply can’t sleep if they don’t understand something.

Branding is about planning your customer’s experience, about thinking with the end in mind. Branding is often referred to as big picture planning, asking where are we now, really. Then, where can we be and how do we get there. However, in order to do this kind of planning we have to have a road map of the territory.

To build your Legend Platform, please click here.

To skip directly to backend marketing, click here.

Stop reading and click one of the above links. Thank you.