Archive: November 2004
Branding — keep it real, y'all.

By Ralph Kirschner

Marketers and advertisers love to talk about branding. Ad agencies seek to outdo one another in declaring their enthusiasm for The Brand. Terminology and jargon sprout like kudzu, covering the landscape in obfuscatory and often contradictory verbiage.

Like everyone else, we read this stuff and are getting tired of it. For our readers’ convenience, I’ve boiled down The Magic Of The Brand into its pure essence:

“The brand is what the customer gets from it.”

What do successful brands do? Do they spend most of their time trying to see into customers’ minds and manipulate their thinking, or do they provide products and services people want?

Primarily the latter. Sure, Apple has a marketing department that gets paid to think deep thoughts about The Brand, but that’s not why people buy Macs. They buy Macs because they work well, look good, and do things PCs can’t. The “Think Different” campaign is widely touted as a huge success for Brand Advertising, but let’s think different — would that campaign have had any impact without a product that was already very different from the PC-world? No. The campaign worked because it stated what the brand already offered, i.e., “What the customer gets from it.”

Brand Crusaders will now flock like starlings and peck at me with “What about Nike / Virgin / etc.” where it’s all about the logo on the shoe / plane / whatever. This, they will say, is proof that a brand is a wondrous and deep psychological phenomenon, worshiped quite separately from any benefit. To that, 2 things : Number 1: If Nike sold horrible shoes, nobody would want to wear the logo. Number 2: Social cachet or self-image may well be among the benefits provided by the product or service. That’s not some mystical brand power, that’s human nature. It’s been around since at least 450 BC, when if you didn’t have an Athenian vase at home, you just weren’t down with decorating trends in the Mediterranean world.

Then there is the theory that brands help customers choose in a world of too much choice. Fine, but on what basis do they choose? What they get from it. If the product or service denoted by the brand stops delivering, customers will drift away. The brand does not exist independently of its products and/or services.

This holds true for tangible and intangible benefits alike. German car brands make much of the fact that they are German-engineered. Quite obviously, this works only because German engineering offers value. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t get anything from German-engineered, so it would be meaningless to them.

So, that’s brands in a nutshell. A brand is what the customer gets from it. (Then, of course, there are the details of execution from product/service concept through performance and delivery, and on through the marketing and communications chain — all subjects of weighty tomes.)